You asked, I answer. Yes, there are right companies to get the money, and yes, robbing Peter to pay Paul often is quite valuable.

For example, "we will collect taxes to pay to build a wall around our city", or "we will collect taxes to pay for a sewer", or "we will collect taxes to pay for lighthouses in remote areas that our ships pass near".

In those cases, the result is: fewer homes being flattened by invaders, substantially less stench, and rather many fewer dead sailors and lost cargoes.

In more modern times: it was government funding to a private company that created the Internet.

That's odd -- everywhere I look, I see government intervention done well. The road outside my door? Government. FedEx charges 20x what the government does for a letter (and delvers to fewer places). Even the Internet was a created by the government very thoughtfully creating a computer network.

In this case, our government has seen that batteries are important (which should be a "duh" -- a big chunk of the cost of, e.g., Tesla is the batteries), that advanced chemistry and processes will win, and that we really ought to fight to keep that here.

Ick -- WSAAsynGetHostByName? In this day and age, you have a window handle lying around?

I'm the Program Manager for WinSock at Microsoft. Have you looked at GetAddrInfoEx? In Windows 8/Server 2012, the DNS team added some Async features into it. Even better, it will properly handle IPv6 AND international domain names.

And if you're doing the new "Runtime" programming for Windows 8, we done our best to make sure that most network programs never have to deal with IP addresses at all -- that means that new new RT apps should be IPv6 ready out of the box.

(We also do the dual-stack thing with our sockets, so listener sockets just specify a port (or service) to listen on, and we automatically listen to both IPv6 and IPv4. We updates .NET 4.5 in the same way to make dual-stack be simpler.)

Links: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms738518(v=vs.85).asp

OK, let's play this game and assume that wineries are a good proxy for temperature. A quick web search shows three wineries in Alaska; they started in 1999, 2003, and unknown (but apparently recent)

By your rules, this is positive evidence of global warming.

Reality check: Romans grew wine in Britain because Romans drank wine. They stopped growing it because they left. As soon as wine was popular again, they started growing grapes and making wine again

You, yourself said just a few posts ago that Methane contributed about 10% to greenhouse effects and that CO2 contributes 30%. That doesn't jibe with this comment that CO2 has "minor effects". Your earlier claims is that the actual atmospheric CO2 is currently 3x more effectful than methane.

And the other people here make sense: methane doesn't linger, so as soon as we stop emitting it, it goes away. CO2 lingers more, multiplying it's effectiveness.

Good news, then -- the MSRP is $31,645
Source: http://www.chevrolet.com/volt-electric-car/

MSRP: $31,645
Source: http://www.chevrolet.com/volt-electric-car/

My father's been in software since the 1950's. There were arguments in favor of octal machine code as being superior to assembler -- on the grounds that if you programmed in assembler, you didn't really understand what the machine is doing.

And all those arguments are...dead. Along with the C-is-slower-than-FORTRAN battles, and the C++-is-slower-than-C, and the bytecode-languages-are-slower-than-compiled.

It turns out that developer productivity is actually more important than almost anything. Sure, there are a couple of niches. But they are small.

Heck, I've got developer customers inspecting over 100K packets per second in C#: they want computer performance, but they need developer performance.

I can tell you're correct because the last 100 years have been nothing but crap. Those great factory towns, and the rampant bribery of Senators -- those were the good old days.

And when you say "entitlement" -- are you including roads in that? Because I'm of the opinion that I'm entitled to use the roads. Does this mean that only people who NEVER use roads can vote?

(Or, to be more freaky-logical: am I entitled to vote in a building with a roof?)

I'd believe it was "just about how to pay for it" -- except that the republicans didn't bat an eyelash over the extensions to the bush tax holiday. Indeed, they were pretty clear and unambiguous that if millionaires didn't a tax cut, then they would hold their breath until they turned blue.

"...and you can't just do the math and ignore the fringe effects! With electric motors, it's all fringe effects" (Carnegie Mellon EE professor).

Real theorists are painfully aware of how their models don't reflect reality, and are careful to say so.

Not just labor unions support this -- as a taxpayer, I support it, too. Otherwise, every time a bad president came into office, they'd get rid of all of the "non supporters" and replace them with useless hacks. The way we have it, people can get a job with the government as a first choice ("I can make a career here" and "I won't be fired summarily") instead of a last choice ("it's only for a few years, but I need money now").

TL;DR: "You kids get off my lawn"

May apologies, but you are on the wrong side of history. In the 50's, there were "old guard" programmers who wanted to program in octal instead of assembly so they could really understand what the computer was doing. In the 60's, the "old guard" fought COBOL and FORTRAN in favor of assembly so "they could understand what the computer was doing". In then 70's, they fought virtual memory because "only with real memory could you understand what the computer was doing". In the 80's, they fought SQL and wanted to keep COBOL so "they could understand what the computer was really doing". In the 90's they fought GUIs because "only with a command line could you really understand what the computer was doing". And in the last decade, they fought bytecode and interpreted languages because "only with a compiled language can you really understand what the computer is doing".

This is not to say that every proposed new language and concept is good -- they aren't. There was an research computer where the compiler was in hardware (yes, individual gates and thing to parse your source code), along with the entire OS. There have been visual languages by the dozen; almost all were losers.

But, overall, history isn't on your side. The higher level languages and abstractions actual make people more productive programmers. Both Java and .NET have been accepted as "good" by an enormous number of working programmers and their hard-nosed managers; they are here to stay.

The British felt the same way about the American and German "bubbles" in manufacturing and steel, too. But they just knew that eventually the two small upstart countries would slow down, resulting in Britain continuing to have a comfortable lead over all other industrialized countries.

Sometimes the view in the rear view mirror is true.

Imagine a world with no government interference -- with no long private railroads (no eminent domain, no free land parcels out west, no westwards expansion). Imagine a world where cars are always slow (no roads mean no cars; no cars mean no roads). Imagine a world with no sewers, and no telephone (telephones are possible only because of telegraphs; telegraphs are only possible because of the railroads).

But imagine a world with lots smallpox, diptheria, and polio. A world with short, nasty lives. A world with plenty of Victorian virtues like polluted water and air, and childen living and dying in poverty.

Yup, that's the world for me!