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.