Entire Department of Labor budget is around 12 billions.

I suppose that 80 billions (if true) would come mostly from Department of Defense - I can easily imagine IT costs of various top-end fighters/bombers/missiles etc being quite high.

In any case, it doesn't really matter. Costs of storage is not an issue here. Legal reasons, maintenance, politics - but certainly not cost of few tapes/harddrives.

Bottled water from male-only communities. Drinking water bottled by women will make you grow soft.
Seriously, is rain filtering out that stuff? If yes, then bottled water from mountain regions should be reasonably clean. Especially from Brokeback Mountains...

Until recently, solar panels used more energy to produce than they were providing. They make perfect sense for moving energy producing into isolated places (sattelites, middle-of-nowhere lamps/lights, autonomous devices etc etc) - but they were not a solution for getting rid of coal. Still, 'tree hugging hippies' were pushing them as a solution to everything even tens of years ago, without doing any cost/benefit analysis. Not to mention my friends putting them on roof of their houses in north of Germany to be 'nature friendly'.

They are indeed a lot more efficient now - but it is still not a real solution for the majority of energy. We need stable, 24/7, continous energy generation. Solar (outside possibly really specific regions), should be used as convinient, portable, non-connected low-power generation, rather than being a main source of energy.

By all means yes. But let's switch to 4th generation nuclear (and work on fusion in background), rather than hippy tree-hugging solutions like wind and solar.

It doesn't matter by how much you multiply it. Orders of magnitude do not care about size of numbers. If vaccine kills 10 million out of each 1 billion, then disease would need to kill at least hundreds of millions out of 1 billion to talk about _orders_ of magnitude better. Probably only Yersinia pestis is anywhere close to that, most of other vaccines prevent a lot less virulent diseases.

My point is not that vaccination is bad. My point is that 99% is absolutely not enough for vaccines and not going to be accepted unless we are in end-of-world pandemic scenario. And if vaccine would be 99% safe only, anti-vaccine groups would have a major point in raising concerns - which they don't, because vaccines are orders of magnitude (this time really _orders_) safer than 99%, which we probably cannot say about quality of AGW climate models. So comparing AGW denialism to anti-vaccine based on percentages is not really valid...

Except people are not advocating putting seatbelts. They are advocating:
- switching to bikes
- breeding more horses for the carriages
- avoid investment and research into trains, because there used to be train accident once as well
- in meantime, reducing car traffic as much as possible by adding huge car and fuel tax, profits from which will be used for plugging in random budget holes and possibly putting marble floor in House of Traffic Victims Association

No, 99% safe vaccine is not ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE better that disease. It is not even better than disease itself. Will you get yourself vaccinated against AIDS if it has 1% of chance giving you AIDS in first place?

Vaccines are safe to 99.9999% or more. And you always have to put it into context. If Ebola will spread to billions, 99% safe vaccine might be acceptable. If AIDS is perfectly preventable in normal case, even 1:million safety might be not enough. But please be careful with 99% and 'orders of magnitude' in same sentence - there are not that many orders of magnitude in 1:100.

System Shock 2? You are serious giving it as an example of how good non-windows gaming is? Release dates from wikipedia
August 11, 1999 (Win)
June 18, 2013 (OS X)
April 1, 2014 (Linux)
15 years late exactly - as OP claimed and you tried to disprove.

Most of the other things you mentioned are also quite old. Maybe preparing a list of 10 really good games from 2013-2014 would be better than hundreds of games from 2-15 years ago. Or maybe even better - take 20 best selling games of last 2 years and see how many of them are available under linux natively.

"change the lives of those who rely on the Arctic ecosystem for their way of life"? You mean guys who are clubbing baby seals to death with strange looking polearms?
Out of all the arguments which could move me, they have picked one which makes me cheer for global warming...

Average Go programmers.
Maybe it tells something about maturity of language (wide knowledge of best practices - or even existence of them), availability of skilled programmers rather than runtime performance.

And in real world, it might be a lot more important how fast/readable/maintenable code will be written by people you can hire rather than how fast/readable/maintenable it could possibly be in most idealized situation.

CGI also has a huge requirement for being fast. It is different kind of fast - maybe 15 minutes instead of 15ms per frame, but you cannot just implement trivial brute-force algorithms everywhere and hope for things to work well. Good algorithms will cut your processing time by factor of 100 in CGI environment - and I assure you, everybody enjoys seeing their scene rendered overnight instead of waiting a month for that.

Hmm and if you fart, your blood pressure decreases? Because it is obvious that that compressed gas in bowels was getting your 'generally more pressurised'? There can be even a correlation between holding your fart in public getting your blood pressure higher ("Not now, not now, she will think I'm horrible").

I'm not saying anything of that. I was saying that:
- it is a job for a programmer, not for trader
- that is is possible to get neccessary experience in just few years to qualify for such job (if you are good)
- that key part here is that you know the domain (investment banking), rather than C# itself
I think that we agree on all that? And this is point I want to make - instead of learning C+-%&^!, train into well paying industry and utilize whatever skills you already have.

Said that, few more points:
- it is a lot easier to get into such positions starting from good IT background and then learning finance on the job rather than having financial background and learning how to program
- there are positions where they will accept good people without financial background for money which is still considerably bigger (2x?) than anything in web-programming
- there are positions where they will accept very good people without financial background for exactly same money (I was hiring for one few months ago, where we were looking for soft/hard-realtime programmers, paying normal investment banking daily rates)
- it is not just 8-5 job in many cases, but it is not as scary as stories about game development crunches (unless you get into small hedge funds, but then you are asking for that...)

From my experience, biggest issue to overcome for people from 'outside' is not lack of financial knowledge, but rather mindset. A lot of programmers enjoy living in walled garden, with requirements coming in controlled agile fashion, well defined sprints, not caring about final deliveries after unit/integration tests have run, not having to face end users pointing your mistakes to you and abstracting away clients to be far away evil. But that is separate story.

I can read. It is C# job for programmer, not for trader. It is C# frontend development, most probably to display UI for risk metrics for daily trading. Yes, you need to have experience with working in investment banking, same way as you won't get accepted into certain jobs without knowing browser quirks, physics or whatever is needed in given environment. As for getting accepted without finance background for similar jobs - indeed it might be hard, but everybody starts somewhere, people are not born with that knowledge. There are offers which accept good programmers even without background in that area (not contracts, but still good money) and in few years you already will get the experience.
You might be confused with some job offers which call for quants - these are indeed quite different profile, where programming is secondary requirement (but it will be mostly C++, not java/C# and it will mention quantitive finance somewhere in requirements). Plus they pay better.

In any case, it is what I'm talking about. Experience in proper domains will earn you a lot more money than experience proper languages. I know about investment banking and game companes, so I gave these examples, but similar discrepancies might exists in other industries. You just need to get out of the mindset of "I'm programmer so I can code in A whatever you throw at me with no knowledge of domain" to "I'm expert in domain XYZ and can code that in any language you ask me for (with preference for A and B)"
And no, HTML or J2EE is not a 'domain' in my understanding. Investment banking, 3d games, biotechnology, nuclear simulation, GIS etc is what I mean.

Wieslaw Maslowski. He later defended it with "I was very explicit that we were talking about near-ice-free conditions and not completely ice-free conditions in the northern ocean". In any case, we are quite far from near-ice-free conditions as well.