You argument is completely unrelated to mine.
Observe that my argument of analysing demand could well result in the observation that more engineers are needed.
It could also come to the results that there are diminishing returns and that having less engineers will result in almost the same advantage for significantly less money. A demand analysis will show which is the case.

But it seems that you are arguing that more military tech is always better, not matter what.
I suggest that you at once stop producing food and train all these people to be engineers and mechanics to make sure that the taliban don't have better drones than you do.

What if the wrong amount of engineers has been trained? Don't you think it would be wiser to analyze how many engineers are needed to achieve the goals that you are describing and than find projects for them? (You know, this is the demand thing I was talking about) Instead of blindly assuming that the amount of engineers currently available is the right number due to some hidden magic?

So you are saying, the number of engineers and teachers available shall define how much is spent on military engineering and schools?

I believe that demand shall define the amount. If there are not enough engineers to meet this demand efforts shall be made to get more (either through education or hiring abroad). If there are more engineers than needed for military engineering there are two options:
- don't give government money to them and leave it to them to find other useful work
- use government money to hire these engineers for non military projects that are needed

But dveloping airplanes just because you have the engineers is a stupid waste of tax money.

Who are unavailable for other tasks due to this programm.

As would almost any other type of spending. The difference is, you get planes instead of schools, highways, vaccines or what else could be done with the money.

Also, the money for this programm is coming from taxes so not spending the money at all creates purchasing power all accross the population which might be the best thing for welfare and economy.

According to a recent study by LBNL the soft cost associated with installing the panels are more than three times as high in the US compared to Germany.

http://emp.lbl.gov/sites/all/files/german-us-pv-price-ppt.pdf
Page 26: Costs that are not module costs. 4.46$/W in the US compared to 1.18$/W in Germany.

Higher cost results in lower volume.

Sorry, wrong URL. Here is a working link:
http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/photovoltaic-cost.jpg

There are your products:
http://deepresource.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/german-pv-price1.

Many incremental technology advances like the one in this article make these dramatic price reductions possible.

You can't have 0 latency audio drivers. But the latency can vary from system to system due to design decisions.

The main source of latency in audio drivers is related on how many audio samples are generated for each call to the interrupt handler (buffer size).
Bigger buffer sizes help avoid gaps in audio due to interrupt jitter. They also reduce the CPU load and energy usage which are very important in mobile devices.
Driver infrastructer for very small buffer sizes need to be designed very carfully to work reliably. So there are many reasons why android developers decided not
to use very small buffer. BUT of course for any kind of interactive audio low latency is crucial.

You are talking about nuclear reactor design.
They have a tradition of implementing 5m walls to protect against 20m Tsunamis.

I am sure that your government will agree to not support rape of children.

I would say that would be about one third the effect of adding three bazillion joules of energy into the wheather system by nuclear reactors with 33% thermal efficiency.

I don't find a reference now, but wasn't there a lawsuit about Popeye where the court decided that if the copyright is expired a trademark can't prevent copying of the work? Isn't this a similar situation?

I mean, if Internet Brands adds text containing the trademark "WikiTravel" to a CC work, they gave permission to use the trademark in the work under the CC license.
If they use their own trademark as the title of the work, I don't see how they can prevent people to refer to the work using the trademark

The study is about kids who grow up in housholds where the parents speak different languages.

Not about kids who are taught a second language on purpose by a teacher. No discipline involved.

I agree that the maintenace required by a diesel plant is low, but it is still much higher than that of solar. You will spent more man hours refilling the fuel than the total maintenance for the solar plant.

The rest of the post tries to compare apples to oranges. Either we compare technology currently available on the market. In that case the comparison I made is accurate.

Or you compared anticipated technolgies. In this case you have on the nuclear side proposals for inexpensive fuel cycles with greatly reduced risk. All of these designs will use more concrete per Watt electrical output so the energy paypack time will be greater than for current designs. But still these advanced reactors would be great improvements compared to current designs.

On the solar side there are concepts for designs that use much less material and less exotic materials. Thin film and metal based cells are on the verge of beeing market ready and there might be a breakthrough in polymere cells any time (so it is not guaranteed). By the time generation 4 reactors will be market ready solar power might be almost free.

Essentially it comes down to a bet that most of the industry currently is not willing to make: Gen 3 and Gen 4 reactors are designed to operate 65 years after a 15 year design time. Currently solar has a 20% to 30% cost improvement every year for 10 years now. Anybody putting his money on nuclear is betting that this progress suddenly stops before solar passes all other technologies. This might very well happen, but it might be smart to wait a few more years before commiting to an 80 year project competing with solar.

I read this a few year ago and current can't find it again.
It might be that this number ist the energy for producing the plant divided by the average electrical power. This would mean that the energy for running the plant and for producing the fuel is not considerd. Sorry I don't have a better source.
What I do find a lot are sources on the average amount of CO2 produced by nuclear power. It is a lot worse than wind and hydro but somewhat better than solar if the uranium does not come from south africa.