No.

Taxes from Tobacco sales doesn't even cover the medical costs of long term treatment of smokers in Australia, where tobacco taxes are high.

This is just medical costs, it doesn't include fires started by cigarette butts or costs that the government doesn't have to pay (such as cleaning a car or house after it's been occupied by a smoker) that have a net drain on the economy.

For the same reason people prefer to watch 42 meat heads wrestle each other for a ball rather than watch 42 of the brightest minds debate.

I dont mean the suppressed homoerotic desires either.

Given my experience with Civ V, they'll build about 2 cities each and never actually go to war, let alone attack. It will be a paint drying simulator. The incredibly stupid AI was what ultimately forced me back to Civ IV.

You're confusing cause with effect. Programmer wages aren't high in the Silicon Valley because of having a lot of programmers. There are a lot of programmers because the wages are so high that CS majors come here in droves after college.

The reason the wages are so high here is because of basic supply and demand at work. Silicon Valley has only about a 3.6% unemployment rate among programmers, and a lot of the unemployed either want to be unemployed or are unemployed because their specific skills aren't in high demand. Programmers may be common in the Silicon Valley, but the demand in the Silicon Valley far exceeds the number of qualified programmers who are available and looking for jobs. Thus, the entire market is a zero-sum game, and the high wages are a result of the need to buy people away from other companies.

As a result, any sudden increase in the number of programmers drives down salaries for new hires, and fairly dramatically at that. For proof, you need only look at what happened to programmer salaries outside the Bay Area during the dot-com crash, when droves of people suddenly were looking for more affordable places to live. In some areas, salaries for programmers dropped almost in half because of that exodus.

Is it realistic to believe that there will ever be enough programmers to satisfy the Silicon Valley's voracious appetite? Hard to say. But that's a separate question.

Yes, it is pretty silly for them to expect the government to educate people. It is not like an educated population is some kind of public good.

Well, it is a benefit to the public as a whole to a large degree, but there is a dark side, too. The main reason that companies want to increase enrollment in CS is to get a larger pool of people to draw from so that they won't have to pay employees as much.

To take the last part first:

You shouldn't be quite so keen on putting down other commenters in this way - your own comments are not deeply insightful either, even you appear to think so yourself. All you achieve is to alienate the person you are talking to, as well as others who will see you as immature and lacking in self-confidence. And you don't actually need to try to put other people down - just keep to known facts, argue logically and accept that if you are wrong, you stand to gain new insight, so it is hardly a 'defeat'.

Plus, of course, where do you see that the GP 'clearly doesn't understand how humans have evolved'? To me this sounds like the kind of arguments I used to get into as a teenager who had just realised he knew it all - no more than agressive bluster, really. You'd do better by seeing the GP for what it most likely is: humour. Otherwise you'll end up sounding like a politician.

You are making some bold assumptions here; these are issues that have been discussed very throughly for centuries; summed up rather eloquently by Descartes: 'Cogito ergo sum'. The scientific method springs from the need to address the uncertainties of cognition being subjective - it is the best way we have been able to think of, which will over time help our knowledge progress towards objectivity, if applied scrupulously.

So, you assume that all intelligence must by necessity be like human intelligence; IOW, you haven't been able to imagine any other form of intelligence. I suppose most people have difficulty doing that - myself included - but that is no reason to assume that none exists. Apart from the fact that we don't really know what constitutes 'intelligence' and whether that has any bearing on things like consciousness and self-awareness, there are actually people to who not knowing everything objectively is not a burden, and to whom the idea of absolute certainty is seen as a threat; they are called scientists.

I believe the Lt Cmdr has wrestled with that question for years.

Because this is pretty much the only thing the anti-android crowd can complain about.

Its becoming harder and harder for them to hide how butthurt they are behind legitimate excuses because the legitimate excuses are disappearing rapidly. Whenever you see an article on the horrors of Android Fragmentation/Piracy/Profitability and so on you know it's going to be bullshit by someone who's upset that Android has become the dominant platform.

These renewed attacks are conveniently timed with Google's release of Google Work.

However, what people forget is that 95% of small app developers on IOS dont break even, it's still high 90's on Android but more break even due to lower start up costs. The idea that you make millions from an app is something Apple likes to perpetuate but in reality only 0.001% of devs make a significant amount of money. The way to make money as an application developer on Android or IOS (or Win Phone, can we call it WinPo?) is the same way as you do it on PC. You make applications for other people.

Everyone from banks to supermarkets to coffee shops want an application that they give to customers for free as it brings in business. Someone has to write these applications and dollars to doughnuts I'll bet that Tesco didn't write the Tesco app, they hired someone to do it for them. If you want to make money from Android or IOS, forget selling direct to consumers because chances are you wont make it.