New protocols? A low-level protocol like like a PGM or ICMP? No, the RT sockets don't let you do that (among other things, there's hardly any value: even if you made a new low--level protocol, you'd have trouble getting internet-scale adoption (heck, even useful things like PGM have trouble, and we're never getting another ICMP again).

RT Sockets are a wrapper over WinSock (aka, Windows version of BSD sockets), but with some stuff cut out and object-orient-ified.

Links: documentation is at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/windows.networking.sockets.aspx/
and there's a talk: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/BUILD2011/PLAT-580T/

(cough). Actually, we rebuilt the RT Socket API from top to bottom, and part of that work involves changing all the names.

What you get with the change is APIs that actually work together: it's a smaller set of objects and radically fewer data structures and the result is something more powerful.

For example, to pull a byte-swapped integer out of a RT Socket, all you do it slap a "DataReader" onto the socket's stream, and read ints until the cows come home. In BSD, it's definitely more awkward: recv returns a void* which in practice is commonly a big char buffer which you pull data out of. But when it comes time to swab your bytes with htonl, you need to convert a pointer-to-char to a u_long. But a u_long needs to be u_long-aligned, so you can't just do some casting; you have to pull the data out and memcpy it into a u_long.

Or, to see a real advance; given a socket, you can, just by "hopping" from socket to hostname to IP information to network adapter, and from there you can get to the network information itself.

You can also directly get some useful socket statistics like your bandwidth usage and the round trip time data.

And (Ok, last point): we have sockets, and we have WebSockets (which follow the normal WebSocket protocol standards). And they have the same basic set of functions, meaning that your socket code and your websocket code are easily swappable!

Hmmm -- a quick bing search for "aviation grade connector" shows lots and lots of connectors. There are even magazine articles about them.

http://www.aviationtoday.com/av/issue/feature/Product-Focus-Connectors_18865.html

I'm an old fart who went to a good private school way back in the 80's. And our professors complained about our lack of work ethic, our ability to do assignments, and our writing ability.

IMHO, what's really happening is that your skills are getting better as you age, and you're automatically up-leveling what "average" is. Back when your were in college, other kids were about as good as you. But now you have years of experience and you're way better. Only you still compare yourself to the kids, and of course they do worse.

The long term tests on college performance show that we aren't in any way getting worse academically.

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.