There is no heavy burden. If the consequences of contact are so disastrous, they must not be contacted, full stop. We have 95% of the world at our disposal. It wouldn't really kill us to leave some patches of unscathed rain forest standing. On the contrary, the non-stop, all consuming "progress" seems to be that which will kill us.

So if a crazy lunatic billionaire wants to buy your share for a billion dollars (share value at this moment 1 billion dollars) and then dies before the transaction could be made (share value back to 10 dollars), by your logic this means that 999.999.990 million dollars of value have "vanished"?

One thing is clear, the existing -money value- has not vanished. It will simply be distributed among heirs instead of being on your bank account. You are talking about the value of a commodity. I was replying to the parent claim that "money can vanish" in a stock exchange crash, which is false. There is a difference between money, which can not simply "vanish" and the value of commodities, which have whatever value people attribute it. In the case of BitCoins, it is even possible for the value they represent to actually, truly vanish, if the BitCoins are lost or deleted.

Actually, I have zero problems with kidnapstering my very own Lucy Liu.

If you invest 100$ into one share, whoever sold you that share now has your 100$.
If later you need cash and want so sell your share, but its price is only at 10$, it means that there are buyers willing to pay only 10$ for your share.

Subjectively you could argue that you "lost" 90$. But the person who sold you the share for 100$ could now buy it back from you for 10$ and he would have "won" 90$. In total, the balance of the transactions is 110$. No money has vanished. The value of the commodity has changed, and there are winners and losers of the exchange. One mans loss is the other mans win.

Money on stock exchanges is never lost. For every seller there is always a buyer. For every investment there is a payout. It's like the conservation of energy. Money changes hands, but it can not simply vanish, like BitCoins apparently can, unless you actively destroy cash currency.

I thought the idea of prison is not to punish by causing suffering, but to punish by wasting the time of your life in a prison cell.

Mostly, I agree with what you say. But I do believe that long term sleep deprivation is not healthy. I once read a believable article claiming that sleep clears the brain of waste chemicals, kind of like going to the bathroom. Without losing that waste it starts to build up and poison you.

Other than that, it's also rather straightforward self-experience. If you feel like shit after pulling 24hrs it's probably because shit is happening to you. Just like when drinking too much alcohol.

Yeah, but he's Mighty too, so maybe we should pretend his papers are in order... just in case.

One of the nicest things about Jigsaw is being able to pick and package only those parts of Java that you need, potentially making your app considerably smaller, faster to load and consuming less memory, also thanks to the overdue housekeeping of breaking ancient, useless dependencies in the JRE apart.

Yeah, that actually sucks some serious monkey balls right there. It doesn't make any sense at all for Oracle to do such a thing with something as important as the Java platform.

There has been a petition to remove this "feature" for some time now, but despite the millions of Java developers, it never took off.

Yaaaaaaay! :D :D :D
More coding shinies!

I am unpleasantly reminded of Metro 2033 a novel from 2005 in which the world experienced a nuclear holocaust in the year 2013.

Let's just hope it wasn't prophetic...

Well, this is why nuclear power is so dangerous. If something bad happens, the bad is here to stay.

On the contrary, I consider someone with 500 facebook friends and who is always online in facebook as superficial and without interests. If you have the time to spend 6 hours a day on facebook, I assume there's not much else going on in your life.

I just googled 'Mandarin' and the Internets told me it can be a Chinese language, a type of orange or a comic.
So according to the Internets the chance that you don't make sense is 66%.

Also, you have a big butt.