If that's your point, you might want to get off your operating system as well. That thing is doing all kinds of stuff while running your program that you didn't tell it to do, leading to all kinds of unexpected behavior.

Yes, I have a kid. Mortally afraid to jump off a platform a quarter her height. No, overconfidence is not innate.

One of my favourites in C:

int* a = ...
2[a] = 5;

Not sure if this is still allowed by the latest standards, but it used to work.This makes use of the fact that the bracket operator x[y] is syntactic sugar for *(x+y). So:

a[2] = *(a + 2) = *(2 + a) = 2[a]

Now try that somewhere else!

Well, for starters, 10,000 leagues is a quite a bit over the circumference of the earth, so being so far under the sea is just simply impossible. If this Verne character is serious about his scientific ambitions, he shouldn't be three to four orders off with his approximations.

whyce?

Sure, and by the same measure, the average European citizen is about 20 times less fearful of their government as the average American citizen. And that's the land of the free?

I think you're overestimating the effect of marketing software. Oh, yes, it's extremely effective at figuring out who you are over many sites, but then the offers are absolutely atrocious. To wit:

There is no time in my life I am less likely to buy some white pants, a toaster or a flight to Los Angeles than after I've just bought these items, yet that's precisely the time I see ads for these products or services.

In other words, digital marketing is a con. It's conning business into paying for technology. No actual value is achieved.

America is special. Because at foundation time had a war with a dictatorship, they started anew, with a fresh constitution. Luckily, the forces that be found a workaround. Now they have a two party dictatorship. God bless you all.

Why do you think the sign of a dying society is a decreasing population? What is your long term outlook? Are we to support 10 billion people, then 100 billion, then a trillion? How do you think this would work out?

I think a population, decreasing or increasing toward stability, is a sign of civilization. Resources are being maxed out, people are no longer starving, and you do not need children to take care of you in your old age. I'm sure that in the US this doesn't hold, as you'll have infinite resources and infinite growth potential, though in the rest of the world, people beg to differ.

Let me correct that for you: About the only place where you see corruption worse than in politics, is in an American union. If you look abroad, there are many unions that are actually functional. In particular, I was very impressed with Nordic unions, having direct experience with Danish ones. There, whilst membership is mandatory, they function exceptionally well. The reason is that they have responsibilities. One of these responsibilities is that the union itself pays unemployment benefits. So here we have functional socialism. Everybody pays into a pot for unemployment, and when people get unemployed, there's a strong incentive to get people up and running again, lest the pot of money dries up. This works incredibly well. People in Denmark are unemployed for a couple of months. If it is conjunctural, they sing it out, if it is structural, the union forces re-education.

I think that indeed, the more generations people are residing on a continent, the more native they become. Furthermore, it is clear from the history of America that its success is based on the non-natives, the immigrants. Therefore it seems only logical that people from, say, fourth generation and beyond are officially declared to be native Americans, and thereby stripped off their possessions, and put into reservations.

I think he describes Tom Ray's Tierra system.