Whooosh... the code example is in C/C++, not Java.

It is supposed to fail, but instead does something terrible. I guess the whole C++ is more sensible than Java thing is called into question by counterexample.

int things[10];

things[11] = 47;

What is that supposed to do?

I am not sure who you are even talking to. My response was in response to a smart ass comment made by a user named fisted, where he basically said that someone was a moron for suggesting counters that will run for orders of magnitude longer (ie. tens of thousands of millennia) are a pretty OK idea.

Nobody mentioned calculating duration besides you (in a perfectly sensible way, I might add). This is a smart answer to the question that it is an answer to, but a really kind of silly answer to a question that it is not an answer to.

Yes, the program would have to be implemented without error, to not have an error... that is a tautology. Pragmatically, use a statically typed language, and do not change anything, use the correct type while implementing the program the first time.

What would a non-lazy programmer use instead? An arbitrary precision int or something? Can you think of any downsides to that approach?

My post was not about nanoseconds, it was about milliseconds.

The correct answer is: write the stuff in a language that is safe in the first place.

A 64 bit signed long counter will merrily count milliseconds for 29,238 millennia.

What math would you do to determine exactly how high a counter should count?

Would using a 64-bit long on a millisecond counter be lazy programming?

I note that you did not specify which Xeon chips you actually have, which kind of suggests a set of E5450 or something similar. FiOS does not charge you enough for a continually saturated link, whether it is 25 or 500mbps, so you are still contending with some hard and secret GB limit (starts to make the $/GB model seem more appealing). Game servers tend to be pretty light, and most could run on very modest AWS hardware. Beyond that, EC2 costs nothing when the machines are powered down, and they provide a robust API & access control that would easily allow your friends to boot/stop the machines on demand. That setup is how my friends game, and you really should at least consider it when the service life of your server machine finally ends.

Wah wah, for some reason it needs to run on under powered hardware in an uncontrolled environment over an asymmetrical residential connection, because, for reasons!

Probably closer to 99.999%

Tiered residental water pricing is fairly normal where I live as well (like $0.50-$20/CCF), is it not in CA?

There is something that we agree upon vigorously. Not letting all users of water bid on available water is a subsidy.

I was reading interesting stuff about using forward osmosis to recover energy from desalination effluent, or even as a pre-treatment step before final desalination.

Note that I said energy, to which you responded with several sources of alternative energy that might be employed. At the end of the day, the hypothetical pipeline might be driven by wind or solar energy as well. The wind or solar energy generated at the desalination plant could alternatively be sold, and so has monetary value that must be used to desalinate water.