It's OpenDNS's fault. They return a bogus A record instead of NXDOMAIN:

$ dig +noall +comments +answer test.example.com @8.8.8.8
-- Got answer:
-- -HEADER- opcode: QUERY, status: NXDOMAIN, id: 48729
-- flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 0

$ dig +noall +comments +answer test.example.com @208.67.222.222
-- Got answer:
-- -HEADER- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 31301
-- flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

-- ANSWER SECTION:
test.example.com. 0 IN A 67.215.65.132

Actually, iOS *is* more developer friendly. Writing an App for Android's infinite screen dimensions and densities is a nightmare.

-Matt

Hmm, very similar to JD Salinger (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._D._Salinger)

For all of you arguing that college requirements for non-technical courses are BS, this is a great counter-example. If you have no idea of what _Catcher in the Rye_ is, nor who Salinger is, then you are at a disadvantage vs. the Harvard (etc) graduates.

My take on this as well.

Many of today's "stars" seem to be analogous to the "pump-n-dump" offerings of investment advisor.

They go about "stoking the star making machinery" to pump up some unknown artist they get for cheap, get him into debt up to his eyebrows, own all his works, then dump him.

Then have Congress write law for them honoring this business model.

Knowing you're dying can be a bad trip, no drugs required. Someone who's looped their fear until their soul is crushed isn't in much danger - they've already hit bottom.

Knowing you're going to die is a terrible burden, but it presents you the opportunity to choose the last memories your friends and family will have of you. They can remember you living your last weeks in fear and dying terrified, or you spending some time recalling the good times, and perhaps forgiving some of the bad ones. That's all the control you have left of your legacy, and you don't have much time to take advantage of it.

LSD, especially low* doses with someone to help guide can sometimes give people a new perspective. If they can relax their fixation on the fact that their time is up they may see the bigger picture - that we're all mortal, that life is a cycle, and that this is just a part of it. It may give you the opportunity to make your peace with the world. And if not, you're dead anyway. So why not?

* There's adequate margin between free-association, preconception-questioning levels and moon-howling-naked.

Sorry... I replied in haste.

I have a real tender spot in me that gets quite worked up when I see the cold hard realities of economics butt up against what I consider pure human compassion.

people ( ObamaCare and the TaxPayer ) will pay for drugs every month for the rest of their lives!!

And keep that poor guy condemned to live out the rest of his life with a syringe in his arm...

I have way too many friends who are diabetic and their insulin production is down.

I do not mean to take away from anything, but I would sure love to see research like this directed to problems that affect the lifestyles of a large number of people.

I know they are working on it, but personally, I would like to see them throw all they've got at these pesky insulin and maintenance drug problems where just a little chemical injection by a tailored cell assembly would do the trick. Forcing patients to be tethered to the pharmacist with little bottles of pills has got to go.

That's total nonsense. The only monopoly a government has on money is the requirement to pay taxes in a particular currency. Bitcoin doesn't make a dent in that.

There is absolutely nothing stopping you from converting your money to any manner of scrip (aka stocks), commodity-tracking scrip, or a commodity itself and still have it be liquid enough to be usable as a currency. Many of these instruments have great long-term records of inflation protection to boot.

Bitcoiners seem to believe that there is some magic 'currency' instrument which is immune to inflation and all manner of government manipulation which maintains or increases its value magically over time with no effort. No such beast exists anywhere in the world. There is not a single instrument anywhere which can make that guarantee. Certainly not bitcoins. Not gold. Nothing.

People who believe that crap deserve to lose every cent they own.

-Matt

I found an awesome one that is accepted all over the world with a nifty piece of plastic that you just swipe in a little machine. Takes 5 seconds and you don't even have to sign for small transactions. Ultra convenient and I can only lose $50 in the event of fraud. All my transactions are listed conveniently on a monthly statement. And, best of all, they loan me the money for 30 whole days and it costs me absolutely nothing as long as I pay my balance off each month.

It's called a credit card.

-Matt

Think about what you are asking. You might be willing to take on huge risks, but I assure no insurance company is going to follow you down the rabbit hole unless they are idiots (and here I would put 'AIG' in the category of 'idiots', heh). You might be able to 'buy' insurance from another bitcoiner, but it isn't real insurance if the other bitcoiner doesn't have a dime to his name to be able to back the policies he's writing. Don't expect to be paid.

This is an excellent example of fantasy going head to head against the real world and winding up in a crumpled heap.

-Matt

Shorting requires that you borrow the stock/commodity/currency/whatever from someone else who owns it, and then sell it on the open market. The borrowing usually entails interest. That is, someone might be willing to lend you the bitcoin so you can then sell them (the short), but that person is also going to charge you, say, 5% of the bitcoins lent payable in bitcoin or some other stock or currency each year as long as they are borrowed. At some point you have to buy the bitcoin back to pay back the person you borrowed them from.

Another problem is that borrowing any significant quantity of anything, such as bitcoin or a stock or whatever, requires a trusted and/or regulated middle-man who can guarantee that the lender gets paid back and consequences if you are unable to pay-back the middleman. Otherwise only a fool would lend you the bitcoin with only your 'promise' that you'll pay him back. This is how shorting in the real stock market works.

Lots of ways to blow yourself up. Usually the lender can call back his or her stock/bitcoin/whatever with less than a week's notice, which might force you to buy-back the bitcoin you sold at a loss if you can't find someone else to borrow the bitcoin from. The lender and/or middleman (aka your broker in the case of stock) also needs to protect themselves, and so there will be wording that requires you to maintain a balance sufficient to buy back the bitcoin you owe them. So if the price of bitcoin were to double and you don't have sufficient funds to cover the value, they can force you buy back the bitcoin right then and there to pay back the loan. Just two examples.

So I'm sure there would be someone willing to lend you the bitcoins, but if they do they are going to be asking for your first born child and your house if you can't pay them back, and probably charge you 20%+ in interest in the mean time.

-Matt

Sure, I'll insure your bitcoins. And the premium I will charge for insuring your bitcoins will be... the face value of your bitcoins.

Sometimes insurance simply isn't possible. Insurance companies exist to make a profit, not to give all their money away to bad clients and go bankrupt themselves.

-Matt

Are you kidding? That's like a kindergarten view of the U.S. banking system. How could possibly have that opinion?

There are a huge number of regulations related to bank security. Literally thousands of accounting standard requirements that are NON optional for banks, including requirements for a daily reconciliation of accounts, compartmentalization of assets, automatic circuit breakers to prevent a complete drain. Mandated reporting requirements for larger money transfers as well as best-practices for transfer requests, and thousands of other regulations.

The FDIC is the umbrella for consumer protection of a bank account but that has nothing to do with why banks and (real) brokerages tend to be relatively secure from theft. Not perfect, obviously, but several orders of magnitude more secure than an unregulated bitcoin exchange could ever be.

Similarly, there are consumer protections on brokerage accounts and credit cards. Brokerages also have to deal with a large pile of regulation (though not as large as a major bank has to deal with).

None of these regulations or standards exist for any bitcoin exchange. How anyone could possibly trust their cash or bitcoins or whatever to ANY bitcoin exchange is beyond me. Its like there is this blind distrust of the government and large institutions, but at the same time that person has complete trust (for reasons in unknown) in a small outfit run by half a dozen people with no regulation or oversight whatsoever and nothing protecting the customer's assets. Insane.

-Matt

NoScript.