...Speculating...could be...
And if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a wagon.
Head under pillows, going to the Apple store to buy more iPads, not questioning the consensus, super-consuming reality we live in. I turned on my facebook today and saw all my friends got new iphones so I went down and got one too! Drone strikes keep us safe, don't ask too many questions, don't rock the boat. Obama or Romney, Apple or Microsoft, Facebook or Google+. What do drone strikes have to do with it?
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Posted from a 17" macbook pro.
The price of gasoline cost $0.25 SILVER per gallon a century ago, and it still costs $0.25 SILVER per gallon today. The rise in apparent price is due entirely to local currency fluctuations.
Silver and gasoline are industrial commodities that are both manufactured: both have to be taken from the ground and refined. Both have storage and distribution infrastructures. Not only have all these systems radically changed over the last 100 years, the relative scarcity and demand for silver and gasoline have not remained constant. Your point seems to be that the inherent value of commodities never, ever change with respect to each other, even over a hundred years. That doesn't seem to be true. Just choosing a commodity to be a currency would change it's value a lot.
Because BitCoins are not directly tied to any single currency, and are not manipulated by fiat, and are instead a representative of time and number of users, BitCoins will likely become a far more stable monetary unit than government-issued currencies. When you see the exchange rate graph of BitCoins begin to mirror the price of oil, that day will have come. If you look at the 1M graphs of BitCoins and oil, that mirroring has already begun.
My God, why would you want your currency tied to the inherent value of oil? I hope for your sake that's not true. One exocet later...
Dollars at least have the advantage of being the fiat currency of the most wealthy and powerful national economy on earth, if only being backed by it's national debt. Bitcoins are the fiat currency of some internet geeks and drug addicts, and are only backed by the strength of... the bitcoin market. As long as everyone has "faith in bitcoins", you're good.
"Sharpen my axe; I'm here to sever heads."
Don't want an extended psych evaluation? Don't threaten people on the internet.
Personally I'm less certain that people need to go to these places. Kind of a stunt, right? Because we have such great imaging and 'bots now.
My friend works at JPL, he told me Carl Sagan once gave a talk to the staff there and basically said as much... No we don't need to send people there, but enthusiasm over manned space flight is what pays for all these robotic science missions.
Either way, we need better propulsion systems. If we're sending people, we need better toilets.
Agreed! Titan deserves another mission, Cassini-Huygens has been amazing. On the other hand, they have to follow the money or cease to exist. Mars is big right now so it was probably a marketing decision. The fact is, we should be doing all three missions.
Moodle no good. No Mafia Wars or Farmville. It doesn't have a "timeline". You can't "like" anything. No great content.
Class groups and study session events.
Do you mean "everyone doing their homework together" on facebook? Do you mean actually teaching a class on facebook? Seems kind of inappropriate to me. Maybe your idea is to make it more appropriate by filtering it, but I don't think they want you to. They make money showing you ads, building a dossier on what you click on, etc. So I would suggest that you not use it as a teaching tool. In fact it's kind of unfair if all the students are required to use facebook to participate in this "content". What if they don't want to start out their lives feeding all their personal info to an evil mega-corporation? (Unlikely I know.) There are probably educational sites out there you could have everyone sign up for that have some kind of chat.
(ps - If they're younger than 13 they're not supposed to be on fb.)
"Money is the root of all money." -- the moving finger