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.

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.

Well it looks like the record golf ball throw is 170 yards, I guess you're right. Apparently Nokia makes golf balls too.

For comparison, the record baseball throw is about 136 meters, set in 1957 by some freak of nature. The record for a female is 90 meters, by Babe Didrikson, who won a gold medal in javelin at the 1932 Olympics, and could have broken that skinny kid in half. Must be operator error, maybe the guy was reading feet instead of meters.

Because in an emergency can't roll joints with a Kindle.

The Van Cliburn Piano Competition? Really? How many people would even be on the fence about something like that. You either own all twelve or you wouldn't watch it if it was free. I mean maybe there was some turfing by all their friends or something. But anyone who would gush about The Van Cliburn Piano Competition very well could be sincere. It's not like it's an air freshener or a stick of RAM or something. The idea is that it's an artistic pinnacle reached by serious young musicians. I think Amazon gets a free pass on this one.

Moodle no good. No Mafia Wars or Farmville. It doesn't have a "timeline". You can't "like" anything. No great content. ;o(

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.)

Prefers flamethrower (ibid.).

They should stomp all over this crap. Here you have an unregulated free-market system in all it's glory. Without some kind of cop pointing a stick at them to do the right thing, of course they don't bother with backups, they don't bother with accountability and they don't honor their debts. They claim they can't figure out what happened. They probably hacked it themselves. Scammers scamming other scammers, take the money and run. Just want to close the site and move on. Ayn Rand would indeed be proud of them.

This fiasco is exactly why we need a stronger regulation in financial markets, not weaker. There's really not much difference between bitcoin exchange and exotic securities markets. You just get a bunch of private people together and start trading something, like tranches of unsecured rubber dog shit. My URDS exchange is a great way to make real US dollars, and buy drugs too!

I never thought this would happen.

Thread over. Also, best doggerel.