Yes, I assume you've read about the recent creation of NaCl3, NaCl7, Na3Cl2, Na2Cl, and Na3Cl at high pressures, compounds not possible in standard chemistry.

‘Impossible’ Sodium Chlorides Challenge Foundation of Chemistry

According to this document linked to from your page world production of gold has increased by a factor of almost 7 over the last century, which is a significant increase, especially since as you say, price has not changed really at all (ignoring the large increase in the last five years, the price/ton in 1900 was the same as in 2005). This seems to indicate price is set by the demand side; also it seems to show consumption has increased by a similar factor, so more gold mined means more gold used.

The last few years however show a huge increase in price without any increase in production or usage, which does indicate to me that speculation was driving the price - the recent crash supports this.

It surprised me to be honest - here is the page I saw, and it's 1967, not 1969.This article backs up the data and discusses the gold supply in general - it does seem as though most people assume that gold mining is much less prevalent than it actually is.

Half of all of the gold in the world was mined after 1969. I wouldn't be surprised if it was similar for silver. And while that obviously hasn't affected the price massively, the supply of gold is increasing rapidly - which I would say indicates the price has nothing to do with supply or utility.

Actually according to Wikipedia the average purity of crystal is 62%, so it would be a bit short of the world's population. It would cover the adult population though :)

Not far off! According to this page the density is 1.2 g/cm3. So 200 gallons is approximately 1000kg, which is about 10 billion 100ug doses.

Yes, it's true both by absolute value and percentage, there's any number of sources available but this BBC article has a good summary of various figures.

Chart one on the police report you linked to shows there were fewer crimes where firearms were used in 2011 than in 1997, the year the handgun ban went into effect. That's despite the fact that

The method used for counting the number of firearms offences in England and Wales was changed on 1 April 1998 and, as a result, the reported number of offences has been seen to increase across some categories of offence.

If you look at the second chart then you can even see that the "big increase" of firearm use in 2003 was nothing to do with handguns anyway, it was mostly from air guns.

With the other half being "the government has been corrupted by companies: we need more companies!"

We're not, we're British Citizens as of 1983, and were formally Citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies since 1948. The term British Subject applies to a very small minority of people who weren't from places that were members of the Commonwealth before 1948. See this article.

You can pay cash and cheques in via ATMs in every bank branch I've been to in the UK since as far back as I can remember, no need for counter service.

Hardware acceleration of audio is pointless today given how little system resources it takes to mix multi-channel audio in realtime... but apart from that, both WDDM and UAA introduced in Vista moved large parts of the graphics and sound drivers out of the kernel, which is a huge stability gain.

Not if you're an adult with ADHD.

I hear the song "Hot Shot City" is particularly good.

Which is absolutely horrible for any album with tracks by multiple artists.