I like having an anti-social network

It may be finite, but if it's as much as currently exists it's going to have an impact, to put it mildly. Ask the Spanish what happens when a ton of gold is brought in.

However, this brings up another point. Before the establishment of the Fed, there were bank runs on a pretty regular basis. The Fed acts as sort of a shock absorber - what serves this function otherwise?

And remember, these panics happened while we were on the gold standard.

And another question: what would the value of gold have to be if it needed to cover all the money that currently exists?

What happens if you're on the gold standard and someone brings down 100 years worth of production all of a sudden?

With my five seconds of thought,

It seems to me that if scientific papers were published with a series of standard meta data they could be submitted to software based peer review that could go through the published literature and look for inconsistencies, missing references, misleading statistics and other things that need addressing.

Sort of a semantic web for scientific publishing.

I've done a bunch of these and can testify that it is the ultimate grandparent present. Nothing else compares to a high quality bound book of pictures of the grandkids that they can show to their friends. Now of course they bug me to do them all the time...

And what fun would that be?

I did a quick skim, and it seems to conflate the idea of Lovins saying what 'could be' with what 'actually happened', which of course is comparing apples to oranges.

For example, from TFA:

"The piece predicted that if the U.S. were to embrace Lovins’s vision, by around 2005 more than a third of the country’s energy would be coming from “soft technologies,”"

Then,

"So how did Lovins’s prediction turn out?"

Huh? the US most definitely did not embrace his vision, so of course the prediction is void.

There's a bunch of that kind of stuff in there. Try again.

You might be interested in reading some actual analysis - the Rocky Mountain Institute has done great research for years on this. Reinventing Fire What you have above is a good case study of a set of logical fallacies. How many can you find?

Yes! Get all three. Code Complete by Steve McConnell, Refactoring, by (I'm pretty sure) Martin Fowler, and Design Patterns, by Erich Gamma et al. Understand these three books and you'll be well on your way.

This is timely - I'm just starting an effort to get a makerbot in our local middle school. Get out there and support engineering in your school!

As someone who had one of these, I can tell you they make excellent lightning rods... Not so good for the electronics, however.

Definitely

Yes! This exactly how to do it. By asking questions you get a lot farther than by making statements.

My logitech dinovo keyboard works great all the time from across the room. Of course it's not a full size keyboard, but for a TV computer (A Dell Zino), it's fine. I'm not writing a novel or anything on it