Value of all gold ever mined: $ 009,120,000,000,000 +
Value of World liquid assets: $ 072,120,000,000,000 +
Value of proven oil reserves: $ 124,000,000,000,000 =
___________________________________________________
Sum of all of the above stuff:$ 205,240,000,000,000 is less than:
Size of derivatives mkt ('09):$ 439,000,000,000,000
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With Dwolla, payments are made directly from your bank account. No credit or debit cards are allowed. And because they don’t exist in the system, we don’t have to bring the fees into the system. You can spend any amount of money and when you do that, the person on the other end doesn’t have to pay 1, 2, 3 or 4%. They only pay $0.25 a transaction, which is especially helpful when it’s $1,000, $2,000 or $5,000 transactions. Obviously PayPal becomes very cost prohibitive with those larger transactions. The biggest difference between ideas like this and a PayPal — and PayPal is a phenomenal idea, Square is too — is that those are built on top of networks like Visa and Mastercard. We’re building our own.
You thought Square was cool? Square is kind of cool, but Square keeps the credit card companies in place, skimming fees off all your payments. These Dwolla guys are building a Paypal replacement that charges a flat $0.25 per transaction rather than the 2-3% that Paypal or credit card companies charge. They started with one bank and a handful of retail businesses in Iowa and are slowly trying to take it national.
It’s hard to believe that the big national banks will let an independent upstart replace the VISA and MasterCard networks. This should be interesting to watch.
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What would I cut? I think, really, what I would want to do is be able to go back and take a look at Lyndon Baines Johnson’s The Great Society. The Great Society has not worked, and it’s put us into the modern welfare state. If you look at China, they don’t have food stamps. If you look at China, they save for their own retirement security. They don’t have pay FICA. They don’t have the modern welfare state. And China’s growing. And so what I would do is look at the programs that LBJ gave us with The Great Society, and they’d be gone.
A Republican candidate for President suggests the U.S. take hints for domestic policy from a Communist country.
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Time lapse sequences of photographs taken with a special low-light 4K-camera
by the crew of expedition 28 & 29 onboard the International Space Station from
August to October, 2011.
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I’m amazed it took so long for the internet to do this.
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And just as awesome, the soundcheck before the show:
And if you think “this guy should do Jimi Hendrix”… he did:
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For EVERY youtube video, I always open the video and then immediately punch the slider bar to about 30 percent.
For example, in this video, it should have just started at :40. Everything before :40 was a waste. This holds true for nearly every video in the universe.
— Wadsworth
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Thus was born the Wadsworth Constant, now implemented across YouTube. Add &wadsworth=1 to any YouTube URL to jump 30% into the content.
United States Marine Corps. Sgt. Shamar Thomas from Roosevelt, NY
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Live at the Bucklebury Beer Festival, The Mini band, with Zoe Thomson and Harry Jackson on lead guitars, Kieran Fell on Rhythm, Harrison Read on lead vocals, Archie Zolotuhin on Bass and Charlie Emmons on drums.
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But after 10 days, hell broke loose in his hospital room. He began shaking with chills. His temperature shot up. His blood pressure shot down. He became so ill that doctors moved him into intensive care and warned that he might die. His family gathered at the hospital, fearing the worst.
A few weeks later, the fevers were gone. And so was the leukemia.
[..]
But scientists say the treatment that helped Mr. Ludwig, described recently in The New England Journal of Medicine and Science Translational Medicine, may signify a turning point in the long struggle to develop effective gene therapies against cancer. And not just for leukemia patients: other cancers may also be vulnerable to this novel approach — which employs a disabled form of H.I.V.-1, the virus that causes AIDS, to carry cancer-fighting genes into the patients’ T-cells. In essence, the team is using gene therapy to accomplish something that researchers have hoped to do for decades: train a person’s own immune system to kill cancer cells.
And to those in the past who wondered why we’re spending money on a “gay disease”, I’ve got some choice words for you right now..
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The Blind Camera is perfect for those people bored by the mass-produced point and shoot cameras. There’s no viewfinder, no lens, or flash. All it has on the outside is an LCD screen and a shutter button.
Inside is a Sony Ericsson cellphone that pulls down images from Flickr. Whenever you click the shutter button, the cellphone pings Flickr and downloads an image that has the same timestamp as your shutter press.
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The email was titled, ”Never seen anything like this before – spectacular”. And he wasn’t kidding!
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A: Two or perhaps three, approaching now, from beyond the tree in the long low light of morning. From some black place: a reckoning neither required nor bidden, a reckoning no judge could have ordered, but a reckoning nonetheless. One of the men carries a single glove, ready to grip the hot, bright bulb and twist it dead. The other two follow, smoking, and whisper about what is to come: the treacherous scramble in wet woolen darkness, the fight to fill that space with light. One of them, the youngest, cradles the thin bowl of glass in his hands like a baby foal born too soon―partly out of gentleness, partly as if to shield it from the mare’s desperate inquiring eyes.
The men walk to the bulb. The Remover’s shadow blackens as he approaches it. A quick unnatural lunge.
Then all is dark.
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From this:
to this:
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There was a lot of excitement in the Technology Studio this week when a nice man with a van dropped off three large flight cases containing something rather special: a spherical display system called a Puffersphere. Pufferfish, the company which invented them, has been kind enough to lend us one for a week.
[..]
For the next step, the Kinect
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At the astonishing distance of 17.4 billion km, the Nasa probe is the most far-flung object made by humans.
But it seems age and remoteness are no barriers to this veteran explorer.
Voyager is executing a series of roll manoeuvres to get one of its instruments into the optimum position to measure particles sweeping away from the Sun.
Controllers at the US space agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, report a perfect response from the probe.
"I liken Voyager like an old car," said project manager Suzanne Dodds. "It’s got simple electronics, not a lot of fancy gadgets – but because of that it can operate for longer; it’s not as finicky."
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Sixty years ago this month, a musical icon was born. If you’ve listened to any kind of popular music from the past 60 years, you’ve heard a Telecaster.
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Sounds like it’s time to start locking people up.
Uh oh. This cannot end well.
What can possibly go wrong?