
I'm No Geologist...
...but 75 million years old is hardly the oldest stone on the planet:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest_rock#Oldest_terrestrial_material
Daft idea, fools & their money and all that.
We've seen hardware go so overboard with gem-encrusted bling, that it was difficult to imagine it getting any more expensive. Insert some dinosaur fossils though and - hey presto! - you can sell an iPad for £5,000,000. The iPad 2 Gold History takes blingage to new extremes. Not only are these slabs covered in two kilos of 24 …
...At least in the UK...
that would mean that just shy of £1,000,000 of the purchase price was VAT. VAT goes into the big governmental pot that funds education, the NHS, etc.
Without it, that £5Mill would have been stuck in stocks and shares or kept under the bed or shipped to Columbia to fund a farmer...
Also, someone down the line has worked to earn that money. Yes, the corporate structure does take a lot of the individual risk out of these jobs- and this is something that needs to be rectified. But think of it this way: Every unit of currency that is spent on something like this will be out of the hands of the greedy accountant bastards and in the hands of some playboy. Who will fritter away their money on fast cars (tax paid, production jobs, design jobs, research jobs, delivery jobs, massive tax paid on petrol, etc), fast women (loads of clothes and other crap bought- and taxes paid on it), gadgetry (sales, research, 'product development', etc jobs), etc. Even snorting it all up provides jobs- and job security- in places like Columbia for the farmers, chem lab techs, delivery guys- and a wide array of income-tax-dodging-but-VAT-paying 'sales types' over here.
So in the name of Egalitarianism we should _encourage_ things like this! Anything that gets the money from the tight-fisted accountants and into the hands of those who will spend it- and get 1/5th of that into the hands of the NHS- is good in my book.
Don't worry about Human Kind- all that money will eventually fritter it's way through the hands of the government (health services, education, etc) and then get blasted back out again to be re-spent!
I was thinking maybe to change that to "youngest stone in the world"; but then, e.g., new stone is continuously created in volcanoes.
Still, it's an outrageous error to leave in the "article" (read: paraphrased press release). But start snipping at that (and the fact that the product doesn't exist, like the golden yacht by the same bloke) and there's no article left.
But 'owning land and gaining revenue from oil found under it' is the normal way that stupid people get stacks of money sufficient for this sort of thing.
Hence the mental-grade Saudi wealth from a country that does very little from what I can see aside from export oil, and the 'Texan Oil Tycoon' stereotype.
For that ammount of money I'd expect at leas a USB host port, an SD slot, increased storage, IR remote, garage door/gate opener, fingerprint scanner, two full HD video cameras and more I can't think or right now -- all with supporting software.
If you're going to spend your money on modifying something at least make it better at its primary purpose.
... as snorting mummia against a head cold. Yes, they used to grind up mummies and tout it as a cure; you'd've thought we know better now. Apparently not.
Just thinking about it makes me slightly nauseous. The money's completely inconsequential. Just a pity that people with more money than taste apparently keep on giving it to this high end pikey, as it appears contagious.
I call fake. I have no doubt that neither of the two will ever be made. Has anyone ever seen one of his supposed products?
Oh and his website is Flash-ridden shite so if by some small miracle he actually produced the goods, you wouldn't be able to view it using his imaginary iPad.
Conman is the word that springs to mind but at least his prey are sheeple so its ok(they have already been conned once)
If I was paying $5 x 10^6 I would want it made from the ground bones of Pope John Paul II (I'm sure that is probably an option)
A 2.9kg iPad seems somewhat unusable, too.
The fact there there is 1. a market for shit like this, and 2. the kind of oxygen thief willing to make it is truly frightening.
First against the wall when the revolution comes! Mind you, my list is getting long, so they might get to be 5th in the queue. For $1,500,000 I can offer them my special, exclusive gold-class executive CEO-tailored luxury cart to the head of the queue, where they will be slowly eviscerated by platinum-tipped cast gold T-Rex claws.
Ground up T rex bone? I was expecting the slab to be embedded in a skull... just don't cut yourself when you use it. Computing with a Bite!
But seriously, why waste valuable fossil records of our planet's past when you could be extracting DNA and growing your own pack of T rexes to let loose on your country estate?
The one with the keys to the emergency generator in the pocket, thanks.
By all means waste some rock, and while there's a finite amount of gold out there it's at least recyclable, but I really hope the T-Rex bone in question was dust before it got incorporated. Being rich and buying something rare is one thing, buying something that the scientific community could have used is just being a dick.