African or European?

actually no one says that.

I'm pretty sure you're getting "science" confused with "the media". Scientists were legitimately studying things like saccharine and breast implants, often coming up with inconclusive results and findings that are different levels of grey, and don't really fit on a pretty headline. Then the media would take some study that says "CANCER CANCER CANCER!".

Or, in picture-form: http://xkcd.com/882/

How is this accomplished in Minecraft? I though the only way to place text was to use signs.

As a non-astronomer, can somebody explain to me roughly what we're talking about with a 140m asteroid?

I'm assuming (I could be way off) that a 1m "beach ball" asteroid probably just breaks up and burns in the atmosphere, with little appreciable hitting the ground/ocean.

How about a "car" sized asteroid? Does it burn up? Possibly take out a house? City Block?

How big do asteroids have to be before they could take out a whole city? How about to create a Tsunami (since they are most likely hitting ocean anyhow). How big to impact yearly weather patterns and destroy crops?

I know the Chicxulub one is supposed to have been 10km, so that's "extinct most species" territory -- What does 140m mean in comparison?

Seems to me the flaw in this plan is that people are cheap -- you'd encourage a lot of them to sit out for the drop, drop, drop in prices in the last 12 hours. So you'd miss out on:

A) the logistical sanity of just having the plane mostly full well in advance.

B) A good chunk of the interest you make from holding on to several hundred dollars per passenger for what is often a few months.

plus, you'd probably end up with a lot of grumpy people who missed out during the last minute firesale. Sure, its their own fault, but people don't care -- you spill your fries, it's McDonald's fault, you show up late on Black Friday, it's Best Buy's fault that they only had 8 doorbuster sale HDTVs. People who missed out on a seat due to their own lack of planning would probably just rage at the airline.

With a bullet where you can literally point a laser at a spot and it hits the spot, it seems to me that the only ethical decision would be to shoot enemy troops in the kneecaps or somewhere debilitating but not life threatening.

IANAL but I think the persons to go after in that case would be the management that can't pay the parking garage land owner.

I mean if I offer to store your valuables in safes within my attic, and then fail to pay my mortgage and get evicted from my house, it seems the person at fault here would be me for losing access to the attic safes, not my bank for repossessing my house.

Sounds like somebody needs to get cracking on a Twitter-to-TCP/IP tool so you can just browse the web thorough the free Twitter service, 140 bytes at a time.

The latency will probably be a bitch, though.

Presumably it would be the last, or near to last, edits made before you abandoned your Wikipedia account?

No one ever, ever, cites a diff when they are bitching about Wikipedia on Slashdot.

Where do you live?

I'm guessing that miltant crazies don't really know what a hard drive is, or where the memory is stored. It's just a devil box at that point. Hell I don't think most US fundamentalist crazies would know either.

AGING is just the American English form of AGEING -- both are acceptable.

MSNBC and Fox are not somehow equivalent extremes. They represent the corporate crazy right and the corporate center-right.