Self-penalty: no posting to Slashdot for at least two weeks.

If you do actually Google "where does space start" you'll get a popular definition of 100km, so yes, quite a bit short.

I'm also not sure yet about the claim that they had the previous record. If you visit http://www.fai.org/record-glid... you'll see that in 2006 the late great Steve Fossett has a claim to a little higher than the Perlan claim. The Perlan claim doesn't even show up on the site.

Dammit. I got n+1.

Wow, you really ARE new around here, aren't you? I'd be OK with you calling it Obama's Torture Chamber if I thought you were just as aware that it was also Bush's Torture Chamber.

Hm?

Following are just a few sources are located on "the internet." I'm not sure who owns them but I do know they do not toe the part line. Whether you think they are valid or not, they ARE out there.

http://www.motherjones.com/
http://www.theguardian.com/us
http://www.kpfk.org/

"So no, it's not at all accurate to speculate that Von Braun was a Nazi or into that whole ideology."

No, he was just a guy who used up the lives of prisoners to meet his ends. He may not have been an ideologue, but he was a sociopath.

Because articles aren't just for those who can answer them. The rest of us are curious and want to learn new things, but when one keeps the subject shrouded in esoteric jargon (to this crowd mostly) that makes it hard to do.

"...and get yourself a job at a big corporate."

Ugh. Well, I'm not a hipster, but I guess I'll have to buy some hipster clothing if that's the only other option. At least the hipsters are allowed to use their imaginations.

"Visa wakes up, takes a dump, then wipes its ass with $300,000 dollars."

This must be the reason that all those money laundering schemes exist.

And Mussolini made the trains run on time?

I don't know. I was busy looking at the bottom of the page for the footnote to the asterisk.

"You think this began with THIS president?"

No, but many of us were hoping it would at least be reduced by this president. I am finally getting it through my head that Romney or Obama would have both basically done the same job of letting our rights slide down the tubes. This goes for any Democrat or Republican candidate. As long as Americans are fooled into not-voting or into voting for either of the two big parties nothing will change.

"It has taken care of us very well."

Past performance is no guarantee of future performance. Nature also took quite good care of the dodo, the Tasmanian tiger, etc.

We are part of an ecosystem. I guess we're going to find out how much of that system we can destroy until we ourselves go extinct, or figure out a way to exist outside of the food web. Remember, just because you don't care about some little tree frog somewhere doesn't mean that the symbiotic and inter-connected nature of the system doesn't care.

Nothing is obvious to the uninformed.

Nope. Go ahead and build anything and eat everything. Nature will take care of the human population eventually.