I know this is a nitpick, but this is a site for nerds after all. It's NASA.

"Well the moment the cameras outside are gone? So are they."

Why waste your time parading to an empty street? Why shouldn't protestors play the PR game just as much corporations? It's all about getting your message out. Just ask the Koch brothers and their hired goons.

"Yet that is perfectly legal..."

Yep. There's no law against being an asshole.

I can say that I use Ruby because of the way it implements regular expressions. They are really easy to use, no need to import a library or compile your regex. Just put some stuff between a couple of slashes and you're off and running.

Since most of what I end up using a scripting language for is parsing text I use Ruby instead of Python.

"...you might as well put money in Facebook and Apple because apparently you like disastrous Titanic-caliber corporate meltdowns.."

And you were doing so well for a minute there.

"using the fabric of spacetime as your communications medium, it becomes rather quite difficult to prevent interception"

I've heard that if you use plaid for your space-time fabric that interception is much more difficult.

That's a pretty provocative few sentences. What job is it that you're quitting?

I don't know, I hear that Zeus is a heavy user of Google maps for pinpointing lighting bolt strikes.

Not sure about all the other gods, however.

"We should ban pens and paper so it doesn't happen again."

Oh, it's YOU. I was there that day. I would have been dead if I hadn't had a pen in my coat pocket to write "emergency exit" on the wall behind me.

So, no, I disagree. Pens don't kill people, aneurisms do.

I thought the idea of big data was that looking at ALL the data obviated the need to sample the data and all the attendant issues that come with that. Ferreting out bits and pieces of the big data set is a step backward from the idea of big data. Real numbers people can jump in here and set me straight.

However, my biggest hope for what is after big data is no one ever again having the title "Data Scientist."

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/