Well, it's not the capital NOW...Volvo has got until 2017 to convince the Swedish government to relocate.

Well, in Japanese mythology, the sun deity is most definitely a gal.

The only flaw with this theory is the term predates the war. It's been recorded in use in 1845 in North Carolina.

I would suspect NRL, since they're the ones who sponsored the TOR project in the first place.

I'd bet the incidence of human drivers cutting off robotic vehicles increases dramatically.

Followed quickly by a dramatic increase of drivers discovering that performing an act of reckless driving in front of cameras results in suspended licenses and hefty fines, not to mention civil suits from the trucking company for any damage caused.

if you have a test that only scores 50 max and you scale it to 100 obviously you aren't going to have many odd numbers in the results.

The thing is, you'll have no odd numbers when you double the values. It's those odd numbers that only occur up in the 90s that stand out--if they are scaling like your theory, then the scorers are screwing with the upper values. If they aren't, they're screwing with the lower values to make those jagged peaks. (And there's still the issue of the missing "just below passing" scores.)

Do you think Molasses is safe? Ever given a second of thought to the fear that your bottle of syrup might attack you? But wait, a disaster COULD happen.

It's happened before.

You've just rediscovered Stratovision!

North America and South America are different continents...

Citation needed.

The boundaries that make up continents are to a degree arbitrary and depend upon the person making the statement. There's no real justification for Europe being a continent; Europe and a large part of Asia are on one tectonic plate, while the easternmost part of Asia is on the same plate as North America. And the Indian subcontinent is on yet another plate.

So, it's ultimately local custom that determines the number of continents. I've seen Europeans refer to the Americas as one continent. For example, the Olympic rings were at one time intended to represent five continents.

The Olympic flag ... has a white background, with five interlaced rings in the centre: blue, yellow, black, green and red ... This design is symbolic ; it represents the five inhabited continents of the world, united by Olympism, while the six colors are those that appear on all the national flags of the world at the present time. -- Pierre De Coubertin (1931)

(The quote's copied from Wikipedia, so in five minutes it's entirely possible that De Coubertin would have said the flag represents the population of elephants tripling within six months.)

Though I don't think you can quite orbit at 120km, there must be terrible atmospheric drag there.

The lowest circular non-powered orbit is around 150km.

...that breaks an arbitrary 100km threshold.

There's nothing arbitrary about the Karman line, aside from picking a static round number close to the value. It's the place where a plane would need to be at orbital speed to get lift from the wings.

One of the problems with the discussion about the number of objects is the definition of what can be considered as "juggling". The International Juggler's Association, when they split apart from the International Brotherhood of Magicians, took care to not define exactly what kind of object manipulation would qualify. Now, if the experts in the field were willing to accept rope spinning, diablos, and hat manipulation under the juggling umbrella, it seems a mistake to not allow a "one object" poll choice.

Well, if Slashdot ever bothered linking to the original article, you'd see:

The goal is to create a 100 Gb/s data link that achieves a range greater than 200 kilometers between airborne assets and a range greater than 100 kilometers between an airborne asset (at 60,000 feet) and the ground.

This is not something you will ever be able to find out firsthand from any amount of electronic conferencing.

Yet, I just found this out from your firsthand account on an electronic conference...

There are two possible interpretations here: the previous post was wrong, or the US has a definition of "chocolate" that specifies a much lower level of cocoa solids than the rest of the civilized world and thus should not be considered chocolate by anyone with working taste buds.

Christmas shopping is performed on Dec. 24th, after dinner.