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.

Does that matter if they currently have plans or not? Now is the time to fight to establish possession, because if the company gets hold of .amazon, it will be next to impossible to get it back.

A glitch on the program makes the drone think that anyone carrying a cylinder 2ft long and 1 inch diameter a combatant? (Looks like a gun barrel!) Well, all those poor fuckers carrying brooms and sweeping their patios had it coming! Nevermind those uppity pool boys with dipnets! Can't make an omlette without breaking some eggs, right?!

So you're for robots and drones, right? Because right now the glitch in programming is when human soldiers in a combat area see someone with something that might be a weapon, they tend to shoot them. Why? Because the ones going "Is that a weapon or is it a broom" don't tend to last when it is actually is a weapon. A drone operator, on the other hand, can take the time to evaluate the situation since they aren't in harm's way.

Actually, it's just the opposite. If you have a security clearance, you have less privacy because you give the government permission to investigate you.

I think it's no coincidence that all the major media players use exactly the same words to describe events. Case in point? The description of the election was "razor tight" was repeated everywhere. Now if this were a commonly used expression, I wouldn't have noticed.

According to Google, there are about 16,400,000 results for "razor thin" and about 10,300,000 results for "razor tight". So "razor tight" doesn't appear to be all that obscure.

But this is a ridiculous and meaningless expression. what is "tight" about a razor? Nothing. Razors are sharp. Razors are thin. Razors are not "tight."

Now, you're right, razors are not "tight". But in this context, tight isn't modifying razor, razor is modifying tight.It's a tight race. How tight? So tight that the margin is a razor-blade's thickness. (Here's a hint: try dropping one of the words and see what happens.)

But that the media repeated this across the board says a lot to me.

Now, did it say "people pick up phrases from each other" or did it say "it's time to up my medications again'?

...a sensible human who is capable of responding to anything unexpected.

It must be nice wher you live, 'cause around here the typical driver's response to anything unexpected seems to be to crash. Actually, for a lot of drivers, the response to expected things seems to be to crash as well.

Acceptance testing with your life is just not, well, acceptable.

You do realize you're doing acceptance testing of every driver around you all the time, right?

She was testifying exactly how you would expect anyone to behave in front of the bosses. She was...asking for more money, saying her job was more important than ever, and she's doing a great job. It's true in government, it's true in business, it's true in academia, it's true just about everywhere...damn few people try to talk their bosses into reducing their importance.