Pretty easily, actually. Rather than producing all our own requirements, we specialise in a particular profession, and trade for our needs in a market. That way we can get our food without having to grow it ourselves, and so we can live on far less land.

I think it's called 'civilisation'.

Ha! Alpha-double-plus FTW! Although technically, there are two cities here and I'm not actually in either of them. I'm somewhere in the surrounding urban sprawl, what would have been the outskirts before the railways came and invented the commuter.

Although I can't help but wonder who came up with that classification system. I mean, Beta-Plus? 'I'm so glad I'm a Beta. Gammas are dull and stupid, Alphas work so terribly hard, and Deltas are simply awful. Yes, I'm so glad I'm a Beta...'

That idea may include some unwarranted tactical assumptions.

Try filling the Burj Khalifa with punched cards. Total floor space of 464,511 square metres. Let each floor be three metres high, that's a volume of 1.4 million cubic metres. Taking the figures from your cited Wikipedia article, a card is 2.7 millionths of a cubic metre. I make it about 5E11 cards, which at 64 bytes per card gives us... getting on for 30 terabytes.

... Says who? The Universe can be infinite and still expanding. Or it can be finite, curved back on itself, and still expanding.

Let's try two one-dimensional analogues of our three-dimensional space. First, the finite case. Picture a clock face, and a one-dimensional circular Universe on it. The galaxies of this Universe sit at the hour marks. The Universe expands, the circle grows larger, the galaxies find themselves further apart - but there's no edge of the Universe, and no centre. If this Universe can be said to bee expanding 'into' anything, it's expanding into the future, and there's a Big Bang singularity in its past where every coordinate is the same point, there at the centre.

Now the infinite case. An infinitely long number line, with galaxies on every integer, from minus infinity through zero to plus infinity. The Universe expands, and we move every galaxy currently on number n to number 2n. This needn't involve actually picking up and moving galaxies; you can just stretch the line itself, and relabel the coordinates appropriately. The galaxies find themselves further apart - but again, there's no edge of the Universe, no centre of the Universe (oh, there's a zero, but that's an arbitrary point - you could declare anywhere to be your zero and it looks just the same), and it's still not expanding 'into' anything.

Of course our Universe has more dimensions than this, and we don't actually know what its overall geometry actually looks like - but whether finite or infinite, it's clearly expanding, and theory does not require that there be any 'edge' other than the horizon from which light has had the time to reach us, or any kind of greater hyperspace into which the Universe is expanding.

So now you know. Me, I had no idea, but I had fish and chips last night so I went for a 'more than the median but not shitloads' option. All of these figures seem rather small, though; are we missing a 'kilo' prefix here?

Ah, you don't mind atheists, as long as we shut up and let you get on with implementing your superstitious agenda for society, eh? Personally, I rather like a culture where, for instance, I can draw whatever cartoons I like, regardless of what your sacred traditions might say to the contrary. I like living in a culture where I can readily obtain contraceptives, regardless of how terribly sinful the Pope might think they are - and then proceed to use them with the consenting adult partner of my choice, whether or not I have gone through any kind of ritual or ceremony beforehand. In general I'm perfectly happy as long as Catholics and Muslims and the rest of them unobtrusively go about their business, but I am terribly offended whenever they try to impose their own peculiar rules on the rest of us. Offended, yes, and insulted.

So I'll happily go about my own business and never mention anything about whether there's a god or not, as long as you all do the same. Keep your superstitions to yourselves and you'll hear no quarrel from me.

Pretty much, actually. It's absolutely hideous, but there's not much of it and it's short-lived.

Radioactives work that way. Radioactivity comes from the decay of unstable atomic nuclei. The more frequently decay events happen, the more intense the radioactivity, and the shorter the half-life. Uranium dug up from the ground is only mildly radioactive, but stays that way for billions of years; some of the byproducts of nuclear fission are intensely radioactive but only stay that way for a matter of days, and other byproducts are of intermediate radioactivity and stay that way for millennia. A spent fuel rod is mostly still uranium, but mixed in with all kinds of other byproducts. The idea here is to extract the uranium for fresh fuel, break down the longer-lived stuff and get energy out of it by doing so, and finally end up with a small amount of waste which is viciously radioactive now, but which has a half-life so short that it's less radioactive than the original uranium we dug up after maybe a century or so.

It reduces the volume of waste dramatically, and it reduces the amount of time it has to be stored too - no more worrying about how to store it safely for ten thousand years and whether civilisation will still be around or the English language spoken and how to protect Mad Max's ignorant great-grandchildren from our wastes. Great news, right? Trouble is, it's tricky to do, and by tricky I mean expensive, so it hasn't really been done on a large scale. Especially since the last couple of decades have seen massive nuclear disarmament which has flooded the market with plutonium.

Something the matter with the N900? Apart from the battery life, anyway :-P

Actually, it was a perfectly ordinary mushroom of the normal sort of size. It only seemed like a giant mushroom because Alice, at the time, was extremely small.

When you send out zero ninja, you have transcended the art of Ninjutsu and truly mastered Zen. Your enemy may not be killed, but he will be humiliated by his recognition of your infinite superiority and come to you to learn true wisdom.

They had to install a morality device in her to prevent her flooding the Enrichment Centre with a deadly neurotoxin after she flooded the Enrichment Centre with a deadly neurotoxin. That's... pretty evil, I think.