It's not so much the 'stealing' of momentum that's required in this case, but the deflection of the path of motion by the gravitational well. Encounters with planets do both but the standard slingshot only normally uses the momentum gain as most missions have been in the plane of the ecliptic

Yes, they can do that. It is essentially an elastic collision as you say, but it doesn't have to result in the gained momentum being in the same direction as the planet's motion. Extrapolating your analogy, if you had an elastic collision between the probe and a high-latitude region of the planet (rather than at the equator) then your resulting trajectory would have a 'vertical' (meaning perpendicular to the ecliptic) component. This can be done by having your encounter with the planet you are using to gain the gravitational assist happen at a high inclination. Take a look at Voyager 2. From a quick wiki search, it's currently travelling on a trajectory 30 below the ecliptic after it's encounter with Neptune and Triton.

If you outsourced it to India then the guys who did the work wouldn't be able to apply anyway as you need to be a British citizen to get the clearance for those jobs.

$35-40k? With maths like that, sincerely doubt that 'you solved it':
£25,446 = $39,963
£31,152 = $48,924

(Using current exchange rates). Or are you one of those people who finds it easier to just lie and make up figures to prove a point and hope that no-one checks the facts themselves?

Last I heard, the voyagers are about 100-110 AUs from the sun. Is the summary incorrect or do you only need to be 40 AUs from the sun to make these measurments? In which case, why is it news now and not in the 80s/90s when they reached this distance?

It's an interesting question, but regardless of whether anyone can theoretically crack the authorisation to upload commands to the Voyagers, I believe that it's only NASA's deep space network that can actually send the signals that far to be received by the probes.

Unfortunately not. Milky way's escape velocity is approx 525km/s (wikipedia) and voyager and our solar system are moving at approx 18km/s (Monty Python Song). Unless it happens to get flung out of the galaxy by the impending collision with Andromeda in 3-5 billion years it's not going to be leaving the Milky way anytime soon. It'll just float around in the vicinity of the solar system and go around the Milky way.

Fruit bats (Megachiroptera) don't eat insects. However, all species of Microchiroptera are insetivorous, so releasing lots of them would do the job. Plus they are cute and fluffy.

I'm assuming you meant "You can't even open them...", otherwise your post doesn't make sense. Anyway, there is a free viewer to open them and view them. Runs inside IE, which isn't ideal, but works fine. I used to use it all the time.

The SSMEs needed to be reusable. J2 wasn't.

I also don't understand why they think you'll consume an entire litre of fizzy drink during a single movie. I've never seen anywhere else selling that much beverage at one time outside the Oktoberfest

When I can buy a DVD for the price of a cinema ticket + parking + snacks and when my living room is much nicer than the local cinema, it makes very little incentive to go to the cinema. The price of the DVD alone is less than two tickets excluding everything it means the only time I ever go to the cinema is when I tag along with my friends who want to see something. If I want to watch a film, I'll just wait for the DVD. Pirating it is easier and cheaper than getting the DVD so that has a large appeal apart from the bit where I have to poo in a policeman's helmet

That aside, there are still plenty of people who use iPhones who aren't that technologically literate. They won't know what server to connect to or what an exchange account is. All they know is that they have an iPhone and a Hotmail account. If there's an option in the mail app to configure an Exchange account, they won't bother. If there is one to configure a Hotmail account they'll go "Oooh, I can get my hotmail on my phone" and do it.

It'd be interesting to see how many asinine comments like this there would be on slashdot about how horrendous Hotmail is if Microsoft hadn't bought them and people judged it on its own merits, rather than ownership. I haven't used Hotmail since the mid nineties, but plenty of friends do and I haven't heard anything bad about it.

It was meaning the former "Earth-asteroid distance Earth-Moon distance".

ie, at the time of closest approach to the Earth, the asteroid is inside the Moon's orbit, is indeed closer to the Earth than it is to the moon, but not 0.5 x (mean Earth-Moon distance).