It depends on how spread out the fallout is. Spread over a hemisphere it is not a problem but if small meteorite fragments streak over a city leaving a contrail of highly radioactive fallout it may be a big problem for certain locations even if nothing significant makes it to the ground. It is also worth pointing out that the size of a nuclear device capable of shattering an asteroid worth worrying about will be extremely large and multiple such devices might be required.

Actually this is only true if it is formed through some recognizably fair and democratic process. For example if it is formed based on a hereditary concerns or an unfair and biased electoral process the public outside of the group will probably feel free to ignore it as not representing the people it claims to represent. While this may not apply here the way a governing body is formed does play a role in whether people outside it accord it any legitimacy and respect.

You forgot:

3) Scatter radioactive fallout with

Still cancer takes longer to kill you that a massive asteroid impact followed by a decade of winter so I suppose it's a win?

I don't think it matters what the laws in the UK are if the website that they are accusing of infringing their copyright is in the US where US laws apply. I think this is a case of a UK company using US law to stifle US free speech in the same way that US companies use it although to be fair it seems a far milder case than the ones you typically hear about. The easy fix would be to just remove the photograph of the front page of the paper. The article criticizing the Sunday Times would still be there for everyone to read - the photo is not really required.

If correct then that rate is far, far lower than the level of radiation in Californians. The tiny amount of potassium-40 in the human body produces 4,400 disintegrations per second. Then there are other isotopes such as carbon-14 to consider so the actual rate of decays will be even higher. In fact if we assume the average Californian has a mass of 80 kg and a density roughly equal to that of water then the decay rate per cubic metre of Californians is just under 55,000 decays/second or 6,875 times your background rate just from potassium-40.

However you typically only get about about 10% of your annual radiation exposure in the US from the potassium-40, carbon-14 etc inside your body so I expect that your background radiation estimate is on the low side.

Do you realize that there is more than one definition of 'subject'?

subject (noun) a person or thing that is being discussed, described, or dealt with.

I thought "creative geniuses" were expected to think laterally and not be confined to rigid, linear thinking? Not everything you learn at school has a special academic lesson devoted to it...which again is something a creative genius should know.

The value of a degree is in what it lets you do not in how much it costs to get it. The skills you acquire are valuable both to the individual and to society.

I utterly fail to understand this point. Your statement is as logical as arguing that governments should not fund vaccination programs because some people are allergic to vaccines and can't have them. The reason degrees should be free is the same reason why school education should be free: society as a whole benefits from having highly skilled people available for employment or even who can create new employment.

I would not go that far but I would agree that there are some degrees which are more valuable than others. However this is the great thing about making degrees free: governments can choose how many slots to fund for each program based on the need. The university then selects the best students for those funded slots. Too many english graduates then fund fewer spaces. Not enough teachers then increase the funding for education degrees etc.

This is far better than the current system where many students pick subjects for less sound reasons such as which subject they think is easiest.

You are missing the point. Yes they can afford to pay the amount but the problem is that the loan comes with interest. Someone in a job like teaching gets a reasonable but certainly not high, salary. Given that the interest rates on the load is RPI+3%. On a 36kGBP loan that's just under 2k interest per year which is 166/month. So your person paying 66/month will never, ever pay off their loan. Essentially they will have a permanent extra 9% marginal tax rate throughout their life.

Compare this to those entering a high paid job in finance. They will have a 9% marginal tax rate for a few years until their loan is paid off and then it's over. This means that the loan not only discourages graduates from taking lower paid jobs but the interest means it acts as a regressive tax where those earning less pay more.

In the previous system we had higher rates of tax for high earners and this was used, in part, to fund the university system. Not only was this clearly fairer it did not dissuade people from important jobs with lower pay scales and it reduced the grumbling about tax of those earning a lot because they could see that they had benefited from taxes.

Thanks to this video probably not anymore.

Ah but when they do you will be glad you took that pre-school computing science class won't you!

Clearly modesty was not one of the subjects you covered.

Yes they can, at least for some plastics and I would bet that if we started to run out of oil based plastics the chemists woudl start to come up with replacements for the rest as well.

That would probably be a good idea because if we had to replace all our fossil fuel plants today it would involve building a lot of nuclear fission plants.

Actually not according to the linked article. The pilots followed the correct procedure which was a slow climb with flaps open but the engine falling off the wing severed the hydraulic lines and caused a partial power failure which meant that the slats retracted on the one wing and the warning indicators both for stall and asymmetric slats did not work. The crash might have been avoidable given hindsight but I would not call it pilot error by any stretch of the imagination and again according to the Wikipedia article neither did the NTSB.

I agree that it might be easier, quicker and cheaper with a drone. However I don't really care. As a passenger I'm far more interested in whether it is just as effective as spotting problems as the human eyeballs it replaces. On the plus side images can be zoomed and you might see more detail than a human eye. On the downside the image is probably not going to be 3D and it sounds like the person taking the pictures with the drone will not be the engineer who inspects them.

In that case if you are still around then clearly the beeping did not wake you up so perhaps the sound of the exploding battery might. See, it's really just an extra safety measure.