And of course all the idiots replying take the standard there is one and only one explanation to anything. People, there are often multiple reasons that something happens, and often all of them are actually valid.

They weren't looking for a hot butt, just someone willing to have their butt moulded on international television. She was already interning at M5 and got chosen because her willingness to do that.

Of Betteridge's Law?

No seems a perfectly fitting answer.

I've always been a bit worried about the response time for the stop button at near light speeds. Press the stop button and by the time the circuits have reacted, you're a few thousand light years beyond your target and have to turn around and go back.

True, but that's the choice of the station operators or the country's standard body. Some operate MPEG-4 or H.264 over DVB-T.

The station probably doesn't want to replace their encoders that they've used for satellite transmission before digital terrestrial was launched in their country.

This is incorrect. -T can carry HD channels, albeit with heavier compression of the video/audio signals. -T2 increases the channel bandwidth from 24Mb/s to 35Mb/s and allows less compressed HD channels.

Spain, Italy, France, Taiwan, Panama, Colombia all do HD over -T.

You are failing to take into account the steady decline in the global birth rate since the mid 1980s. While we are at 1.1% now, we were over 2% in the 60s and have steadily dropped from 1.6% in 1990 and will go under 1% by 2020 and hit 0.5% by 2050 at the current rates. The current prediction for an extra 2 billion is 30 years time and to reach a peak of 11 billion in the early 22nd century before beginning to drop off.

The driving forces behind 3+ children were lack of basic education, religious beliefs and poverty. As the information evolves, the first two factors are fast disappearing. People are fast gaining an understanding of the growth issues globally and are adjusting their behaviors because of that understanding.

What may require intervention are the farming processes and the distribution of foods. The calorie requirements in developed countries have dropped because of the less manual labour nature of the economies, but the calorie consumption has increased dramatically. That is something that should be rectified both for the health of the population and to increase the availability of food in areas where needed. Easy access to higher density cultivars and reversion to soil management techniques from previous centuries is also essential. This might need a breaking of the business models of food, fertilizer and seed companies, but we don't like Monsanto anyway, don't we.

There is a growth issue and a food/water issue, but it isn't an exponential issue.

For not having to pay international call costs for my parents to ask my teenage nephew what he's doing today and getting "Stuff" answers, I'll happily let the NSA try and interpret what "Stuff" really means. :)

Also, in addition to the bandwidth and generation of equipment involved, consider the range from Rosetta to the comet when the photos were taken.

One of the photos includes a |---2km---| scale marker. That means the camera is a bit further out than a studio photographer and distance reduces both the image size and amount of light reaching the camera.

Also, the amount of light at the comet location is lower than in a photographic studio, so longer exposures are needed which increase the effect of craft shake and sensor noise.

They'll be bringing in a mimeograph machine to make the copies. Oh gods, the recollections of primary school and helping the secretary run off the couple of hundred copies of the latest school raffle sheet. By hand crank.

After all, Aaron would have wanted the data to be free.

In South Africa, absentee ballots have to be applied for ahead of time, an electoral commission officer accompanied by one or more party representatives goes to the person, gives them the ballot paper and retrieves it in sealed double envelopes as soon as the person is done with it.

It is labour intensive, but it prevents trouble from happening.

About 1.02996826% of a Library of Congress. :)

Given average email size of 75kB, compressible attachments, a 5:1 compression ratio and LTO 6 uncompressed 200MB/s write speed, 18 minutes of tape would be roughly 14.8 million emails.

Hey, how did you get hold of the IPv6 address for my bathroom^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hsecurity camera system?

Signed, the janitor at St Trinian's School.