Frank Burly (4247955), said:

And it's a good thing only the police had weapons in this situation. The photographer went through the legal process and won. If he had started a gun battle, he would have been shot dead and never vindicated.

It is very unlikely that the police officer was armed. UK police are rarely armed, and there's almost no reason why a policeman, such as in this case and in this location, would be carrying a gun.

In general, there is no sole arbiter of what words, grammar or syntax is English. English is largely defined by common usage.

The Oxford English Dictionary, and other popular dictionaries or encyclopedia may well be used as supporting evidence for how we use English, but I certainly don't look to the Associated Press, as reported by ABC News, as a strong basis for what I should be doing with my speech and writing.

The original 6502 certainly had no HALT instruction (or similar variant). I don't believe there's any way to stop it listening for an NMI (Non-Maskable Interrupt), although obviously a "normal" maskable interrupt is trivially blocked by setting the IRQ disable bit in the status register.

Not to mention you'd also destroy pretty much every non-military (ie very seriously rad-hardened) satellite which didn't have the Earth between it and the nuclear device.

So, a large area of Earth based elecronics destroyed, and even if you've managed to avoid that, no communications or Earth observation satellites to aid in recovery.

(...and yes, most satellites are built with rad-hard components, but they're not designed to withstand an EMP, which requires substantially more shielding).

Across town could be 20 miles away in London. On the other side of the Thames is very likely to have it's power and data coming from completely independent systems, even a different power station and over a different part of the national grid.

Since BT was historically the only telecoms provider, even now they are plenty big enough to easily be in a position to have multiple independent data feeds, and if they all fail, nothing else in the capital is working anyway, so a DC's survival would be a minor issue.

A six hour drive from London going North would almost put you in Scotland, and in the other direction, you would have run out of land, and be well on your way to Paris if you crossed the Channel.

gmack said:
Actually the quote from Ecclesiastes is "The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil." The missing word is quite significant. For some reason it's one of the most often misquoted scriptures.

...and is apparently often misattributed as well, since that quote comes from Timothy 6:10, not Ecclesiastes.