They made the right call at the time, given that the alternative to was to archive every tape and stack up a nontrivial fraction of the BBC's budget in a vault in preparation for applications that didn't exist.

Most media go through a period where the recording format is too valuable not to reuse (magnetic tape) or too fragile to store (nitrocellulose film, early print). Some day maybe we'll invent a way to record brain patterns, but I'm inclined to expect it'll be in a medium like defect-free carbon-hassium nanocrystals that cost $500,000 each. I don't doubt that some re-recording in whatever technology we come up with.

NASA recorded over the Moon Landing masters, at a time when they were better-funded than they have ever been. The BBC is in good company.

If they wanted to live they should have stayed on the moon.

We are living in the future.

An elegant calculator, for a more civilised age.

If the nefarious scheme you're describing seems too diabolical to believe, maybe the destruction of the tapes has nothing to do with your postulated scheme.

It's a lot easier to picture 8 million miles than 13 million kilometres.

The point of brushing (and flossing or interdental brushing) is to remove the biofilm of bacteria living on your teeth and gum margins, which:

1) Produce acids through their metabolism which dissolve your tooth enamel
2) Stop anything else from actually reaching your teeth

So, a sequel to Armageddon then.

That's what we need, another big console release where online performance is dependent on the average home console owner's broadband connection.

(I say this as a home console owner. Microsoft's decision to push dedicated servers for multiplayer gaming is one of the few things they got right in the Xbox One from the start.)

It's almost as though this research didn't come out of NASA.

This one *is* a dupe.

Exactly 243,000,050 years old, obviously.

I think that the fact that quantity can be expressed in many different ways is a pretty fundimental mathematical idea and trying to hide it from children would be a mistake. 1/6 isn't the "un-evaluated" version of 0.166..., it's exactly the same thing.

The idea is that it gives you an energy "currency" that's fungible, like current fuels, and can be easily made from whatever energy source you have on hand, unlike current fuels. Where that energy comes from is essentially a separate issue as far as hydrogen research is concerned, although the way that it was sold to the public you'd be forgiven for thinking otherwise.

There is some work on making hydrogen efficiently from solar energy and water, but that tends to get lumped with the related work that aims to make carbon-based fuels from solar energy, water, and CO2.

Advice for submitters: avoid writing while hungry, snack foods might not be the universal and inviolable constant you assume them to be when your stomach is growling.

Pies? Rolls? I'm heading into a mid-afternoon blood sugar crash here and Slashdot is not helping.