Smarter reactor designs, yes, but we have no large scale commercial breeder reactors in operation. Even in breeder reactors, you can only run so far before transuranic elements taint the fuel and prevent breeding, and you have to reprocess it to use the remainder. Every time you restart, you need some amount of fissile material to kick off the reaction, although I suppose you could use a particle accelerator instead.

Well... the bit we care about will only be around 0.7% remaining, which is coincidentally its abundance among natural uranium found in the mantle, but who's counting.

Your body does not measure a lack of oxygen. It measures an abundance of carbon dioxide. If you hyperventilate, you can hold your breath considerably longer, not because you actually have any more oxygen in your system, but because you flush out any carbon dioxide in your blood stream, and it takes longer for your body to register that it needs to breathe again.

Willing? Sure... Capable? Probably not.

I think the only thing I would have trouble with would be lobster. They scream if you do it wrong.

The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE), Engineering Guideline 18-1994. That has since been retracted and replaced with 196M-2003, which now phrases it in terms of picture height, stating you should be no more than four heights back, or roughly seven feet.

They hold their value because people place move value on them than a simple utility. A PC is for utility. A Mac is a fashion item. The equivalent era Mac is no more capable than the equivalent era PC, considering they're made with the same exact parts.

Why 32bpp? Monitors and televisions (and our eyes) only have three color channels, so you have 24-bit, or 30-bit, or 36-bit, for 8, 10, or 12 bits per channel, respectively. When you're talking commercially distributed video, it's almost always YUV420 rather than RGB. You have your one intensity channel at full resolution, and two color channels running at quarter resolution, so a cluster of four pixels shares one color. 24-bit color becomes 12bpp, 30-bit becomes 15bpp, and 36-bit becomes 18bpp. It was originally designed to allow B&W and color television to coexist on the same transmission, but was found to be a good psychovisual compression mechanism. The only time you would use 16-bit or 32-bit color is inside your graphics pipeline prior to compositing, where the three-channel image is accompanied by a fourth transparency channel.

That might have been when the average TV was 20", and standard definition. The recommendation these days is for the horizontal viewing angle to be roughly 30, which would mean you should sit roughly 6.5' back from a 42" television.

That's a very bad idea. It's common for television sets to overscan and crop the video inputs. It's hard to find one that will actually do 1:1 display.

Now back to reality, the ATSC spec was published way way back in 1995, and was accepted and standardized by the FCC just a year later, long before even the "enhanced definition" sets hit the market. An HDTV purchased 12 years ago will have a component input, and will be able to receive an analog HD signal from a modern Bluray player.

The televisions gain market share because it's a feature put into just about every half-way decent television. It's hard to get a TV these days that isn't stereo. Now, how many people actually use that feature, and how many people reluctantly have it shoved down their throat?

Why 16bpp?

Technically, it's only half that (plus your math is off somewhere). Nearly all video transmission techniques convert the color space from three color channels to an intensity and two color channels, and then quarter the resolution of those color channels. A 1920x1080 video frame will only store color information at 960x540. Even analog formats do that. With two of three channels down to a quarter the data, it averages to only 12 bits per pixel, rather than 24.

That said, the OP is still a complete dunce.

Right. We're still a long way off before those tricks stop being useful.

Did he now? I surely hope you're not employed by that IPTV/Satellite service in a technical fashion. Please tell me you're in sales or something...

Do the math. 1920 x 540 x 60 x 12 = 750Mbps. That's quite a bit higher than 18.2...

Or it's limited to around 18.2Mbps, as you just stated... It's actually typical to see the primary channel only running 12-16Mbps, with the excess used for one or more secondary channels.

When you see large chunks of missing or corrupted video, THAT is from interference or an insufficient antenna. Compression effects are things like color banding, or easily discernible macro-block boundaries, and you absolutely do see those as your scene complexity or motion increases beyond the codec's ability to handle it.