The Daily Mail

'Why is it that the Daily Mail is vociferous in support of penalties for certain crimes, but not so much for others (phone hacking)? '

You have to remember the same deranged moral compass that once had the Mail printing "Hurrah for the Blackshirts" has driven them on to the ideological rocks of the 1950s when everyone loved the Queen, there were no beastly foreigners around, everyone went to church and Europe could still be cut off by fog in the Channel.

There was a death penalty in the 1950s so we need it back. And only nice proper people had telephones back then and they'd never dream of listening to someone else's messages, so why the fuss now?

At a guess

The plastic used by LEGO might not be capable of withstanding the heat, cold and radiation Juno is going to experience.

But I'm with you on wanting a set for myself (LEGO is far too good for children)

Well if you're going to ask

http://santoki.files.wordpress.com/2007/01/bush_golf2.jpg

Debt ceiling

A dodgy bloke with a fag hanging from his lip comes round and clamps the rocket.

Good point

And the engines on this beast happen to be Russian, originally developed for the N1 super rocket of the 1960s.

Thank-you Conservatives

The UK government encouraged companies to drill our side North Sea as quickly as they could with the result that the UK sector is the fastest oil producing region ever brought on stream. It is also now the one declining the fastest.

But for a while it was nice, all that money covered up the collapse of our manufacturing industry and paid for millions to be put on to long term benefits.

The Norwegians sensibly decided to manage their oil production through Statoil with the government pension pot taking the proceeds. The result being that not only does Norway still have lots of oil under the sea, but it is sitting on half a TRILLION dollars of assets that will keep on generating income when the wells run dry.

That's a big job

Where do you start?

The ISS is in an inclined orbit, geostationary requires one aligned with the equator. Changing inclination is a big job,

About half of the energy used to lift a kilo to geostationary orbit is used getting it into low orbit, the remainder is used in the transfer to the higher orbit. So take whatever energy its been to assemble the ISS and double it.

You'd then have to contend with the fact the ISS would lie outside the inner Van Allen Belt and would be exposed to more radiation and necessitate its crews being exposed to a healthy dose of whatever the Sun coughed up a few days ago.

And finally, we don't have any manned vessels that can get there.

It should definitely be inspired by the lovely Ms. Lohan

And come without any undercarriage.

Funding

Why isn't Jeremy Hunt's best friend at BSkyB being tapped to help fund the service from his massive tax-free income?

Oh right, I forgot, Jeremy will need a job when his glittering ministerial career comes to an end.

Seriously?

As ITV's regional news areas get ever larger (The West now reaches from the Isles of Scilly to somewhere near Gloucester), to offset the cost of programming, Jeremy Hunt is trying to reverse the process by sucking money out of the BBC. He really is a useless spoonerism isn't he?

Not sure it's genuine

James Murdoch looks less plasticky in the photo than in real life.

Depends how you measure it

'How much has the average global temperature risen in the past two decades?'

Roughly 0.25 - 0.3 C since 1990.

Here's a good capsule summary with lots of plots:

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/

Mars and Venus

You won't be too surprised to know that temperature records for both planet are patchy.

For Venus, well we really have a very primitive understanding of the Venusian atmosphere and how it circulates heat. It is about 100 times the mass of the Earth, so we do know it holds a huge amount of heat and changes very slowly. A Japanese probe which would have performed long term measurements of the atmosphere failed to enter Venusian orbit in 2010. At the moment there are no probes planned to do that task.

We have better records for Mars going back to Viking in the mid 1970s. On a planet wide scale the atmosphere has cooled noticeably since Viking which arrived at the end of a long period of planet-scaled dust storms. The storms served to warm the atmosphere and probably pushed temperature above trend.

There was a large retreat of the Southern Polar ice cap on Mars from 2001 to (IIRC) 2005, but this was not seen elsewhere on the planet. It is thought this was a regional effect caused by dark dust being carried from equatorial regions towards the pole. The dust absorbed heat and melted the ice. But even this is uncertain as the Southern Cap is very thin, some years it disappears entirely, others it persists.

It's not volcanoes

'The fact is that there are 13 active volcanoes at this time, spewing out millions of tons of acknowledged greenhouse gases and dust and no one is tying this recent hot spell to that primary contributing factor.'

That'd be because none of the eruptions going on right now are large enough to have a significant warming or cooling effect I expect. I don't think there's been an eruption over VEI 5 for nearly 20 years and no overall increase in the number of eruptions in that period, so there doesn't even seem to be a correlation (let alone a causation) between them and recent global temperature trends.

Volcanoes 0.3 Gt CO2 pa. Humans 29 Gt CO2 pa.

Ooooh good call

We should rename the whole Plutonian system with Rupert at the centre orbited by James, Rebekah, Andy and Call Me Dave.

Pluto jnr. obviously

Since the planet is obviously named after the Disney character ;)

Going classical on astronomy's ass; perhaps Alecto, daughter of Pluto (the god, not the dog)?

Alternatively

Take the bottom model, DON'T put Windows 7 on it and you have a very nice Media PC.

This is a tempting upgrade to my G4 Mac Mini which has been a faithful EyeTV, VLC media box for some time now.

Fairey vanished

Thanks to the unique way in which the British government has always managed to bugger up our industries, in 1960 Fairey was forcibly merged with Westland along with Saunders-Roe and the helicopter division of Bristol Aeroplane.

Westland not only had their own helicopter designs but licensed technology from the Americans. The rotodyne was dead in their hands, but they held all the IP.

Antigravity

'Doesn't fall down' = antigravity.

Well it does in my Wile E Coyote Beginners Book of Physics Fun.

Hacking - I don't think that word means what you think it means

That lexicographic train has long since left the station.

The word 'hacking' now means any attempt to break into a computerised system no matter how it is done. It joins words like 'nice', 'garble', 'brave' and 'artificial' in having dramatically changed their meaning with time.

Give up, the battle is lost.

James Murdoch

Born in Wimbledon. He at least was once a British citizen. Anyone know if he ever got round to renouncing it?

Feel his collar next time he arrives

I'm sure an imaginative judge could say the Murdochs are persons of interest to a police investigation and put a warrant out for their arrest next time they feel obliged to grace us with their presence.

Alternatively, whilst he's here, Rupert could go down to a police station of his own accord and help the rozzers with their enquiries into just when he found out about the phone hacking allegations and that his son had been paying hush money to victims in contravention of British and American law.

'There is no all-you-can-eat-Burger-King on the dark side of the moon.'

There isn't?????

[puts Moon landing plans* back in the drawer]

* hugely detailed:

1: get to Moon

2: Land

Pure bloody genius

If you wrap it with gaffer tape it will be even stronger.