Why does it feel better to curl up in a ball when you have a stomach bug?

It seems that lying in the fetal position (curled up in a ball) has some sort of deeply comforting physical and psychological effect on people. Many people who have gone through severe trauma will go into this position. Most people also sleep in some variant of this position - lying on their side with their knees tucked up and body curled forward. People also tend to be comforted by having a thick blanket put on them. For this reason emergency workers have such blankets on hand for victims of trauma.

Even some animals respond to this - blankets are used in rehabilitating orphaned elephants to provide psychological comfort. So one reason that curling up makes you feel better could be psychological comfort.

The other thing is that curling up reduces the tension on your abdominal area. If you lay out all straight or stand up, your abdomen is being pulled taught and increasing the pressure/stimulation to your GI tract. As you probably have experienced even something usually insignificant like a waistband or seatbelt can worsen nausea. So a position that decreases stimulation in that region would help you feel better.

Why do manufacturers always exclude batteries with their products i.e. 'batteries not included?'

• Makes their product cheaper
• Gives the consumers choice about what kind of batteries they want to us
• Safer and easier to ship
• Don't have to worry about the shelf life of the product

In a Democracy, if nobody knows which candidate anyone else voted for, how do we know we can trust the results of an election?

Audit trails and exit polling.

Audit trails allow you to demonstrate that the final tally declared in the end is directly derived from the physical votes cast. This is one of the major arguments against electronic voting: electronic records can be erased and overwritten relatively easily (just look at your hard drive). You can't remove and replace paper ballots without a physical act. The ballots go somewhere, and systematically getting rid of thousands of ballots and replacing them with new ones would be much more difficult to fake than changing digital data.

Now, of course, there exist lots of countries that have exactly this problem. This is common in Africa (Zimbabwe, South Africa, Kenya) and other countries. Iraq claimed Saddam Hussein was elected with 100% of the vote in 2002. In these instances, the fraud is able to be carried out because of the oppressive and essentially autocratic regimes -- everyone knows the fraud is happening, but no one can do anything about it.

But let's assume for a second that a government does systematically change the election results. Even then, in a free country with free press, there exists a check: exit polling. News stations typically poll people as they leave a sample of polling places to see how they voted. these exit polls are how they make their predictions about who won before any votes are even counted. These exit polls are based on interactions directly between the people and the news agency -- the government is not involved. So, if a government did anything more than tilt a close election one way, it would show up as a major departure from the exit polls and prompt an investigation.

The only way for a government to systematically manipulate the results of an election would be to both manipulate the results and manipulate every single news agency reporting on the results. Given the radically different biases of the news agencies, that isn't likely to happen in most civilized countries. It's far, far cheaper and easier to manipulate elections by selectively preventing or encouraging people from voting in the first place.

How/why do old games like Ocarina of Time, a seemingly massive game at the time, manage to only take up 32mb of space, while a simple time waster like candy crush saga takes up 43mb?

A large chunk of a game's size comes from things like textures and audio files. Older games had very small, simple textures if they used them at all. In contrast, newer games tend to use high-resolution images that take dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of megabytes just by themselves.

Likewise, audio in old games was pretty simple. Older systems synthesized sounds, allowing the game to just supply some basic instructions to control them. Now, audio is typically recorded and stored with the game, making the overall size larger.

Why is a Cover Band allowed play gigs and make money, but if they upload those same songs to YouTube and try to monetize them they are breaking copyright laws?

A cover band is not allowed to make recordings of cover songs or even perform them live without paying licensing fees to the original copyright holder. However, in the case of live performance, it's the venue who will pay the fees through a performance rights organization. So if the band is performing at a venue that does its job, then they don't have to worry about the licensing issues.

For recordings (or youtube), they need to pay a standard licensing fee. The copyright holder of the original song can't demand a bigger fee or forbid the use of their song outright, they have to accept the standard licensing fee.