Yes but they would be replaced by people who are actually knowledgeable as opposed to merely opinionated.

It's more likely a change in the rules and/or a change in their definition of 'misuse'. The rules for this change all the time and the same site can be blocked or unblocked (like Slashdot!) depending on the whim of the IT Director. But certainly, it's not due to a change in behaviour.

Fuck, YES. I read the original story, about the school introducing this moronic system, and could only shake my head. Attempts at total control are generally the solution proffered by lazy bureaucrats as an alternative to them doing their jobs. Here’s an idea - instead of working out ways of forcing the kids into school and keeping them there - why not work to make it compelling for them to come to school in the first place. I know, hard, right? Idiots. However, the creative (dare I say scientific) solution employed, and so quickly makes me remotely proud of our clever children. It’s nice to see the kids are far more intelligent and creative than their so-called teachers. I will have somewhat less pride when they remotely drain my bank account and I am forced to live on cast off gummi bears, but hey.

They mostly work in marketing. I believe it's a pre-requesite there.

No, it isn't.

"The end of DRM?" Nice spin. In fact it's the proposed end of anything other than DRM. If Valve have their way, the only way to play a PC game (which you bought and paid for, and should actualy own) will be to connect to Valve servers.

You know, because you should have to repeatedly prove you did not steal the product you paid for in order to keep using it. At Valve's discretion they will eventually discontinue the "service", leaving you with nothing. Have fun with that.

Holy shit, I'm a bat!

Mars has a similar axial tilt to Earth's. The fact that one hemisphere of Mars is lower than the other points to a significant impact in the early days of the solar system. Mars and Earth have very similar early histories.

Before this surprise methane discovery, Pluto was thought to be more like an icy version of our moon - something like the asteroid Ceres or Neptune's moon Triton. Now, it may be that Pluto has more in common with Saturn's moon Titan, which has a thick atmosphere of methane with a distinct orange hue. If Pluto were closer to the sun it might have a thicker atmosphere, it may even have a 'summer atompshere' as that methane goes from liquid to gas as it gets closer to the sun.

Pluto Express, due to arrive in 2015, is a flyby, and will only give us a 'snapshot' of Pluto. It would be nice to have something to observe Pluto's changing seasons over the next 200-odd years.

To be fair, the ground is exactly where those paleontologists found the mass extinction evidence. That ground-based evidence pointed to an extraterrestrial origin that had not previously been considered, but no one worked out the reason by looking up with a telescope.

I won't pretend the hypothesis was accepted immediately but once the Yucatan crater was identified (by a satellite looking down, but that's more engineering than astronomy surely?) that was pretty much the clincher.

However it is good science where so-called 'separate' disciplines start working together, though it's pretty common. The Victorian-era divisions across science become more irrelevant daily, and only persist due to government and university funding models that still use them to determine grants allocation.

You're right, sorry I was reading size rather than mass. The Moon is about 25% earth's diameter, but made of lighter material.

10% of the parent's mass as a threshhold would mean that our Moon is no longer a moon...

I thought the ending to the original Italian Job was pretty good, actually.

Not really. The detection methods currently used to find exoplanets mean that the larger and closer the planet is to its parent star, the easier it is for us to find.

As our techniques become more sophisticated, we will be able to find more planets of a comparable size to our own. Those 335 can be thought of as the 'first wave' of discovered exoplanets. Large bodies close to their parent stars. These planets are interesting for what they can tell us about how solar systems can form.

The next wave of discovered exoplanets will be smaller, say between the sizes of Venus and Neptune, and therefore far more interesting from the perspective of extrasolar life.