Errr no. The Daily Mail is owned by a different media magnate... Lord Rothermere.

Nice try at blaming Rupert Murdoch - owner of hugely nationalistic media in Australia, US and UK but a man who sold his nationality to expand his business empire, but the Daily Mail is a different type of nut, EVERYTHING in the world is either a) Hugely bad or b) Hugely good. Often in the same issue of the Mail a single product will both cause AND cure cancer.

Only real surprise in the article is that it didn't mention how this would impact house prices.

Before people bleat about this being about poor MS security do remember how many dumb folks there are out there. Lots of attacks come from dumb folks using things like Bittorrent and then executing something that they really shouldn't do without having decent virus protection on their machine.

So good on Microsoft for doing this, yes they also need to clean up their security act, which they have been doing, but also coping with the dumb people who buy their products is a decent thing to do.

but 37 km is nowhere near space in my book. My personal boundary for space is the end of the Mesosphere. Official boundaries oscillate between 80 and 130 km.

Now here is a person with serious personal boundary issues.

Things in orbit STAY in orbit unless they somehow lose all of their kinetic energy.

Nope, they have to have ENOUGH velocity (Kinetic energy is about the energy required to get it to a given speed) at the right angle in order to counteract the acceleration of the object towards the planet. If the velocity (a vector) isn't right then it will either move out of the orbit into a further orbit (or even escape) if it is too fast or it will fall towards the planet if too slow (as inner orbits require faster velocities). Things do not stay in orbit if they aren't moving fast enough. If an object was stationary (not geo-stationary) with respect to the earth then it would fall back to earth in the same way as a ball when thrown up comes back down.

If you through a ball hard enough STRAIGHT UP then it could escape the Earth's gravity well, if you through it at the right angle (lets say 45 degrees for arguements sake) and at the right speed then you could indeed put that ball into orbit.

Gravity is an acceleration towards.

Temperature gradients indicate the amount of energy in a given area and various pieces of physics talk about how things will shift from high to low energy areas over time, I assume that this is what they are getting at. I just understood the old stuff (while knowing it was clearly wrong), I don't understand the new stuff yet!

Why does the gravitational effects of a gas disk around a star cause inward migration?

Throw a ball up... it comes down. This is gravity. The "base state" for gravity is everything sticking in the centre. Now when something has the right velocity this acceleration towards the centre just causes it to form an orbit around the body.

However given that gasses expand to fill up available space its very hard to have a stable orbit of gas moving at a constant velocity and thus obtaining an orbit. Gasses just don't behave like solids so it doesn't work like that. The expectation would be that as a gas spreads some of it will get pulled in and over time this "some" would become "all".

Simply put Security is a standard Risk Management job, the risk of the problem occurring against the cost of preventing it. This then includes the cultural requirements for risk avoidance and the practices to ensure that.

Now will someone tell me why I should trust someone to tell a business person how to do the IT Risk Management who worked at a bank whose major failing was in Risk Management.

Isn't that like asking an Enron accountant to teach you ethics?

Sorry folks but the US airport system was designed for a time when there was no threat of terrorism and planes were basically just a fast Greyhound solution. Having a single Exit (as is common at most European airports) which means a single guard can stop people entering means that its extremely rare to have this happen at a European airport. This is the "advantage" of having airports that are primarily designed for international travel and so the exit is where customs also resides.

Crap security, appalling immigration staff and an inefficiency of process that is so bad that someone must have sat down and designed it deliberately.

So I disagree with the much more educated writer in the article. It really isn't hard to fix, its something that most other first world countries have done as a core part of their airport design.

US Security as embodied by the department of Homeland security is a complete joke at every single level, from not listening to intelligence from abroad to woeful and officious security at airports. It really is a George W Bush of a department.

Even if they did it with telepaths or clarivoyants it would still be an invasion of privacy.

Err no it wouldn't, that would be just a waste of tax-payers money on a load of mumbo jumbo that doesn't work.

BIG difference between a technology that works (thermal imaging, wire taps, etc) against those that don't (astrology, divining, clairvoyants). Its like saying there is no difference between a massive super computer and a cardboard box with the word "computer" scribbled on it with wax crayon.

Now in order to get lynched I'm going to start with a statement

I don't care if they put these restrictions on

But I'll add a caveat...

As long as I can play it on any device that I own with only a single payment

My ideal these days would be to just buy a license (and I use the term deliberately) and for them to store the content in their cloud and for me (in a Steam type way) to then be able to activate that content on my various different devices. If I could get rid of all my DVDs and have a single, secure, backed up place where my devices can connect and download the content for local playing then I'd be much happier.

Otherwise I'm not playing. I don't want physical copies, I want stuff on disk and in the cloud, and if they don't do it for me then I'm already doing it for myself.

Its the sound of the patent system beginning to crash down. RIght now there are two choices

1) Take the fundamentally broken US system and roll it out across the world
2) Take the rest of the worlds approach that software can't be patented and roll it out to the UK

The scary thing is that even with judgements like this and the patent trolls out there we are actually seeing the likes of Microsoft push for option 1.

Patents will be the death of innovation if the system continues in this way, particularly if the US judgements are assessed at insane levels of cost. If Microsoft had known about this patent when starting the development they'd have bought the company for less than this judgement.