News for Nerds. Nerds like editing stuff.

I read it. It's pretty, exploratory, well worth a read.

The camera only changed the universe if we are in a simulation with lazy evaluation (things are extrapolated and created to be as they should exist when we look at them) or or if something like quantum superposition applies on a macro-level (the observed matter's state is changed based on our observation of it).

The camera didn't change the universe, it changed the *known* universe--made us a little less ignorant. For millenia mankind expanded its knowledge of places by travelling to them. That has now become prohibitive for almost every place in the known universe.

The easiest stuff is done. We still need to explore the oceans and the solar system, where travel is quite inefficient but not utterly prohibitive.

We also need to develop defense against world-killers. Biological, nuclear, and simple kinetic energy.

And the big hump after that should be interstellar exploration. Multigenerational, multicentury.

We'll need to figure out relatively stable world government and economy before that happens, so give us another four to twelve centuries, I'd say.

The team they have working on this is excellent, the idea is promising, the reviews are great, and the advertising is good. Looks like a solid win. If they have good patents on it, they should be able to control a large and growing market 5-10 years out.

It's more of a continuum in the US. A student's history suing his school is only going to help him if he was suing them when they were doing something very wrong, the admissions committee at the school he applied to believes that, and the school he's applying to is rich enough that they can risk a small lawsuit or two.

So if you sue your high school because they wouldn't let you play on a men's sports team because you were gay, for example, Harvard and Yale and a few dozen of the top schools would definitely count that as a major plus, whereas many small private schools struggling to make ends might well count it as a risk they were unwilling to take.

Yes, it *sounds* like that, if you don't remember the constitution and due process parts. This is about which judge is able to issue a search warrant, *not* about whether the police have met the requirements for a search warrant based on probable cause (or falling within a few exceptions, like border searches).

One of the images they've recovered literally says "HEY".

No, really.

Search warrants are still subject to constitutional requirements of reason and due process; this is a procedural rule independent of that.

It will allow a judge to issue the warrant even if the FBI or police are not sure what judicial district it's happening in. It's important to let a magistrate judge approve a warrant on that basis, because the current rule 41(b) does not provide for it except in terrorism cases. So if you have someone selling hard drugs online, for example, but the government can't tell whether they are located inside the United States or not, this provides a way for them to get a warrant to search.

See the proposed rule (from last November) on page 111 of http://www.uscourts.gov/uscour...

The old one is here: http://www.law.cornell.edu/rul...

And isn't it racist to get rid of the blackberries?

All of these are things a kid should come across while growing up in a few parts of the world.

Acorn is an especially disappointing word to lose--suddenly all these things falling from the sky don't have a word. We just live in a world where things fall from the sky and are undefined.

Minnows are a bit strange to lose because it's a basic fish, for a pet or for feeding to pets or for following. But I suppose you could always learn the word when you got the pet.

Finally, did they get rid of blackberries because it was racist?

There are lots of legitimate reasons why they could do it. Ultimately I'm sure it was a small part of a larger strategy to do something community-relations related on page 25 of a powerpoint presentation.

Many schools have a system where students submit papers through an online submission system that checks their papers against other papers in a database for plagiarism. Personally I find it incredibly offensive and fought successfully against such a system when I was in undergrad, because it assumes that a student is guilty then runs a check to make sure he isn't.

But regardless of the ethics or morality of the process, it *relies* on the vendor profiting from each submitted paper, in that each submitted paper grows its database of papers. The database is then cross-referenced against new submitted papers to look for plagiarism.

So if companies are prohibited from profiting from the information, it may be tricky to have this business model survive.

You don't understand the context. I am not saying that every 4-year university ("college" over here) is elite, but rather that by focusing on 2-year colleges, this bill does not subsidize the elite schools, which are generally liberal (left). As a result, it may have a slightly better chance of gaining conservative (right) support if the narrative around it is drawn in a certain way.

One of the things that some people on the American right dislike is the ideas of the people on the American left who come out of the country's elite colleges, and the feeling is somewhat mutual.

I don't know--it's community colleges, which should be relatively appealing to Republicans who like supporting hard workers. Republicans hate social welfare programs, but really like the *image* of the hardworking American. By sticking with community colleges rather than going for the elite schools, this may actually have some chance of getting Republican support.

In this case, it doesn't matter if they're Republicans or Democrats. AT&T is a major purchaser of votes in Congress. This has no chance of passing. The people sponsoring it know that and are still doing it so they can campaign on it.

In other words, it's a dog-and-pony show.

It is beneath the dignity of the slashdot front page.

No, really.