Over 200 University of Central Florida students admitted to cheating on a midterm exam after their professor figured out at least a third of his class had cheated. In a lecture posted on YouTube, Professor Richard Quinn told the students that he had done a statistical analysis of the grades and was using other methods to identify the cheats, but instead of turning the list over to the university authorities he offered the following deal: "I don't want to have to explain to your parents why you didn't graduate, so I went to the Dean and I made a deal. The deal is you can either wait it out and hope that we don't identify you, or you can identify yourself to your lab instructor and you can complete the rest of the course and the grade you get in the course is the grade you earned in the course."

CPerdue writes with this excerpt from the MIT arXiv blog: "The equivalence principle is one of the more fascinating ideas in modern science. It asserts that gravitational mass and inertial mass are identical. Einstein put it like this: the gravitational force we experience on Earth is identical to the force we would experience were we sitting in a spaceship accelerating at 1g. Newton might have said that the m in F=ma is the same as the ms in F=Gm1m2/r^2. ... All that changes today with the extraordinary work of Endre Kajari at the University of Ulm in Germany and a few buddies. They show how it is possible to create situations in the quantum world in which the effects of inertial and gravitational mass must be different. In fact, they show that these differences can be arbitrarily large."

jerryjamesstone writes "Everybody is into rail these days; it is the greenest way to get around next to a bike. Leonid Mulyanchik has been into it for years since before the Berlin Wall fell, since before the first Macintosh, building his own private underground Metro railway system. English-Russia says that he has been doing it with his pension, that it is all legal and approved and that he is still at it. Gizmodo calls it 'Partly the traditional, inspiring, one man against all odds type of persistence, but more the obsessive, borderline insane persistence.'" Update: 06/02 07:33 GMT by T : And if you're the type to visit Burning Man, you can actually ride a home-made monorail this summer, too.

JumpDrive writes "I have been the victim of (Visa) debit card theft. I do not know where they stole or got the number, but it was used one day on the other side of the country and the next day it was used in Europe until they cleaned out my account. I had been monitoring my account online and immediately went to the bank and filed a claim. I was told at that time it would be 3 to 5 weeks for them to investigate the claim before they could return my money. Recently I tried to make a purchase with a debit card and was told that they couldn't use the card since it wasn't a Visa or MasterCard check card; this led to a discussion of why I no longer have a Visa or MasterCard check card. Which then led to the question of 'What can be done about it?' Currently I have a separate account for debit usage for my personal safety. But I also think that those producing these check cards should be required to advertise the hazards of having one of these cards (not in small print and maybe required in advertisement of these cards, similar to what is required with pharmaceutical drugs on television) and/or that if a debit or check card is issued a separate account should be required for its use, and users informed of the issues of placing all of their money in the same account that their debit card has access to. What other precautionary measures should be required or taken?"