They have an agenda, fine, that doesn't mean everyone has to preach it for them also.
Wow. What a hate-filled, ignorant propaganda piece. I mean, seriously...
Judge Napoleon Jones said in his 2003 ruling the Boy Scouts are a religious organization with a "religious purpose" because adult leaders and youth members are required to believe in a "formal deity" and to swear duty to God.
Sounds reasonable to me. You don't need to back a specific domination to be a religious organization; any organization that would exclude atheists and/or polytheists clearly has its own religious agenda, and government support of such an organization is clearly unconstitutional, and rightly so[1].
The ACLU want to force the BSA to welcome professing homosexuals and even to recruit gay Scout leaders.
Yes. Practicing discrimination against homosexuals is unlawful, not to mention morally repugnant. I'm not surprised the ACLU wants to stop this.
They'd also like to erase the mention of "duty to God".
Yep. Right there with them on that one. If this organisation wants to receive any form of state support, it has to openly accept people of all religious beliefs, including atheists and polytheists for whom this statement would be a violation of their own religious beliefs. If it doesn't want to do that, the ACLU see it as their job to stop it from receiving any form of state support, as is their legal right.
But then, it's not surprising that a group that embraces NAMBLA would be tied up in knots by the Boy Scouts, an organization grounded in a traditional morality, promoting faith, family, and self-reliance. Such old-fashioned American "bigotry" seems infinitely more repulsive to the ACLU that the depravities of child sexual abuse.
NAMBLA is a political, campaigning organisation. We may find what they are campaigning for repugnant, and I'm sure most ACLU members do to. But we also believe that NAMBLA's members right to _say_ whatever they want to say is critical. The "bigotry" referred to above is discrimination against homosexuals ("traditional morality" in the words of the article) and discrimination against those whose religious beliefs contradict those of Christianity ("promoting faith"). This bigotry is actively pursued by the BSA. NAMBLA, as an organisation, does not sexually abuse children. Many of its members, AIUI, while they would _like_ to do so, have never done so either. The organisation exists only to spread the word about how these people want to change the law, a perfectly legal activity, and one that is protected by the US constitution.
This is why ACLU attorneys and their allies are working furiously to force the Boy Scouts to accept scoutmasters who engage in homosexual behavior
That'll be because homosexuals have a right not to be discriminated against on the basis of their sexuality. It's a basic civil liberty, which the Boy Scouts have repeatedly attempted to subvert.
despite studies showing that those who engage in such behavior are more likely to become pedophiles than those who don't.
Studies say that black people are more likely to commit crime than white people. Perhaps we should send them all away somewhere they can't get access to us law-abiding people to make sure we're safe from them. This is the same logic that this article is using.
Behind the blitzkrieg against the Boy Scouts is an essential conflict of interest: The ACLU is paving the legal way for an atheistic, libertine society, which puts them at cross-purposes with the God-fearing, self-disciplined kids who help old ladies across the street.
No, the ACLU is working to protect the constitutional rights of Ame
Sure... We got to this point by only reading the misleading Slashdot summaries rather than the actual patent, and thus believe that it's a patent on something nature created.
Err... this WIPO article on the patents in question claim that the holders have patented an "isolated DNA coding for a BRCA-1 polypeptide", which certainly sounds like something nature created to me.
Something called an Expresso Book Machine is coming down the line, and it's going to cause a revolution too. Print on Demand caused a revolution as well.
I wouldn't really call the results of PoD a revolution, at least not in terms of fiction publishing (which, at least tacitly, is the topic at hand -- both Doctorow and LeGuin are fiction authors). PoD books are too expensive for mainstream purchasers to consider. While a typical novel will set you back around £7 ($10), a typical PoD novel would be more like £13 ($20) (e.g. most of the stuff here). From what I've heard about Espressoo Book Machine it's likely to suffer from the same issue... you'll be paying around 50-100% over the odds to purchase a book from it. They currently have the catalogue of Lightning Source, a PoD printer, and are I believe selling the books for the same (overinflated) cover prices that you'd pay to order one from Lightning Source.
As far as I can tell, the people who call themselves "the creative industries" are mostly recycling folk tunes and Shakespearean stories, and that's on a good day. True creativity happens in other fields, like, oh, computers, engineering, and science.
And, of course, piracy. It's amazing how creative we can get when faced with a new DRM technique...
I think most people are slightly missing the point here: it isn't shocking that prime numbers follow this distribution. It is, as you say, a fairly obvious consequence of the prime number theorem. The point is this: the authors have designed a new statistical distribution as a slight modification of the Benford's Law distribution. Among other things, first digits of prime numbers fit this distribution. The focus of the story is wrong.
I am admittedly not a mathematician, but I do have a good understanding of economics and finance, and I am not seeing how a pattern found in prime numbers could have any application to stock market analysis.
The fact that the pattern has been found in prime numbers is irrelevant to this; the interesting fact is that the pattern should also turn up in any sequence of numbers generated by multiplying the previous number in the sequence by a randomly-generated number that is on average proportional to the previous number raised to the power of some constant. Stock market prices are known to follow a distribution very much like this (where the constant is close to, but not exactly one). This is an improvement on Benford's Law, currently used in stock market analysis, which is equivalent to this new distribution except with the constant set to one. Being able to tweak the constant slightly might provide some slightly improved analyses.
Sweep out the half dozen networks in our cars and replace them with an open, Internet-based platform.
Most vehicles have just two networks, one for components inside the cabin and one for the rest of the vehicle. Both are implemented with hardware that's way too primitive to cope with IP. They're completely datagram-based services whose primary requirement is to be able to cope with a large amount of line noise, hence the protocols are slow (typically 250Kb/s or thereabouts). Opening these networks up to internet access gains nothing, except perhaps the ability for a hacker to remotely disable your car while you're driving it.
The result will be two versions of software. One will be priced the same as today, with a detailed license agreement with you ultimately giving up those rights
The purpose of the law would be to prevent license agreements taking those rights away. You already have them by default anyway (google "implied warranty of merchantability").
As to the moronic comment about the car thief, learn the difference between civil and criminal law and then come back, OK?
We're talking about civil law. In the car thief example, the car thief has committed a criminal act for which he may (or may not) be prosecuted, but in doing so has caused damage (e.g. by breaking the car window); this is a tort, and as such can be recovered in a civil case.
For the PS2, it was much the same, except that it had then gained Grand Theft Auto (yes, I know it came to the PC and 360 later, but by then it really was a one horse race).
You seem to misremembering. GTA was released on PC first, and PS_1_ several months later. There was no xbox release.
Exactly, every hardware vendor knows that exclusive titles can mean the customer buys more than one console if a game they REALLY want is only available one the one they don't currently have
OTOH, timed exclusivity like this one (the other platforms will get the game within 6 months, apparently) are less likely to have this effect. I don't know about you, but there are few games I want enough that I'd shell out for a new console just to be able to get 'em 6 months earlier.
Cheaper would be to buy a mod chip and import the US version. (I'm not a big console user these days, but I assume this is still possible).
That quote in the story is way out of context. Ulrich's words were:
Any change will negatively impact well designed architectures for the sole benefit of this embedded crap.
Which is, of course, utter bollocks, as the change could have been wrapped in #ifdef _ARM... #endif, at which point it would only have effected "this embedded crap".
Did you actually read #3? strfry() is a joke function, an silly Easter egg that had been included in Glibc since time immemorial and unfortunately cannot be removed for fear of breaking compatibility.
Anyone with half a brain can see that fixing "bugs" in ancient Easter eggs is a waste of developers' time. If I were in Ulrich Drepper's position, my response would be similar to his, but with more insults.
Funny, the function's man page doesn't say it's a joke. Nor does it warn developers that the function is deprecated. As long as this is a documented, non-deprecated function _it should work_. And when you have somebody submit a patch to fix a potential issue with it, you don't insult them. That's just good manners.
I called my first subroutine with a family-owned thumper. It was a small one, 40 metres or so... But once I hooked it, it was smooth sailing all the way to the sietch!
I think, perhaps, you need to lay off the spice for a bit, OK?
On the other hand one can observe the rate of brain tumors among train drivers. (In countries with fully electrified railways systems, of course).
You can, but the studies involve very few cases and are therefore very cautious in drawing conclusions: "For brain tumor (astrocytoma), the observed relative risk was close to one"; "95% CI: 1.2, 21.2". It looks like there is a small effect in this case, although it should be noted that the exposure to magnetism of the subjects in the second study there was over 100 times higher than exposure in the 200-metres-from-HT-power-line scenario the OP was talking about, which is I believe in the order of 100 times higher itself than mobile phone masts (a topic you hint at in your post).
Yes, there is some evidence that magnetic fields can have health effects, I'll admit it. But the evidence is overstated and the risks exagerated repeatedly by people like the original poster who seem to be spreading anti-electricity FUD for all I can see (probably not intentionally; few people have done the research and read the reports here).
And interestingly enough, all those studies were funded by companies in the power/radio/telecom/mobile industries
Citation please. The only one I see any overt link to such a company is actually the one most favourable to the OP's position. I'll happily ignore this paper; the rest of my point still stands.
You're skipping a step, the purchaser will most likely contact the seller before pursuing legal action. If they do, the seller will point out how they never said it was an artifact. This will make the seller far less likely to actually contact a lawyer and find out that it doesn't matter.
I'm assuming a purchaser who understands their legal rights. In this case, they'll realise that nothing the vendor says _after_ the purchase is made is relevant to whether the contract was misrepresented or not.
is scraping for 1.6 million, they might as well give it away, becasue there not going to be here in a year anyways.
If they're in that kind of financial trouble, they're not legally allowed to give it away. A company that is expecting to be liquidated must not give away assets, because technically from the moment it is considered likely that liquidation will occur those assets effectively belong to the creditors.
Do you even think about what you are saying? If that where true we would all be powering our devices from radio signal. You are saying 50K watts of power can power infinite devices, ir be broad cast to an infinite amount of radios with degrading the signal.
Inverse square law prevents that without having to speculate that receivers diminish the signal. The energy density over any area is never greater than the power put into the transmitter multiplied by the length of time over which its transmissions can be received in the area in question, so for any given area the total energy you can receive in that area is less than the total energy transmitted. The smaller the area, the smaller the amount of energy you can receive. Receivers cannot overlap, so there is no possibility of receiving more energy than is transmitted, even without taking into account effects receivers have upon each other.
Slashdot Mirror
I have never seen a proper legal business that will buy PC games, much less sell them back to the general public.
Where can I find such a place? I would much rather support local business than pirate.
Don't know about locally to you, but I have a CEX nearby: http://www.cex.co.uk/products/gaming/pc%20gaming/
And a good example of why I DON'T donate money to the ACLU
http://www.stoptheaclu.com/archives/2006/02/11/aclu-and-lesbians-attack-boyscouts-in-9th-circuit/
They have an agenda, fine, that doesn't mean everyone has to preach it for them also.
Wow. What a hate-filled, ignorant propaganda piece. I mean, seriously...
Judge Napoleon Jones said in his 2003 ruling the Boy Scouts are a religious organization with a "religious purpose" because adult leaders and youth members are required to believe in a "formal deity" and to swear duty to God.
Sounds reasonable to me. You don't need to back a specific domination to be a religious organization; any organization that would exclude atheists and/or polytheists clearly has its own religious agenda, and government support of such an organization is clearly unconstitutional, and rightly so[1].
The ACLU want to force the BSA to welcome professing homosexuals and even to recruit gay Scout leaders.
Yes. Practicing discrimination against homosexuals is unlawful, not to mention morally repugnant. I'm not surprised the ACLU wants to stop this.
They'd also like to erase the mention of "duty to God".
Yep. Right there with them on that one. If this organisation wants to receive any form of state support, it has to openly accept people of all religious beliefs, including atheists and polytheists for whom this statement would be a violation of their own religious beliefs. If it doesn't want to do that, the ACLU see it as their job to stop it from receiving any form of state support, as is their legal right.
But then, it's not surprising that a group that embraces NAMBLA would be tied up in knots by the Boy Scouts, an organization grounded in a traditional morality, promoting faith, family, and self-reliance. Such old-fashioned American "bigotry" seems infinitely more repulsive to the ACLU that the depravities of child sexual abuse.
NAMBLA is a political, campaigning organisation. We may find what they are campaigning for repugnant, and I'm sure most ACLU members do to. But we also believe that NAMBLA's members right to _say_ whatever they want to say is critical. The "bigotry" referred to above is discrimination against homosexuals ("traditional morality" in the words of the article) and discrimination against those whose religious beliefs contradict those of Christianity ("promoting faith"). This bigotry is actively pursued by the BSA. NAMBLA, as an organisation, does not sexually abuse children. Many of its members, AIUI, while they would _like_ to do so, have never done so either. The organisation exists only to spread the word about how these people want to change the law, a perfectly legal activity, and one that is protected by the US constitution.
This is why ACLU attorneys and their allies are working furiously to force the Boy Scouts to accept scoutmasters who engage in homosexual behavior
That'll be because homosexuals have a right not to be discriminated against on the basis of their sexuality. It's a basic civil liberty, which the Boy Scouts have repeatedly attempted to subvert.
despite studies showing that those who engage in such behavior are more likely to become pedophiles than those who don't.
Studies say that black people are more likely to commit crime than white people. Perhaps we should send them all away somewhere they can't get access to us law-abiding people to make sure we're safe from them. This is the same logic that this article is using.
Behind the blitzkrieg against the Boy Scouts is an essential conflict of interest: The ACLU is paving the legal way for an atheistic, libertine society, which puts them at cross-purposes with the God-fearing, self-disciplined kids who help old ladies across the street.
No, the ACLU is working to protect the constitutional rights of Ame
Sure... We got to this point by only reading the misleading Slashdot summaries rather than the actual patent, and thus believe that it's a patent on something nature created.
Err... this WIPO article on the patents in question claim that the holders have patented an "isolated DNA coding for a BRCA-1 polypeptide", which certainly sounds like something nature created to me.
Something called an Expresso Book Machine is coming down the line, and it's going to cause a revolution too. Print on Demand caused a revolution as well.
I wouldn't really call the results of PoD a revolution, at least not in terms of fiction publishing (which, at least tacitly, is the topic at hand -- both Doctorow and LeGuin are fiction authors). PoD books are too expensive for mainstream purchasers to consider. While a typical novel will set you back around £7 ($10), a typical PoD novel would be more like £13 ($20) (e.g. most of the stuff here). From what I've heard about Espressoo Book Machine it's likely to suffer from the same issue... you'll be paying around 50-100% over the odds to purchase a book from it. They currently have the catalogue of Lightning Source, a PoD printer, and are I believe selling the books for the same (overinflated) cover prices that you'd pay to order one from Lightning Source.
They must only be counting out of the less than 1% of net traffic that isn't porn.
Why would you think any more than 50% of online porn accesses are legal?
As far as I can tell, the people who call themselves "the creative industries" are mostly recycling folk tunes and Shakespearean stories, and that's on a good day. True creativity happens in other fields, like, oh, computers, engineering, and science.
And, of course, piracy. It's amazing how creative we can get when faced with a new DRM technique...
Prime numbers follow a logarithmic curve!!
Film at 11.
Old?
What's new is the derivation of the distribution of first digits of values on such curves, of which prime numbers are far from the only one.
I think most people are slightly missing the point here: it isn't shocking that prime numbers follow this distribution. It is, as you say, a fairly obvious consequence of the prime number theorem. The point is this: the authors have designed a new statistical distribution as a slight modification of the Benford's Law distribution. Among other things, first digits of prime numbers fit this distribution. The focus of the story is wrong.
I am admittedly not a mathematician, but I do have a good understanding of economics and finance, and I am not seeing how a pattern found in prime numbers could have any application to stock market analysis.
The fact that the pattern has been found in prime numbers is irrelevant to this; the interesting fact is that the pattern should also turn up in any sequence of numbers generated by multiplying the previous number in the sequence by a randomly-generated number that is on average proportional to the previous number raised to the power of some constant. Stock market prices are known to follow a distribution very much like this (where the constant is close to, but not exactly one). This is an improvement on Benford's Law, currently used in stock market analysis, which is equivalent to this new distribution except with the constant set to one. Being able to tweak the constant slightly might provide some slightly improved analyses.
Code this have cryptographical uses? IANAMOG, but I know primes play a role in many crypto schemes.
The obvious thing is that it may speed up heuristic prime number generation, which would enable us to produce larger keys more easily.
Sweep out the half dozen networks in our cars and replace them with an open, Internet-based platform.
Most vehicles have just two networks, one for components inside the cabin and one for the rest of the vehicle. Both are implemented with hardware that's way too primitive to cope with IP. They're completely datagram-based services whose primary requirement is to be able to cope with a large amount of line noise, hence the protocols are slow (typically 250Kb/s or thereabouts). Opening these networks up to internet access gains nothing, except perhaps the ability for a hacker to remotely disable your car while you're driving it.
The result will be two versions of software. One will be priced the same as today, with a detailed license agreement with you ultimately giving up those rights
The purpose of the law would be to prevent license agreements taking those rights away. You already have them by default anyway (google "implied warranty of merchantability").
As to the moronic comment about the car thief, learn the difference between civil and criminal law and then come back, OK?
We're talking about civil law. In the car thief example, the car thief has committed a criminal act for which he may (or may not) be prosecuted, but in doing so has caused damage (e.g. by breaking the car window); this is a tort, and as such can be recovered in a civil case.
I played Ghostbuster on the Commodore 64 when it first came out. No way in heck will that ever be AAA title. :P
Also suspect there's no way in hell this new version will be as good.
For the PS2, it was much the same, except that it had then gained Grand Theft Auto (yes, I know it came to the PC and 360 later, but by then it really was a one horse race).
You seem to misremembering. GTA was released on PC first, and PS_1_ several months later. There was no xbox release.
Exactly, every hardware vendor knows that exclusive titles can mean the customer buys more than one console if a game they REALLY want is only available one the one they don't currently have
OTOH, timed exclusivity like this one (the other platforms will get the game within 6 months, apparently) are less likely to have this effect. I don't know about you, but there are few games I want enough that I'd shell out for a new console just to be able to get 'em 6 months earlier.
Cheaper would be to buy a mod chip and import the US version. (I'm not a big console user these days, but I assume this is still possible).
That quote in the story is way out of context. Ulrich's words were:
Any change will negatively impact well designed architectures for the sole benefit of this embedded crap.
Which is, of course, utter bollocks, as the change could have been wrapped in #ifdef _ARM ... #endif, at which point it would only have effected "this embedded crap".
Did you actually read #3? strfry() is a joke function, an silly Easter egg that had been included in Glibc since time immemorial and unfortunately cannot be removed for fear of breaking compatibility.
Anyone with half a brain can see that fixing "bugs" in ancient Easter eggs is a waste of developers' time. If I were in Ulrich Drepper's position, my response would be similar to his, but with more insults.
Funny, the function's man page doesn't say it's a joke. Nor does it warn developers that the function is deprecated. As long as this is a documented, non-deprecated function _it should work_. And when you have somebody submit a patch to fix a potential issue with it, you don't insult them. That's just good manners.
I called my first subroutine with a family-owned thumper. It was a small one, 40 metres or so... But once I hooked it, it was smooth sailing all the way to the sietch!
I think, perhaps, you need to lay off the spice for a bit, OK?
To this day, I still think OWL was far better than MFC.
Might this be because _anything_ is better than MFC?
On the other hand one can observe the rate of brain tumors among train drivers. (In countries with fully electrified railways systems, of course).
You can, but the studies involve very few cases and are therefore very cautious in drawing conclusions: "For brain tumor (astrocytoma), the observed relative risk was close to one"; "95% CI: 1.2, 21.2". It looks like there is a small effect in this case, although it should be noted that the exposure to magnetism of the subjects in the second study there was over 100 times higher than exposure in the 200-metres-from-HT-power-line scenario the OP was talking about, which is I believe in the order of 100 times higher itself than mobile phone masts (a topic you hint at in your post).
Yes, there is some evidence that magnetic fields can have health effects, I'll admit it. But the evidence is overstated and the risks exagerated repeatedly by people like the original poster who seem to be spreading anti-electricity FUD for all I can see (probably not intentionally; few people have done the research and read the reports here).
And interestingly enough, all those studies were funded by companies in the power/radio/telecom/mobile industries
Citation please. The only one I see any overt link to such a company is actually the one most favourable to the OP's position. I'll happily ignore this paper; the rest of my point still stands.
You're skipping a step, the purchaser will most likely contact the seller before pursuing legal action. If they do, the seller will point out how they never said it was an artifact. This will make the seller far less likely to actually contact a lawyer and find out that it doesn't matter.
I'm assuming a purchaser who understands their legal rights. In this case, they'll realise that nothing the vendor says _after_ the purchase is made is relevant to whether the contract was misrepresented or not.
is scraping for 1.6 million, they might as well give it away, becasue there not going to be here in a year anyways.
If they're in that kind of financial trouble, they're not legally allowed to give it away. A company that is expecting to be liquidated must not give away assets, because technically from the moment it is considered likely that liquidation will occur those assets effectively belong to the creditors.
Do you even think about what you are saying? If that where true we would all be powering our devices from radio signal. You are saying 50K watts of power can power infinite devices, ir be broad cast to an infinite amount of radios with degrading the signal.
Inverse square law prevents that without having to speculate that receivers diminish the signal. The energy density over any area is never greater than the power put into the transmitter multiplied by the length of time over which its transmissions can be received in the area in question, so for any given area the total energy you can receive in that area is less than the total energy transmitted. The smaller the area, the smaller the amount of energy you can receive. Receivers cannot overlap, so there is no possibility of receiving more energy than is transmitted, even without taking into account effects receivers have upon each other.