Actually there is a fairly substantial legacy issue associated with BeOS/Haiku, but not in the way you are thinking. The ABI used by BeOS is not supported in GCC anymore. Haiku Release 1 is striving for binary-compatibility with BeOS. What this means is that if you want to run original BeOS applications, it can only be compiled against GCC version 2.x. Haiku can be compiled against later versions of GCC, but you will lose the ability to run older software unless it's recompiled for Haiku, which may be impossible if it's closed source.
there were other legacy issues with modern hardware that existed with BeOS as a result of having died so young, but these don't exist with Haiku.
Surely it is an absence of rational thought which makes those feelings grow in the first place? Lest we, as society, feel that our established position is less rational? Look up the word "rationalize" in the dictionary. Use the other definition.
The free exchange of ideas is precisely that which crumbles tyrannies of thought and lazy rationalisations. The exchange of ideas is not free in most online communities. People seek out communities where people agree with them.
Maybe then it is not the internet at fault, but the people using it? The community-forming of the Internet can be used for good OR "evil." The Internet is not a moral entity, so I am not assigning "fault" per se. I am saying that the natural community-forming nature of the Internet fosters bad as well as good communities, including pedophiles.
Such that by forcing these people to practice extreme secrecy we have created the ideal conditions to in-breed their ideology?[...]You make the point that their actions or predilections are controlled by their ability to rationalise. If you or I even wanted to, we couldn't find a chatroom or forum to engage them in honest debate. We couldn't challenge their group mentality even if we knew where they hang out online; by the criminal act of posting our counter-arguments we'd simply become a statistic in the next 'bust'. I didn't address or allude to any of these points. Without addressing any specific part of this because it relies heavily on values, I will tell you that while I am of course opposed to Child abuse/exploitation and find pedophilia sickening, I am also opposed to the moral panic surrounding child sexuality. So is the APA, so I think I am in good company.
Can you source this wild claim, at all? That would require me to link to a bunch of stuff that I don't want to be associated with, and really don't want to go to while at work. My identity on Slashdot is pseudonymous, but I hope I've established a reputation of trustworthiness. However, I won't blame you for rejecting unsourced statements. But I really, really can't do that . I'm sorry.
I'm saying the Internet can take someone who might be susceptible to that and turn them into a full-blown pedophile. As I read it, that's exactly what the article said, although they take it one step further and say that it increases abusers (someone who turns the thoughts into actions.)
It doesn't matter what you believe or are feeling, the Internet is big enough that you can find a group of people just like you. The "I am not alone" feeling in combination with the protection of anonymity dissolves the taboo in the individual, which is the psychological wall that separates the acceptable from the unacceptable. After that point, nothing is preventing you from examining and exploring your thoughts, which naturally can cause them to grow, especially when you have others legitimizing them. You can't rationalize it until the taboo is broken. On the extreme end, this acceptance INSIDE the group leads the group to feel that there really is nothing wrong with what they believe, and they start working on legitimizing themselves. You can see this happening online today. there are already activists for such causes. They are explicitly using the civil rights and gay rights movements as templates for creating social acceptance. Keep an eye out for it.
I am planning on voting Democratic if Obama gets the nomination. I've also been donating money to him besides Dr. Paul. As a conservative I feel like I a risking a lot by supporting a fairly liberal Democrat, but I also feel like there's more at risk by allowing any of the other prominent Republicans to take the White House again. I will only vote for a candidate who will immediately work on Restoring the USA's image worldwide and plan our long-term exit from Iraq. On top of that I do consider the person when voting, and Obama is an upright and intelligent man. He hasn't done anything I'm aware of that would make me ashamed to call him my President, unlike the last several.
I'm sorry, but by making that statement I have to assume you've never met any actual Lyndon LaRouche supporters or Ron Paul supporters. LaRouche supporters are legitimately scary and cult-like, and having met them in person I would NOT want to give them a reason to hate me because they would DO something about it. I have met many, many Ron Paul supporters, and the majority are regular conservatives with good hearts that are fed up with the system and have found a candidate to be truly enthusiastic about. I have met dodgy types associated with him as well, but when I visited the Ron Paul tent at the Iowa Straw Poll I didn't feel like anybody was a fucking cult member like when I've met larouchies.
Every Presidential election, the Socialist Party of America runs their candidate. One year I talked to their candidate (whose name I cannot remember) and he was very up front that he would not win. He told me that they run to get their positions out to the American people. They are building their movement by running candidates even if they do not win.
Re:Let's face it, it's done
on
Has Ron Paul Quit?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I will tell you why I gave Ron Paul some financial support. I don't agree with all his politics, but I am a conservative who is against torture, is against the police state, is against the surveillance state and is against this war. I supported Ron Paul because every debate he shows up at he fucks up the unstated agreement among ALL other Republican candidates to not talk about any of that shit. He disrupts their big snow-job on the American public about the sins of the Republican party for the last eight years, and I love every minute of it.
That's the entire problem! It doesn't matter if it failed or not because economists and political lackeys can always come up with a million reasons why they weren't doing X or Y or Z, so that's why it failed. There is NOTHING you can do to prove economic theory X wrong because the world is so complex that you can always find some alleged mitigating factor that was responsible for its demise in any particular instance. That's the opposite of falsifiable.
The Republican party is large and diverse, and not all Republicans are for small government. This includes the current President. Having come of political age in the early 1990's, most of the Republicans I know are for small government and are very much against domestic surveillance and entanglement in foreign wars. I am a young guy, but I have watched for years and years as pro-business lackeys have been propped up into power in the party while the small-government pro-freedom Republicans have been railroaded out the back door. The unfortunate truth is that a great deal of the pro-freedom, small-government crowd ARE a little wacky (see: reinstitute the gold standard, abolish central bank, sorry if I'm offending anyone but those are crazy) and many I have met (I doubt most though) are at least latently racist. I have been a sorry witness to racist asides and outbursts from some of these people that have made me question my party affiliation. This is makes them unpalatable to many in the party, who believe it or not are not racist and do not hate blacks and Jews and are embarrassed by the association with some of these people. Then there are the evangelicals in the Republican party, who often ally with the pro-business crowd and have gelled where pro-business party members use the evangelicals for vote consolidation and many evangelicals have been brainwashed into believing pro-business politics even where it hurts people.
It depends on what you value, because by Stallman's definition it doesn't matter if it gave you multiple orgasms and cured cancer because proprietary means you can't change it and that's the most important thing so it's "not good." Other people define "good" as "device works good." I respect Stallman, but that is his opinion and not everyone's. I suspect that he doesn't consider hospitals bad because they don't let him administer his own medical care in their facilities. This is analogous to how most people see software and products. They don't want to tinker, they just expect things to work as advertised.
Actually it's the opposite. Under WDM it was not possible to write a _purely_ user-mode driver, while in the new model introduced under Vista and backported to XP, UMDF allows for pure user-mode drivers. Both allow highly modular drivers
"Media literacy" means being educated to recognize the business motivations of media. So when it tries to deceive you into buying a product or identifying with an ideal by making you feel afraid or inadequate or by inflating your desires, you will properly evaluate their real message. Hillary Clinton is intimately familiar with the power of media and Image to deceive, both to her advantage via James Carville in her husband's 1992 Presidential campaign, and against her and her husband by right-wing talk radio and Fox News Channel.
The skill of recognizing when others are attempting to manipulate you for their own gain is the basis of "media literacy." It should be a required part of primary education in the USA and is probably the only thing I have ever agreed with Hillary Clinton on in my life.
The only part that doesn't work is the fact that the cables were completely severed. So the theory is wrong, but it's still actually less convoluted than reality, which is that the USA owns and operates a sub designed to splice and eavesdrop on undersea digital communications cables undetected.
I've noticed that on many shows you can easily tell whenever a product is a paid product placement. In most shows, product labels are fuzzed out. If it's not fuzzed out, it's probably a product placement. Not sure if this works for Mythbusters, I don't habitually watch the show.
Any of this stuff could happen whether or not something like I suggested was in place. Here is the problem as I see it.
* Banning Geiger counters is stupid because this is America and if I want a Geiger counter I should be able to own one. I'm not a criminal for owning a Geiger counter, don't make me into one for owning a clicking box. * If I want a Geiger counter, and if I think I need a Geiger counter for my safety, your dumb law is not going to stop me. Again, don't make me into a criminal for wanting to protect my personal safety. * If I detect some sort of emergency, I want to report it because believe it or not, I have a sense of civic duty. If I'm not causing a panic, don't make me into a criminal for trying to help my community.
Everybody wants to make their job easier, and the NYPD probably thinks that the easiest way to avert panic is by banning Geiger counters and air quality detectors. They are not a judicial court and are not concerned with your civil rights as an individual. They are charged with maintaining civil order. So I don't blame them for wanting to make it easier to maintain civil order. But if you are concerned about civil rights, you need to remember that that's not directly the job of the police. Your rights are often in opposition to their ability to do their job as smoothly as possible. Please do not construe this as anti-police, but you need to keep this in mind when they suggest legislation. They are not necessarily taking into account the big picture. They are looking at the problem with the slant "what makes it easiest to maintain public order."
You will get my Geiger counter when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
I totally disagree with this law. The mere POSSESSION of a device like a Geiger counter or air quality tester is a misdemeanor. That is insane, and everyone should acknowledge this. BUT there is a real problem here, which is people buying inaccurate devices that they do not know how to operate. This is resulting in false positives which, when reported, police officials are obligated to investigate. At the very least this is a defense mechanism by the NYPD, because if something was reported and they didn't respond, if it turned out to be legitimate they would be held responsible.
My problem is why is the citizen always perceived as the enemy? Why are criminal punishments always deemed the solution? Here is my solution: Establish a citizen corps of air/radiation testers. Require a minimum set of standards for equipment and require some sort of proof that the operator knows how to operate the device and that the device functions properly. This may involve some sort of licensure. If you meet the requirements and become a member, you will have established the repute required to report a crisis to the proper authorities.
If you are not a member, you will still be allowed to own or operate these devices. However, if you detect a problem, you are obligated to report it to your closest deputy as defined above, who will verify and report it to the authorities if legitimate. You will not be punished for false positives because the purpose of the deputy is to filter these. However, if by your irresponsible actions you cause a panic, you will be held responsible, possibly criminally.
This engages the community, establishes a system of responsibility and gives a method to report problems. No one has to give up their equipment. It's almost like we live in a society, where people work together and laws aren't just made on the spot to ban stuff and create criminals out of regular people.
You may or may not like a religion, but a religion lays it's cards on the table. It doesn't have secret teachings that you need to join up and achieve some level of roped-in-ness before they will tell you what the secret teachings are. That is not now, nor has ever been true. There have been many accepted religions that are based on secret teachings or rituals. Off the top of my head I can think of Mormonism, Sufism, Alawism, Kabbalah, and several versions of Christian Gnosticism. As far as the US government is concerned, you lose the "religion" status when (among other reasons) monetary remuneration is the primary requirement for access to said secrets. None of the groups I listed have this as a requirement as far as anybody knows.
I had to look if you were right, and you were, so I learned something today. I was surprised to discover that it doesn't even appear to be an option to run any video driver in ring-3. I guess one could use vga.sys so at least you're using Microsoft's driver, which hopefully degrades gracefully.
I don't think the driver complaint is fair because there HAS been support for modular drivers since Windows 2000 via WDM. Hardware makers are just releasing terrible drivers. It took a really long time for hardware makers to start supporting WDM, and it really didn't catch on until they were forced to when XP became the OEM standard. I had a Kensington webcam that had promised Win2K/XP support, then after a year they rescinded their beta driver while blaming Microsoft for making drivers too hard to write. In reality what they meant was that they couldn't just belt out a crappy single-layer driver and be done with it.
On the MSDN blogs there have been developer conversations detailing why it's difficult to near-impossible to get hardware makers to follow the rules for making good drivers. In at least one case a video card maker intentionally wrote in code to cheat WHQL testing so their hardware would run in an extremely cut-down mode to pass quality testing, but it would have been impossible for Microsoft to PROVE this was intentional. So basically hardware makers write crappy drivers that crash and people blame it on Microsoft.
Video has always been in ring 0, so it's always going to have the chance to bring down the system. That's really unavoidable if you don't want to sacrifice some speed for safety.
Apple tends to back away when it gets demonstrated to them that such restrictions don't work. The dual-monitor hack detailed above; They used to artificially restrict you to Apple-branded wifi cards in OS X even when other cards of the same chipset would have worked--they backed down when people kept hacking the OS to use whatever brand Wifi card they wanted; People kept jailbreaking the iPhone, so soon we're going to get an official dev kit.
Using the video output, your desktop was mirrored and did not span the two screens. (I don't know if the newest models still do this.) There were firmware hacks to get around this completely artificial restriction, which Apple put into place to differentiate their consumer line machines from their professional line. That's a thing about Apple that bugs me, now that you mention it.
I agree, and I hate the "papers please" internal passport argument. If you lived in the Soviet Union you didn't have a right to travel and the passport was how that was enforced. We DO have a right to travel, and no one is setting up checkpoints all over the country. This is primarily the federal government telling states that unless their IDs meet a minimum level of anti-forgery protection, the federal government will not recognize said ID.
Look, the reason they gave is just a lie anyway. The real reason is that the farther back you go, the harder it is to prove the identity/citizenship of someone via birth records. They made the exemption because if they didn't, they would have IMMEDIATELY gotten a civil-rights challenge similar to what is being done to prevent picture-ID voting requirements in some states, they want this to go through with as few challenges as possible.
You can almost make a case for what the government is saying, there is a terrorist profile and it's not simple for hostile forces to adjust their demographics. Profiling didn't result in a spike in elderly Korean matron suicide bombers because terrorists don't have the same access to them as they do young disenfranchised Arabs. But it's not hard to see them working around an over-50 requirement. I don't believe this is the real reason, I believe they want to avoid a potential legal challenge.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually there is a fairly substantial legacy issue associated with BeOS/Haiku, but not in the way you are thinking. The ABI used by BeOS is not supported in GCC anymore. Haiku Release 1 is striving for binary-compatibility with BeOS. What this means is that if you want to run original BeOS applications, it can only be compiled against GCC version 2.x. Haiku can be compiled against later versions of GCC, but you will lose the ability to run older software unless it's recompiled for Haiku, which may be impossible if it's closed source.
there were other legacy issues with modern hardware that existed with BeOS as a result of having died so young, but these don't exist with Haiku.
I'm saying the Internet can take someone who might be susceptible to that and turn them into a full-blown pedophile. As I read it, that's exactly what the article said, although they take it one step further and say that it increases abusers (someone who turns the thoughts into actions.)
It doesn't matter what you believe or are feeling, the Internet is big enough that you can find a group of people just like you. The "I am not alone" feeling in combination with the protection of anonymity dissolves the taboo in the individual, which is the psychological wall that separates the acceptable from the unacceptable. After that point, nothing is preventing you from examining and exploring your thoughts, which naturally can cause them to grow, especially when you have others legitimizing them. You can't rationalize it until the taboo is broken. On the extreme end, this acceptance INSIDE the group leads the group to feel that there really is nothing wrong with what they believe, and they start working on legitimizing themselves. You can see this happening online today. there are already activists for such causes. They are explicitly using the civil rights and gay rights movements as templates for creating social acceptance. Keep an eye out for it.
I am planning on voting Democratic if Obama gets the nomination. I've also been donating money to him besides Dr. Paul. As a conservative I feel like I a risking a lot by supporting a fairly liberal Democrat, but I also feel like there's more at risk by allowing any of the other prominent Republicans to take the White House again. I will only vote for a candidate who will immediately work on Restoring the USA's image worldwide and plan our long-term exit from Iraq. On top of that I do consider the person when voting, and Obama is an upright and intelligent man. He hasn't done anything I'm aware of that would make me ashamed to call him my President, unlike the last several.
I agree 100%, but like in China, if you want to get political traction you need to be a Party member. We just have two parties instead of one.
I'm sorry, but by making that statement I have to assume you've never met any actual Lyndon LaRouche supporters or Ron Paul supporters. LaRouche supporters are legitimately scary and cult-like, and having met them in person I would NOT want to give them a reason to hate me because they would DO something about it. I have met many, many Ron Paul supporters, and the majority are regular conservatives with good hearts that are fed up with the system and have found a candidate to be truly enthusiastic about. I have met dodgy types associated with him as well, but when I visited the Ron Paul tent at the Iowa Straw Poll I didn't feel like anybody was a fucking cult member like when I've met larouchies.
Every Presidential election, the Socialist Party of America runs their candidate. One year I talked to their candidate (whose name I cannot remember) and he was very up front that he would not win. He told me that they run to get their positions out to the American people. They are building their movement by running candidates even if they do not win.
I will tell you why I gave Ron Paul some financial support. I don't agree with all his politics, but I am a conservative who is against torture, is against the police state, is against the surveillance state and is against this war. I supported Ron Paul because every debate he shows up at he fucks up the unstated agreement among ALL other Republican candidates to not talk about any of that shit. He disrupts their big snow-job on the American public about the sins of the Republican party for the last eight years, and I love every minute of it.
That's the entire problem! It doesn't matter if it failed or not because economists and political lackeys can always come up with a million reasons why they weren't doing X or Y or Z, so that's why it failed. There is NOTHING you can do to prove economic theory X wrong because the world is so complex that you can always find some alleged mitigating factor that was responsible for its demise in any particular instance. That's the opposite of falsifiable.
The Republican party is large and diverse, and not all Republicans are for small government. This includes the current President. Having come of political age in the early 1990's, most of the Republicans I know are for small government and are very much against domestic surveillance and entanglement in foreign wars. I am a young guy, but I have watched for years and years as pro-business lackeys have been propped up into power in the party while the small-government pro-freedom Republicans have been railroaded out the back door. The unfortunate truth is that a great deal of the pro-freedom, small-government crowd ARE a little wacky (see: reinstitute the gold standard, abolish central bank, sorry if I'm offending anyone but those are crazy) and many I have met (I doubt most though) are at least latently racist. I have been a sorry witness to racist asides and outbursts from some of these people that have made me question my party affiliation. This is makes them unpalatable to many in the party, who believe it or not are not racist and do not hate blacks and Jews and are embarrassed by the association with some of these people. Then there are the evangelicals in the Republican party, who often ally with the pro-business crowd and have gelled where pro-business party members use the evangelicals for vote consolidation and many evangelicals have been brainwashed into believing pro-business politics even where it hurts people.
It depends on what you value, because by Stallman's definition it doesn't matter if it gave you multiple orgasms and cured cancer because proprietary means you can't change it and that's the most important thing so it's "not good." Other people define "good" as "device works good." I respect Stallman, but that is his opinion and not everyone's. I suspect that he doesn't consider hospitals bad because they don't let him administer his own medical care in their facilities. This is analogous to how most people see software and products. They don't want to tinker, they just expect things to work as advertised.
Actually it's the opposite. Under WDM it was not possible to write a _purely_ user-mode driver, while in the new model introduced under Vista and backported to XP, UMDF allows for pure user-mode drivers. Both allow highly modular drivers
"Media literacy" means being educated to recognize the business motivations of media. So when it tries to deceive you into buying a product or identifying with an ideal by making you feel afraid or inadequate or by inflating your desires, you will properly evaluate their real message. Hillary Clinton is intimately familiar with the power of media and Image to deceive, both to her advantage via James Carville in her husband's 1992 Presidential campaign, and against her and her husband by right-wing talk radio and Fox News Channel.
The skill of recognizing when others are attempting to manipulate you for their own gain is the basis of "media literacy." It should be a required part of primary education in the USA and is probably the only thing I have ever agreed with Hillary Clinton on in my life.
The only part that doesn't work is the fact that the cables were completely severed. So the theory is wrong, but it's still actually less convoluted than reality, which is that the USA owns and operates a sub designed to splice and eavesdrop on undersea digital communications cables undetected.
I've noticed that on many shows you can easily tell whenever a product is a paid product placement. In most shows, product labels are fuzzed out. If it's not fuzzed out, it's probably a product placement. Not sure if this works for Mythbusters, I don't habitually watch the show.
Any of this stuff could happen whether or not something like I suggested was in place. Here is the problem as I see it.
* Banning Geiger counters is stupid because this is America and if I want a Geiger counter I should be able to own one. I'm not a criminal for owning a Geiger counter, don't make me into one for owning a clicking box.
* If I want a Geiger counter, and if I think I need a Geiger counter for my safety, your dumb law is not going to stop me. Again, don't make me into a criminal for wanting to protect my personal safety.
* If I detect some sort of emergency, I want to report it because believe it or not, I have a sense of civic duty. If I'm not causing a panic, don't make me into a criminal for trying to help my community.
Everybody wants to make their job easier, and the NYPD probably thinks that the easiest way to avert panic is by banning Geiger counters and air quality detectors. They are not a judicial court and are not concerned with your civil rights as an individual. They are charged with maintaining civil order. So I don't blame them for wanting to make it easier to maintain civil order. But if you are concerned about civil rights, you need to remember that that's not directly the job of the police. Your rights are often in opposition to their ability to do their job as smoothly as possible. Please do not construe this as anti-police, but you need to keep this in mind when they suggest legislation. They are not necessarily taking into account the big picture. They are looking at the problem with the slant "what makes it easiest to maintain public order."
You will get my Geiger counter when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
I totally disagree with this law. The mere POSSESSION of a device like a Geiger counter or air quality tester is a misdemeanor. That is insane, and everyone should acknowledge this. BUT there is a real problem here, which is people buying inaccurate devices that they do not know how to operate. This is resulting in false positives which, when reported, police officials are obligated to investigate. At the very least this is a defense mechanism by the NYPD, because if something was reported and they didn't respond, if it turned out to be legitimate they would be held responsible.
My problem is why is the citizen always perceived as the enemy? Why are criminal punishments always deemed the solution? Here is my solution: Establish a citizen corps of air/radiation testers. Require a minimum set of standards for equipment and require some sort of proof that the operator knows how to operate the device and that the device functions properly. This may involve some sort of licensure. If you meet the requirements and become a member, you will have established the repute required to report a crisis to the proper authorities.
If you are not a member, you will still be allowed to own or operate these devices. However, if you detect a problem, you are obligated to report it to your closest deputy as defined above, who will verify and report it to the authorities if legitimate. You will not be punished for false positives because the purpose of the deputy is to filter these. However, if by your irresponsible actions you cause a panic, you will be held responsible, possibly criminally.
This engages the community, establishes a system of responsibility and gives a method to report problems. No one has to give up their equipment. It's almost like we live in a society, where people work together and laws aren't just made on the spot to ban stuff and create criminals out of regular people.
I had to look if you were right, and you were, so I learned something today. I was surprised to discover that it doesn't even appear to be an option to run any video driver in ring-3. I guess one could use vga.sys so at least you're using Microsoft's driver, which hopefully degrades gracefully.
I don't think the driver complaint is fair because there HAS been support for modular drivers since Windows 2000 via WDM. Hardware makers are just releasing terrible drivers. It took a really long time for hardware makers to start supporting WDM, and it really didn't catch on until they were forced to when XP became the OEM standard. I had a Kensington webcam that had promised Win2K/XP support, then after a year they rescinded their beta driver while blaming Microsoft for making drivers too hard to write. In reality what they meant was that they couldn't just belt out a crappy single-layer driver and be done with it.
On the MSDN blogs there have been developer conversations detailing why it's difficult to near-impossible to get hardware makers to follow the rules for making good drivers. In at least one case a video card maker intentionally wrote in code to cheat WHQL testing so their hardware would run in an extremely cut-down mode to pass quality testing, but it would have been impossible for Microsoft to PROVE this was intentional. So basically hardware makers write crappy drivers that crash and people blame it on Microsoft.
Video has always been in ring 0, so it's always going to have the chance to bring down the system. That's really unavoidable if you don't want to sacrifice some speed for safety.
Apple tends to back away when it gets demonstrated to them that such restrictions don't work. The dual-monitor hack detailed above; They used to artificially restrict you to Apple-branded wifi cards in OS X even when other cards of the same chipset would have worked--they backed down when people kept hacking the OS to use whatever brand Wifi card they wanted; People kept jailbreaking the iPhone, so soon we're going to get an official dev kit.
Using the video output, your desktop was mirrored and did not span the two screens. (I don't know if the newest models still do this.) There were firmware hacks to get around this completely artificial restriction, which Apple put into place to differentiate their consumer line machines from their professional line. That's a thing about Apple that bugs me, now that you mention it.
I agree, and I hate the "papers please" internal passport argument. If you lived in the Soviet Union you didn't have a right to travel and the passport was how that was enforced. We DO have a right to travel, and no one is setting up checkpoints all over the country. This is primarily the federal government telling states that unless their IDs meet a minimum level of anti-forgery protection, the federal government will not recognize said ID.
Look, the reason they gave is just a lie anyway. The real reason is that the farther back you go, the harder it is to prove the identity/citizenship of someone via birth records. They made the exemption because if they didn't, they would have IMMEDIATELY gotten a civil-rights challenge similar to what is being done to prevent picture-ID voting requirements in some states, they want this to go through with as few challenges as possible.
You can almost make a case for what the government is saying, there is a terrorist profile and it's not simple for hostile forces to adjust their demographics. Profiling didn't result in a spike in elderly Korean matron suicide bombers because terrorists don't have the same access to them as they do young disenfranchised Arabs. But it's not hard to see them working around an over-50 requirement. I don't believe this is the real reason, I believe they want to avoid a potential legal challenge.