Zipf’s law is a testament to the order in our world, showing that the same patterns emerge in a wide variety of situations. The linguist George Kingsley Zipf first proposed the law in 1949, when he noticed that the distribution of words in a newspaper, book, or other literary article always followed the same pattern. nbsp; nbsp; Zipf counted how many times each word appeared, and found that the probability of the occurrence of words starts high and tapers off. Specifically, the most frequent word occurs about twice as often as the second most frequent word, which occurs about twice as often as the fourth most frequent word, and so on. Mathematically, this means that the frequency of any word is inversely proportional to its rank. When the Zipf curve is plotted on a log-log scale, it appears as a straight line with a slope of -1. nbsp; nbsp; Since Zipf’s discovery, researchers have found that the power law describes many other natural and human phenomena, including the distribution of cities ranked by their population, the distribution of corporate wealth, and Internet traffic characteristics.

Australia’s bicentric slope reduced welfare rates to a 6-½ year low, transfer the decrease since September to 3 percentage points and leaving the door unstoppered to more cuts as it fights to save its frugalness from recession. Klik her for læse hele nyheden

Two separate stories in the NY Times provide fodder for those who view Google as the new scary borg. The first, looks at a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/magazine/30google-t.html?_r=2#038;pagewanted=all" target="_new"Google's sometimes slippery slope role as a "gatekeeper" of information/a within certain countries. For example, it looks at Google's a href="http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070406/135305.shtml"agreement/a to help block access to certain YouTube videos in Thailand and similar decisions in other countries. The article plays up Google's reluctance to be involved in making these sorts of decisions (and highlights how the company hopes that more countries learn to accept free speech a bit more), but it still leaves you with this questionable feeling of Google as quasi-government censor. No matter how well-meaning the people may be who are making the decisions, it still ifeels/i questionable. br /br / The second article isn't just about Google, but talks about how, with various online services, a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/business/30privacy.html?partner=rss#038;emc=rss#038;pagewanted=all" target="_new"many people are effectively giving up their privacy/a. This is hardly a new topic, and it's one that's been discussed repeatedly -- often with a nod to the famous Scott McNealy a href="http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/1999/01/17538"quote/a from almost a decade ago: "You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it." The article touches on a lot more than just Google, but does mention the fact that Google seems to have access to all sorts of data that, when clumped together, could be seen as a violation of privacy for some. br /br / Between the two stories, you can see why there's a growing sense of worry among some about how Google could become dangerous. It has access to all sorts of data about you -- and has the power to make decisions about what you can access, often with no explanation or recourse. Put that together, and you get this picture of Google as the benevolent dictator of the internet -- where it may be using its powers (mostly) for good, but there's plenty of potential that eventually it could turn evil. And, to some extent, it's worth highlighting these issues, so that people don't become complacent about Google's actions. But, there's an undercurrent to these stories that seem to miss out on a few things: if Google really does start abusing either of these "powers," unlike with a dictator, people have pretty easy choices to go elsewhere. Furthermore, as more concerns are raised about any potential abuse, people are rapidly working on technologies that solve both issues -- allowing people to surf the internet much more anonymously, while also routing around censorship. So, while it's not problematic to highlight these potential issues with Google, that doesn't mean that there aren't necessary checks and balances in place.br /br /a href="http://techdirt.com/articles/20081201/0119292980.shtml"Permalink/a | a href="http://techdirt.com/articles/20081201/0119292980.shtml#comments"Comments/a | a href="http://techdirt.com/article.php?sid=20081201/0119292980op=sharethis"Email This Story/abr / br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=03bbcba18df60519cca48ee41761eee4p=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=03bbcba18df60519cca48ee41761eee4p=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=03bbcba18df60519cca48ee41761eee4" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.techdirt.com/~f/techdirt/feed?a=e7WOo"img src="http://feeds.techdirt.com/~f/techdirt/feed?i=e7WOo" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.techdirt.com/~r/techdirt/feed/~4/471700526" height="1" width="1"/

We've already talked about how the Lori Drew case represents a dangerous a href="http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080724/0404151777.shtml"slippery slope/a, in that it effectively turns just about ieveryone/i into an internet criminal who can face years in jail for "criminal computer fraud," simply because they disobeyed a website's terms of service -- even if they didn't read the terms or even approve them. With the initial a href="http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20081126/1223412965.shtml"verdict in/a, Orin Kerr -- who is involved with the case as a part of Drew's legal team -- demonstrates how awful this case is by a href="http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2008_11_23-2008_11_29.shtml#1227896387" target="_new"changing the terms of service on the blog he writes for/a in order to demonstrate how easy it is for any website to turn pretty much everyone into a criminal: blockquote New Terms of Use for the Volokh Conspiracy: In light of the verdict in the Lori Drew case, I have decided to promulgate new Terms of Use for the Volokh Conspiracy. You are only permitted to visit the Volokh Conspiracy if you are in compliance with the Terms of Use. Any accessing the Volokh Conspiracy in a way that violates these terms is unauthorized, and according to the Justice Department is a federal crime that can lead to your arrest and imprisonment for up to one year for every visit to the blog. br /br / By visiting this blog, you promise that: ol li You will not post comments that are abusive, profane, or irrelevant. Civil and relevant comments only, as indicated by our comment policy./li li You are not an employee of the U.S. government. Yes, that includes postal service employees, law clerks, judges, and interns. We're a libertarian-leaning blog, and we're for the private sector only. Government types, keep out. /lili Your middle name is not "Ralph." I've always thought Ralph was a funny name, and even odder as a middle name. No one with the middle name "Ralph" is welcome here. /lili You're super nice. We have strict civility rules here, and this blog is only for people who are super nice. If you are not super nice, as judged by me, your visit to this blog is unauthorized. /lili You have never visited Alaska. Okay, this one is totally arbitrary, but it's our blog and we can keep out who we want. Alaska visitors are out, too. /li/ol If you post an abusive comment; you are an employee of the U.S. government; your middle name is Ralph; you're not super nice, as judged by me; or you have visited Alaska, I have kinda bad news for you: You are a criminal, as you have just violated 18 U.S.C. 1030(a)(2)(C) by accessing the Volokh Conspiracy's service without authorization or in excess of authorization. You are only authorized to visit the blog in compliance with the Terms of Use, and by violating these terms you have become a criminal by essentially "hacking in" to the Volokh Conspiracy. /blockquotebr /br /a href="http://techdirt.com/articles/20081201/0252082984.shtml"Permalink/a | a href="http://techdirt.com/articles/20081201/0252082984.shtml#comments"Comments/a | a href="http://techdirt.com/article.php?sid=20081201/0252082984op=sharethis"Email This Story/abr / br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=42435d7c1198adc7146f42c3bee95ed0p=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=42435d7c1198adc7146f42c3bee95ed0p=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=42435d7c1198adc7146f42c3bee95ed0" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.techdirt.com/~f/techdirt/feed?a=mgNyo"img src="http://feeds.techdirt.com/~f/techdirt/feed?i=mgNyo" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.techdirt.com/~r/techdirt/feed/~4/471669796" height="1" width="1"/

If you live in the municipality of Austin, chances are you’ve heard of the Austin Bank. Located in the orient conception of Texas, Austin slope is digit of the more widely used banks in this conception of the state, and if you live here, chances are you or someone you undergo does playing with them. [...]