Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Card, Fortran, Legibility
Follow-up: Can You Raed Tihs? meal worms writes "A Slashdot article appearing last Monday, which reported on the claim that scrambled words are legible as long as first and last letters are in place, was circulated to the University of British Columbia's Linguistics department. An interesting counter-example resulted:
"Anidroccg to crad cniyrrag lcitsiugnis planoissefors at an uemannd, utisreviny in Bsitirh Cibmuloa, and crartnoy to the duoibus cmials of the ueticnd rcraeseh, a slpmie, macinahcel ioisrevnn of ianretnl cretcarahs araepps sneiciffut to csufnoe the eadyrevy oekoolnr."As demonstrated, a simple inversion of the internal characters results in a text which is relatively hard to decipher."
Addendum to Tough California Anti-Spam Law Signed On September 23, we mentioned California's new spam-ban law; srmalloy writes "The text of the new law, added by S.B. 186, is here."
Now you can WASTE away again in Margaritaville. adamsmith_uk writes "WASTE is open source small P2P network software supporting IM, group chat, file browsing/searching, and file transfer. It was released by Nullsoft and then removed by AOL, its parent company, in matter of hours. WASTE is now up to version 1.1 and back on Sourceforge. Get it while you can!"
Next time, Gadget Grandmother ... next time! FrankBama writes "The RIAA sued a grandmother for sharing over 2,000 songs (including 'I'm A Thug' by Trick Daddy). The EFF got involved and RIAA dropped the suit. This was done as a 'gesture of good faith' but the record industry spokesperson says they still think it's the right account.
260 other defendants still outstanding."
More of Orson Scott Card on Net music sharing. happy_place writes "FYI, you reported the first part earlier, here's the PART 2 of Orson Scott Card's political discussion on the stupidity of the record industry subpeona frenzy."
This part of the agenda is not supposed to be hidden. Stealthgirl writes "Note to everyone on the Hidden Agenda Contest that was mentioned over the weekend: There was a lot of feedback about only undergrads being eligible for the $25,000 prize. The rules have been clarified and full time grad students are welcome as well."
Update: Ah, yes: The Fortran bit. Thomas Beuthe writes "With regards to your slashdot Fortran article of the 16 Sept 2003 entitled 'Is GNU g77 Killing Fortran?,' I just wanted to make you aware of a fully featured alternative to g77 that perhaps everyone should consider using. Please go to Walt Brainerd's site: www.fortran.com (yes, he was the one who got *that* site!) and have a look at the "F" compiler.
I discussed the problem of the lack of a good freeware compiler and its influence on the lack of Fortran education and propagation of the language with him personally when he was here giving a Fortran course. He pointed out the "F" compiler to me. This is a fully compliant compiler which he put together himself.
The source code is actually the NAG compiler, I believe, except that he's hobbled it a bit to allow it to go out for free. This means that he has restricted the syntax a little, but not the functionality. So what you get is a fully funtional compiler which is restricted to what Walt considers to be the 'best' syntax for Fortran! This makes perfect sense for education, but also allows full useage for big projects as well!
Neat eh?"
Yahoo says:
Edward U Nottingham, (303) 844-5018, 1929 Stout St, Denver, CO 80294
If this really is Judge Nottingham, how do you think that he would feel about Americans exercising their free speech rights to telephone him? Please, one call only, you don't want to be impolite.
This is new? Look at the dates those files were released.... July 5th.
I haven't seen any real updates coming from the sourceforge site. It's mostly people hacking at it independently. It seems development for it has been going rather slow.
The Federal Trade Commission has chosen to entangle itself too much in the consumers' decision by manipulating consumer choice and favoring speech by charitable (organizations) over commercial speech
By doing what?? You mean, they're entangling themselves too much by enforcing the consumers' decision???
It's interesting that CNN's main page still shows the top story as:
Senate OKs no-call list
The Senate approved legislation that would grant authority to the Federal Trade Commission to maintain a do not call registry for telemarketers. The House approved similar.....
The subject mentions Fortran, but it is nowhere to be seen in the article.
If you can raed tihs, you may hvae a rear getniec doreisdr! Just kidding :)
I got a +5, Troll
The idea that anyone can call me up on my telephone line to annoy me with a sales pitch when I have asked them not to is equally bogus.
I don't care how many lothesome creeps loose their jobs as a result.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
I would argue that the counterexample given is not realistic, in that the letter switching is too consistent. Our brains may be in a mode of trying to find "randomness" and as a result, filter out any intentional pattern subconsciously.
Another counterexample to consider is using the normally scrambled method but have the words in the sentence jumbled around. Context plays a huge part in comprehension, not just the first and last letter, switched.
-jc
17529.2.(b) Initiate or advertise in an unsolicited commercial e-mail advertisement to a California electronic mail address, or advertise in an unsolicited commercial e-mail advertisement sent to a California electronic mail address.
So when I get spam through my work email, which is a LLC in California, and it was sent through a relay in Korea, how is the Attorney General going to collect?
Oh, you're going to go around suing every company in Asia and Europe? This simply isn't ever going to be enforced.
There was a company in California (Trevor Law Group, search google) that was basically scaring small businesses into settling for $5,00-$10,000 on nonsensical lawsuits, and it took the Bar Association to step forward and stop them, because the Attorney General simply has too many cases on his desk. The number of lawsuits in this state are silly as it is, and I don't see anyone going to enforce this.
--
Use Vobbo for Video Blogs
"manipulating consumer choice"??????
I don't feel the least bit manipulated. I knew full well what I wanted to happen when I went to that web site and entered my do-not-call information.
"Anidroccg to crad cniyrrag lcitsiugnis planoissefors at an uemannd, utisreviny in Bsitirh Cibmuloa, and crartnoy to the duoibus cmials of the ueticnd rcraeseh, a slpmie, macinahcel ioisrevnn of ianretnl cretcarahs araepps sneiciffut to csufnoe the eadyrevy oekoolnr."
"According to card carrying linguistics professionals at an unnamed, university in British Columbia, and contrary to the dubious claims of the uncited research, a simple, mechanical inversion of internal characters appears sufficient to confuse the everyday onlooker."
Ummm.... what does fortran have to do with any of this?
Davo -- Free speech, free software, AND free beer.
What am I missing? Where the Fortran story?
I wonder when WASTE will be ported to Linux & gcc. It fails to compile here with gcc 3.2.3
BULLSHIT!
The consumer has already made their decision by signing up for the DNC list! The Gummint is just enforcing that decision with some teeth. The Gummint is not preemptively suppressing speech based on content or source, it is telling them to leave us the hell alone when they won't listen to us asking them to do that ourselves.
The self-enforced "opt out" lists are an abysmal failure; what the hell do the direct marketers expect??
Haven't had a chance to read it yet...
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
From the "technical requirements" section:
The Hidden Agenda team reserves the right to build your game for a platform other than the one for whichyou designed your game. We also reserve the right to, or not to distribute and/or sell your game through whatever distribution channel or method we see fit.
Translation:
"We'll give you $25,000 for what would have cost us ten to a hundred times that to produce ourselves. Have fun splitting with your team half of what we would have had to pay just one full time developer for an annual salary. You slave away, we profit."
Nice to see that slashdot editors are still getting suckered into giving people free advertising. It all seems very clever, until you realized just how quickly you figured out The Catch.
Please help metamoderate.
is part of the problem with the "scrambled text" claim. It is a neat trick and it does work as long as the majority of the words do not have the internal word shape destroyed by major shifting of letters. But then again this is old hat to most typographers (IANAT)...in fact just using all italics in a long section of text is enough of a word shape change to slow down most readers, and has often been used by typographers for a long time to great effect.
Excuse me, but when has WASTE not been availible? It was there(and at version 1.1) almost a month ago, last I checked.
The original example for scrambled text talked about random rearrangement of letters in a word.
The example given is all but random rearrangement. Actually, every word is scrambled the same way, making them as different as the original as possible (keep the first and last letter the same, and invert all the remaining letters). So maybe yes, for truly random rearrangement of letters, it may be mostly understandable. I, for one, welcome our new random letter rearrangement overloards.
(IANAL) Even though Congress AND the House GAVE the FTC the authority to do this, how can a District Court Overrule them? WOuldn't it have to come from the Supreme Court?
Yes, I do understand that he is complaining about First Admendment rights of the telemarketers, but isn't the telphone system regulated by the FCC? They should be able to put whatever restrictions on it they want. If the MDA et al, dont like it, find some other medium to peddle your crap to people who dont want it.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
You pay the phone company for the phone line. This costs me about $20 a month for basic service. Likewise, my email address costs me money because I had to pay for that.
I PAY FOR IT.
ME.
As in "NOT THEM."
Telemarketing assholes DO NOT PAY FOR MY PHONE LINE. If I do not want them to call me, THEY SHOULD NOT FUCKING CALL ME.
They can fuck off back to whatever hole they came from and die.
I'm sick of getting home and my answering machine being full of robots trying to sell me a loan, car or that I've "won" a holiday (for the low, low price of only $200). I stopped watching television because of the advertising plague - I'm on the verge of unplugging the phone now.
And since when did a commercial entity qualify for "free speech?" It's not a human being and shouldn't have those rights.
These people slave away day and night, putting up with your abuse. Now you want to take away their rights to free speech.
I'm glad there are judges that will keep that from happening. Telemarketing is the only job some people can get, especially in the rural parts of the US.
Businesses all over the country rely on these hard working, honest folks to sell their product. We have so many people unemployed and some snooty "too good for you" jerks want to take away their right to make a decent living for their FAMILIES.
Shame on you if you signed up for do not call! I just wish you could see all the hungry , poor children's faces when they find out that mom or dad just lost their job because of yuppie jerks like you and they won't have a Christmas.
Basically, hard working Americans aren't free to earn a living anymore. They are only free to starve if they weren't born rich.
Those folks who basically say that we as humans don't miss the forest for the trees, but that we see a forest where there are *only* trees.
To elaborate:
Cat the green over jumped fence the.
Your internalized grammar can sort that out into an intelligible (though not necessarily what I meant--"green" could modify "cat" or "fence, for example) string of words; you *can* comprehend it, even though it's wrong. Linguistically, we do this a lot, especially with the example from U of BC.
Something that I've not seen discussed in conjunction with this, though, are the studies that show that, even though vowels and other sonorants are the parts of speech we prolong while talking or singing, the semantic content of language is carried primarily in the consonants:
Tr t yrslf--s hw mn wrds y cn ndrstnd, vn whn y dnt wrt dwn vwls n th pg.
(Try it yourself--see how many words you can understand, even when you don't write down vowels on the page).
Chew on that, just please don't destroy my good karma.
I like the judge's reasoning. I don't see why
charities and politicians should be exempt from
this list. Hopefully we will finally have a way
to put a universal "do not disturb" sign on our
email accounts. IOW, I like the all or nothing
approach to this.
Another alternative to Fortran is C++ with Blitz++. Using templates, library builders are able to close the gap with or surpass Fortran speeds. And that is without any compiler optimization, which C++ recieves a lot of attention on because of its market status. Anyway, here is Blitz++. Here are their goals and philosophy. Eat your hearts out, C programmers.
From the SAL website:
F is a carefully crafted subset of the most recent version of Fortran, the world's most powerful numeric language. F retains the modern features of Fortran--modules and data abstraction, for example--but discards facilities such as EQUIVALENCE, which are difficult to teach, use, or debug.
Backwards compatibility is extremely important for the Fortran crowd (who tend to be a very conservative bunch). Having to rewrite source code is not going to make them happy.
Update: Ah, yes: The Fortran bit. Thomas Beuthe writes "With regards to your slashdot Fortran article of the 16 Sept 2003 entitled 'Is GNU g77 Killing Fortran?,' I just wanted to make you aware of a fully featured alternative to g77 that perhaps everyone should consider using. Please go to Walt Brainerd's site: www.fortran.com (yes, he was the one who got *that* site!) and have a look at the "F" compiler.
I discussed the problem of the lack of a good freeware compiler and its influence on the lack of Fortran education and propagation of the language with him personally when he was here giving a Fortran course. He pointed out the "F" compiler to me. This is a fully compliant compiler which he put together himself.
The source code is actually the NAG compiler, I believe, except that he's hobbled it a bit to allow it to go out for free. This means that he has restricted the syntax a little, but not the functionality. So what you get is a fully funtional compiler which is restricted to what Walt considers to be the 'best' syntax for Fortran! This makes perfect sense for education, but also allows full useage for big projects as well!
I posted a commentary on this article and it's inadequacies the first time round... see here
Q.
Insert Signature Here
Is that like the 'evil bit' we spoke about last April 1st? ;-) But on the scrambled text issue..
As demonstrated, a simple inversion of the internal characters results in a text which is relatively hard to decipher.
This is what I attempted to argue a few months ago. I studied linguistics at college (although I dropped out) and we did some studies into obscuring language. It was particularly interesting, as I was also studying a module on encryption and ciphers.
What I learned was that recognition of words comes from several variables, and recognition of LETTERS from yet more. For example, if you write a line of text, and cover the top half of every letter with a ruler, it's hard to read the LETTERS. Cover the bottom half, it's easy to read the LETTERS.
WORDS work in a similar way. People can recognize words merely from basic patterns. These patterns do NOT have to correlate with the spoken word. What's more, the use of CONTEXT can mean words can be obscured even further, yet still be recognized.
For example..
I drve my cr t wrk.
People are very good at skimming over vowels, simply because they serve as the 'flow' of our language, and have little content in-and-of themselves. Compare to this:
I dr my ca to wo
Using the prefixes destroys any sense of context. No longer have we 'obscured' the words by removing their vowel glue, we've actually lopped half their bodies off, destroying any attempt at fathoming a reason.
Web Hosting Reviews
let's see.. Fortran, scrambled like those linguist guy do it comes out to "fart ron"
so that leaves the question: who is ron?
Are there public WASTE networks out there? Seeing the P2P app with the coolest name go under for lack of public support would be a downer.
When friends can say, "Have you heard Eva Cassidy's music? Here, I'll send you a couple of songs, you won't believe how good she is," that's called "word of mouth," and what you'll get is more and more people who attend her live performances and buy her CDs.
... how can anyone be against this great technology?
Wow! File sharing can raise the dead
If they turn up at the door wearing a badge, during a widely publicised door knock appeal, they might get a few bucks. But not if they call me out of the blue claiming to represent an organisation I cannot verify the identity of.
Fortran: a dead language?
Most informative and insightful post I've seen on this matter.
Nottingham Edward Us District Judge
1929 Stout St DENVER, CO 80294
303-844-5018
This is his WORK number. Anyone have his home number???I never knew that unwanted harassment on a system I pay to be a part of was "free" speech...
Suprisingly, a corporation's right to free speech is not on as solid a legal ground as the telemarketers think. It seems that the interpretation of the 14th Amendment as granting corporations the same rights as flesh and blood people is actually only found in the headnotes of a Supreme Court decision on Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad in 1886, not in the decision itself. The courts have built upon this shaky foundation, expanding corporate rights to include freedom of speech and rights to privacy. Unfortunately, it has never really been decided that corporations are entitled to those rights.
Oops.
Let's hope they sue. It should provide quite a bit of entertainment watching the courts try to uphold the wildly popular telemarketing bill while not accidentally stripping corporations of their rights of free speech. Remember, if corporations do not have freedom of speech, their political contributions would not be protected.
Most of my analysis programs and add-ins are written in Fortran. I've just had to buy an up to date compiler so that we can incorporate some new code into the models. I'm intrigued by the Fortran to C converters, but can't imagine trying to debug the code that would be produced.
Let's face it, for well structured problems like engineering analysis, the basic number crunching is best done in a simple language that is easy to read and somewhat resistant to programming tricks.
The basic task is
several enormous matrices->crunch-> more enormous matrices.
Sounds like Fortran to me.
So now free speech extends to waking me at 0-dark-thirty? Calling me along with 5 other people and then hanging up on me when one of the others answers a split-second sooner? Filling up my answering machine with such hangup calls?
No. Your right to swing your phone ends at annoying me in my own home without my express permission.
Tell Rehnquist to raise up his Learned Hand and strike down these judicially unsupportable attacks on the Do-Not-Call list.
Someone needs to fire that judge for being so daft about the rights regarding free speech.
If you can't even get our most basic rights correct, I'd hate to think how badly he butchers more obscure laws and rights.
If he's concerned about telemarketers being hated more than charitable organizations, political campaigns then maybe he should work to get a list for those going as well.
The American public has spoken against the telemarketers. The DNC list should go up for that.
Then he can bitch and moan to get a second list that people can sign up for so that charitable organizations can't call them.
And a third to keep politicians and their supporters from calling. Or maybe one for each party. Details.
We shouldn't lump them all together. And the bill as it stands, doesn't. Telemarketers are one clear cut category that doesn't need any further analysis. If you're calling to sell me something, you're a telemarketer. There are no loopholes in that one.
So shut the hell up Mister Judge, thank you very little. You should spend less time whinning about things you don't understand and more time educating yourself on basic human rights. "Free Speech" has nothing to do with this issue no matter how many times you repeat the lie to try to convince us otherwise.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
the judge's home phone
Telemarketer: Good evening sir. Are you interested in buying a coupon book to support your local charity?
Me: Not right now, but if you can give me a call tomorrow morning at <Judge's phone number>, I'll buy a few. I love to support charities!
TM: <Judge's phone number>. Is that correct?
Me: Yes.
TM: Thank you sir!
vodka, straight up, thank you!
\begin{tinfoil hat}
I see now! Hell hasn't frozen over. It's all a conspiracy! The Senators passed the Do Not Call List, and then had their buddies challenged it. Now the well meaning diligent congress critters, can come to the american public and say, "You know we'd like to stop telemarketers, but this misguided first amendment is getting in our way." It's just a setup for the patriot act 2 where we loose are freedom of Speech! Terrorism wasn't scary enough, but as everyone knows it's inconvience that really gets Americans all rile'd up.
\end{tinfoil hat}
Us /. users may have an unfair advantage over people new to computers here. Removing unneeded letters is how we fit everything into DOS 8.3 filenames!
Karma: Marginal (mostly due to the border around the website)
There is another open source Fortran. Look at
http://www.openwatcom.org/
To quote the site,
Open Watcom is a joint effort between SciTech Software Inc, Sybase(R), and the Open Source development community to maintain and enhance the Sybase Watcom C/C++ and Fortran compiler products. Plans for Open Watcom include porting the compiler to the Linux and FreeBSD platforms, as well as updating the compilers to support the latest C and C++ ANSI standards.
The Open Watcom development team has released version 1.1. You can download the source and binaries here.
This is the Constitution.This is the Constitution under the Bush administration. Any questions?
While Walt was certainly a major part of the F effort, it was not his work alone. Dick Hendrickson, David Epstein, Michael Metcalf, John Reid and Loren Meissner all had hands in it (working from memory).
In it's early days, it was a preprocessor which enforced restrictions, and relied upon a full compiler behind it to actually do the compilation. It used to be mated to more than one compiler as a backend.
I fail to see how anyone can claim that calling me at 5:00 pm while I'm eating dinner to sell me life insurance or ask if I REALLY want to change phone companies for the umpteenth time is 'free speech'.
As a wise man once said, 'Your right to swing your arms back and forth, ends where my face begins.'
Just as standing on a suburban corner with a bullhorn at 4:00 am yelling out my political agenda for world domination isn't protected by free speech (as it violates noise ordinances), stopping telemarketers from calling my house is not violating their free speech rights. Their are perfectly allowed to have their views on which phone company the average American should be using, they can even publish, or state them, they just shouldn't be allowed to call me and personally bug me about it.
There are two items I'd like to address:
1. Please call this judge (since he believes in free speech) on his public phone and use your right to free speech to calmly and politely tell them that you are very upset that he ruled in favor of private for profit corporations to ring your private, individually funded, telephone.
Judge Edward W. Nottingham
Alfred A. Arraj United States Courthouse A1041 / Courtroom 14
(303) 844-5018
2. To address this entire situation: I'd like to say that I feel that it is completely insane! The fact of the matter is, there are already laws in place that opt a person out when a telemarketer calls. If simply you tell a telemarketer to no longer call you, they can't call you for 10 years! This law is on the books and sets a prior precedent.
Here are a few links that clearly state this fact:
FTC
Junkbusters
So this brings me to this question... What in the hell are the telemarketers trying to prove? That the RIAA is not the only one that can piss off their target market?
The do-not-call list is even better for telemarketers as it provides only 5 years of protection and it saves them the time AND the money from having to maintain and collect data on their own lists!
Can someone help me understand how any of this free speech platform they are using is in any way valid at all?
The anti-RIAA article continues the fallacy that musicicians don't need the recording industry. Without writing a book, let me just pose the alternative. You want to be famous, and you think you have a good band. How are you going to get the half million or so to produce a studio quality album and get anyone on any radio station to play a track? This cost money. Go to a bank and propose a loan for $1M without any real collateral and see how long before security escorts you to the door.
Vote for Pedro
Now it's from English -> German -> English -> Japanese -> English aka ALL YOUR BASE!!!!
Like opinion of the specialist of basic language study in the nameless map, and the everyday onlooker of the research namely internal letter which is not quoted on opposite side it is easy to confuse in the English Colombia, the sufficient university to the condition machine conversion being doubtful at first glance.
Sean R.-Gallagher, Esq.
c t.asp?at t_id=2410&att_nm=Sean+R%2E+Gallagher
j pg
e vereRobe rt.cfm
o nald.c fm
Marianne N. Hallinan, Esq.
Hogan & Hartson
1200 17d1 Street, Suite 1500
Denver, CO 80202
Attorneys for Plaintiffs
DENVER OFFICE
One Tabor Center
1200 Seventeenth Street, Suite 1500
Denver, CO 80202
Tel: (303) 899-7300
Fax: (303) 899-7333
Contact: Ty Cobb
Niki Tuttle
Send SEAN an email:
http://www.hhlaw.com/site/directory/conta
Say "Hello!" to Marianne:
http://www.hhlaw.com/site/photos/5509.
Or, perhaps, call their Washington, DC home office:
WASHINGTON, D.C. OFFICE
555 Thirteenth Street, NW
Washington, DC 20004
Tel: (202) 637-5600
Fax: (202) 637-5910
Contact: Warren Gorrell
Robert Com-Revere, Esq.
Ronald G. London, Esq.
Davis Wright Tremaine, LLP
1500 K Street, N. W., Suite 450
Washington, D.C. 20005
Attorneys for Plaintiffs
Washington, D.C. Office
Suite 450
1500 K Street NW
Washington, D.C. 20005-1272
Main: (202) 508-6600
Fax: (202) 508-6699
Email: washingtondc@dwt.com
Robbie's personal page with phone, email, and !!! Outlook VCard!
http://www.dwt.com/lawdir/attorneys/CornR
Ronnie's 'neck-o' the woods' with the same
http://www.dwt.com/lawdir/attorneys/LondonR
I'm sure they'll enjoy citizens using their published information as much as we love telemarkets using ours....
ENJOY!
10 MD
I thought it was long decided that commerical speach wasn't entitled to 1st Amendment protections. Or are they claiming that telemarketers aren't "commercial speach" now?
I am not trolling, seriously .. if it's not end to end encryption whats the use??
.. but that doesnt mean I want them to see what I'm saying to my GF!!
Yes, I trust my friends
Are there public WASTE networks out there? Seeing the P2P app with the coolest name go under for lack of public support would be a downer.
It would be... umm... a WASTE.
I don't think so. With about $50,000, one can perform all the tasks required to obtain the equipment to record an album. While in school, we produced albums of local bands for about $400 by using a local recording arts schools equipment during the non-teaching times.
Sound Forge, Pro Tools, MARS Music, a few sheets of sound insulation, microphones, mixing boards.. etc.. etc... You must be getting your number from the Studios that charge an arm and leg because they leased the expresso machine and purchased all the stainless steel/glass lamp/furniture to market their bullshit studio, while at the same time while leasing their posh space in downtown X. I think a fold up 8 foot table will do just fine that you very much.
I have to say that i believed the first ruling to be a contrived technicality, while I see this ruling as having some merit. I mean look at the two big reasons why tele-marketers are considered such a scourge. Calling at inopportune time and deceitful statements.
The first applies to any tele-marketer. If I am macking my date, do I care if the person calling me is from 'chaney gas guzzler rewards program' or the 'bush drunk driver defense fund'. Hell no.
The second is not direct, but really applies to both as well. I do not know how things are now, but it was not so long ago that charities were getting in trouble for spending significant percentages of their income on non-serve items. It was also not so long ago when the tele-markets were keeping significant percentages of their take, allegedly up to 90%, for their own profits. Both of these made the charities non-profit in name only. This non-profit status was beneficial because it allowed the officer to run corrupt organizations without getting in trouble with the IRS or shareholdes, both whom would otherwise would require profit to made every once in a while.
Furthermore what would stop tele-markets from combining non-profit and commercial customers. For a donation of X you get a premium and a handy coupon book for further purchases. The non-profit part of the telemarketing company becomes a loss leader, with the telemarketing firm keeping their traditional 85%, but using it to pay for the comical customer for the premium. The commercial customers pays a higher rate for each commercial call in order to pay for the sale through the non-profit channel, and the telemarketing gets further kickbacks if the coupon book is used.
Which is just to say I think the non-profit exemption was a hack to appease certain parties, like the religious right, the public employee unions (most of the calls I get come from the policeman funds) and the powerful medical lobby. It really has no legal basis and quite frankly I think the bill will be much more useful it the exemption is struck. I was kind of thinking that the tele-marketers would use the exemption as an opportunity, like I have shown above, but they obviously are not that smart.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
If I had sex with Hemos, I would post AC too!
server ip is 216.135.68.133
http://216.135.68.133/waste.php to paste your public keys in.
my public ip is on that webpage
Please dont slam me too hard, I will shut this down in 1 hour.
This is why text in all CAPS is more difficult to read.
If you rearrange letters so the shape of the word stays the same then we can read it.
What is the count of students with failing grades?
How many people LIE each minute? (The speaker for instance!)
How many people STEAL in this country????
HOW MANY PEOPLE USE MS WINDOWS????????
but discards facilities such as EQUIVALENCE, which are difficult to teach, use, or debug Eh? EQUIVALENCE is the substitute for the lack of pointers that makes FORTRAN usable. Sheesh! Next these people will be telling us that GOTOs are bad for your health.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Judge Nottingham's decision on the Do-Not-Call list today is extremely disappointing. But why stop there? Indeed, why should commercial speech be favored over non-commercial speech? I wonder what would happen if this judge were to rule on the constitutionality of the DMCA, esp. with respect to DeCSS...
It's disappointing that the telemarketers have been able to cast this as a freedom of speech issue. Freedom of speech has nothing to do with it.
The issue is intrusion. You are free to say whatever you want, but you don't have the right to intrude into my home to say it. I have the right to deny the use of my property to any person or group if I so choose. A telephone in my home is not public property, it's my property.
I clicked through the link in parent and saw the Goatse receiver.
A good editor might have suggested a different singer...Eva Cassidy is dead. The tragedy of her death was the best "marketing angle" the record company had.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
server ip is 216.135.68.133
http://216.135.68.133/waste.php to paste your public keys in.
my public ip is on that webpage
Please dont slam me too hard, I will shut this down in 1 hour.
My potato gun was confiscated by the United Nations. They said I wasn't allowed to have weapons of mash destruction.
Chief Justice Berger, U.S. Supreme Court:
"Nothing in the Constitution compels us to listen to or view any unwanted communication, whatever its merit. We categorically reject the argument that a vendor has a right under the Constitution or otherwise to send unwanted material into the home of another. If this prohibition operates to impede the flow of even valid ideas, the answer is that no one has a right to press even 'good' ideas on an unwilling recipient. The asserted right of a mailer, we repeat, stops at the outer boundary of every person's domain."
The fourteenth amendment to the U.S. Constitution had the unintended consequence of giving corporations almost the same rights as citizens under the First Amendment as natural persons. To learn more, Google Search for corporate personhood
Will I retire or break 10K?
The 1st amendment guarantees the right to speak, not the right for an audience. The do-not-call list isn't preventing them from speaking; it is just telling them that they will have to find a new obtrusive way into people's lives. This happens all the time. Protests, rallies, marches, demonstrations, and all the like, are told that they can protest all they want. But they are given specific locations and times so they do not aggressively assert their right to protest over the rights of others to ignore them.
In any public or private venue, I can walk right past anyone exercising their right to free speech without acknowledging their presence or going out of my way to ignore them. When it comes to telemarketing, I have no such luxury. The list is a way for people to opt-out if they believe they will never buy a product or service. By opting out, they are saying "If I need a product or service, as an adult, I am fully capable of finding it myself."
I am on my states do-not-call list, I use an unlisted number, and I have privacy manager. It has taken all three of these to convince me to get another land line telephone. That is what it took for me to get another land line. Before this, constant marketing calls and cheap cellular airtime were the two reasons I had cell only service for 3 years. Now, the only sales/marketing calls I receive are the ones I signed up for. The only reasons I still deal with them are because I called them first, I use their products, and they are non-profit charities. When used properly, telemarketing can be useful to both sides. The people at the local VFW actually know how long a box of trash bags lasts me, and give me a call a few days before I run out.
Don't set long pasages of text in ALL CAPS or even SMALL CAPS-it makes every word a box that has to be speled out letter by letter.
whenyou do set a word in all caps or small caps, give extra letter spacing to facilitate quick, accurate individual letter recognition
if you want to slow down the reader through a particular passage use italics, otherwise use it sparingly to higlight or cite.
Use proper word and line(leading) spacing to faciltate smooth eye movement and easy reconition of word shape,
for reading text use serif over non serif faces, although a good non-serif is still better than a bad serif typeface. The reason is that the serifs of a good serif face help define both the letter shape and add extra information to better define the word shape. more detail and some links to other sources...
The ironic thing about this is that Colorado has had a do-not-call list -- with similar exceptions for charities and politicians -- for over a year.
Courts routinely exempt "commercial speech" from freedom of speech protection. Not that I'd complain about equal protection against begging calls from charities, mind, but that'd be a tougher one to get through. (And a bill outlawing telephone solitications from political organizations would be defeated by about the same margins as this one was passed -- and probably would violate 1st Amendment.)
-- Alastair
Us /. users may have an unfair advantage over people new to computers here.
Hr, prhps, bt nt 'vrwhr. Hbrw 'nd "rbc 'r wrttn mstl wth cnsnnts, yt ntv spkrs cn rd th lnggs flntl. ("n ths dmnstrtn, th 'pstrph 'ndcts ' glttl stp, tht 's, whr ' vwl bgns ' wrd.)
<Here, perhaps, but not everywhere. Hebrew and Arabic are written mostly with consonants, yet netive speakers can read the languages fluently. (In this demonstration, the apostrophe indicates a glottal stop, that is, where a vowel begins a word.)>
Will I retire or break 10K?
This must mean it would also be free speech for me to call the home of these idiot judges and tell them how utterly retarded that is. Over and over again. Even if the judge asked me to not call again.
Oh, and by the way, it's "take effect".
Fun with Anagarams! LADS HOST, SHALT DOS. HAS DOLTS. AD SLOTHS, HATS SOLD. ASS HO, LTD.
Fine. Let's TAX every telemarketing call. $20 per call.
On a personal note, a couple of years ago I stopped being sarcastic (or abusive) to telemarketers and simply interrupted them immediately and told them to remove me from their call list. Every single time. This has been more successful than you might think. I now get less than one call a week. Since the current law excludes charities, political groups and polling organizations, these guys will keep trying. But my experience is that they, too, go away when you tell them to.
The one thing that still is bugging me is the pre-recorded stuff. I am not willing to listen to the whole pitch so that I can tell them to piss off. If anyone has figured out a better way to deal with this than just hanging up, I would love to hear about it.
My dream compiler, back in the days when I was doing high school CS assignments using mark sense cards on an IBM 370. (Aaah, those were the days)
l il ty.htm
I quick google search revealed that a native 8086 version of it is now freely available at:
http://digilander.libero.it/saracos/Download/ut
Funny how a University of Waterloo compiler would wind up in Italy. Now, if I can just spark up an old PC-XT somewhere...
My rights don't need management.
Does this mean my wife can share her 13,000 MP3s to utter impunity? (Note: irony). After all, she is a grandmother (she had her son when she was 16, and became a grandmother 6 years ago). I realize we live in a youth-obsessed culture, but there are few people who are as obsessed with music as my wife. Yeah, and some amount of new stuff as well.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
The Gummint is not preemptively suppressing speech based on content or source, it is telling them to leave us the hell alone when they won't listen to us asking them to do that ourselves.
Unfortunately, the government DID make an error in crafting the law. They made an exception for charities, polls, and political campaigns.
By distinguishing those from commercial speech and refusing to protect you from them, they have suppressed some speech but not others based both on content AND source. The choice of classes is obviously politically motivated. And there is precedent that commercial and political speech are equally protected.
Now if the government HADN'T excepted political speech they would no doubt have run into other free-speech arguments for suppressing political speech. Similar (though less compelling) arguments might be made for suppressing polls or charities - and religious charities might make a freedom-of-religion argument as well.
The government MIGHT be able to get around this by operating separate don't-call lists for each of the classes, allowing the telephone user to make a separate choice for each one. That way your argument that they're just enforcing the stated will of the telephone user, rather than selectively suppressing speech based on content or source, would hold more water.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I didn't think WASTE was supposed to scale to huge sizes.
One application I'm currently using WASTE in is in research labs. My advisor has 2 clients running on his computer. The 2 nets are his 2 collaboration groups, which don't include the same professors. PDFs, drafts of grant proposals, TIFF, JPG et. al. go wizzing around in the private networks. In all, it's proven to be a pretty effective way of pushing data around and contacting other professors. E-mail is still king of the heap when it comes to non-time-sensitive stuff, but the ability to talk IM-style for quick messages is appreciated.
My gf, who is a Linguist says "Linguists can get their tongue round anything", something I highly approve of. :-)
James
However, the government has already divided speech into classes, several times. Aside from the obvious "yelling fire in a theater" case, take a look at campaign finance legislation. You can run a car commercial a month before an election, but you can't run an independant political ad. The supreme court is deliberating on that issue right now, so I imagine that will have some bearing on this case eventually.
Unfortunately for those who favor the DNC list, the newest ruling implies that neither the FTC or Congress can make a DNC list, so October 1 looks like it's not even a possibility.
On an incidental sidenote, what happens to the numbers on the DNC between now and whenever it goes into effect? I assume since the telemarketers said they needed until October 1 to prepare for this thing that they've got the list in order to put together a system to make sure the numbers don't get called. Does that now become a 50,000,000 number list for them to use?
Someone get me the name and address of the judge who made this ruling.. I want to go stomping into his bedroom at 4 in the morning and proclaim loudly that I have a wonderful long distance calling program for him. I'll be exercising my freedom of speech, right?
It is becoming fashionable to legislate from the bench; while there has always been a right to free speech, there has never been a right to force people to listen to you. Telemarketers drive me crazy because I work a night shift; they think the best time to call is while I am asleep. I leave the phone in case of an emergency; I am almost to the point where I'm going to purchase a call screening appliance to restrict incoming access to well known numbers.
The only problem I had with the DNC registry was the loophole made for charitable organizations. Recently, they've been the worst abusers.. I've been woken up twice this week by opinion pollers from nonprofit organizations.
Weapons of Mass Analysis
Please post the errors gcc gives when compiling the Windows client on Linux and linking it with winelib. One of us more familiar with porting software may be able to help you.
Will I retire or break 10K?
One of the best features of WASTE is that it is fully secure, using link-level encryption and public key authentication.
"Security: WASTE uses link-level encryption to secure links, and public keys for authentication. RSA is used for session key exchange and authentication, and the links are encrypted using Blowfish in PCBC mode."
Also, it should be noted that waste is only for small scale use, around 50 nodes at most.
Moderation Totals: Flamebait=2, Troll=1, Redundant=1, Insightful=6, Overrated=1, Underrated=1, Total=12. (not mine)
The parent post catured my first thought about this "It's a consiracy to limit first ammendment rights under the guise of eliminating telemarketing."
Guess this means you made me into a tinfoil hat paranoid now. THANKS ALOT GUYS!
FORTRAN, like BASIC and COBOL, are supposed to be written in all caps. Pascal and Ada are exceptions.
After reading the most recent decision for blocking the FTC's do-not-call registry, it seems like there is a simple solution. The judge's reasoning was that since the Gov't didn't treat all telemarketing calls equally (e.g., political and religious calls aren't blocked), it was taking to big a part in things.
Solution: Provide a mechanism for us to block ALL calls, including religious and political calls. It should be easy enough to set up a list of check boxes on the do-not-call registry web site, identifying various kinds of calls. That way, if you wanted to block religious and political, but accept the sales pitches, you could do so.
But then again, can you see the people in Gov't who make these rules blocking themselves from making such calls?
>So what you get is a fully funtional compiler
Without an EQUIVALENCE statement? You'll be saying he's left out GOTO next!
Oh the joys of patching the operating system with creative use of the EQUVALENCE statement and negative array subscripts.
Phil.
It seems that a simple inversion of the internal characters of a word is the worst case of internal letter rearrangement (i.e., the aggregate displacement of letters is maximised in the inversion). So we should have predicted that the inversion is hardest to read.
Note also that larger words have more possible combinations of rearrangement, and average a higher aggregate displacement... and the UBC counterexample, in fine post-secondary form, uses big words.
pinhead judges need educating. my right to freedom of association is equal to theirs of free speech... and frankly, their right to swing their fists ends just short of my nose. either the judges take our first amendment rights back for us, or we'll just have to take them back ourselves.
this is getting increasingly bizarre. where do they get these pinheads, and can any of them read and write?
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
An Ode to Personified Sausage
I don?t want to see
your shirt tight-cotton stretched
small casing to fat frame
cellulite pleading to escape;
a sausage overstuffed
and lumpy.
Ironic descriptors arched across
taut-strained shorts seat
Flirt Princess Cutie
Attractive.
Cigarette in corpulent hand,
I walk behind
but can?t move around before
a disgusting cloud
is exhaled in my face;
if binging on nicotine controlled weight
it would have worked by now.
Gathering in gaggles of those like you,
moving in a herd.
Decrying the evil things men do
like you would know.
Rejecting and rejected by society,
your mom says you?re just healthy.
Despair drives you to consume more,
you have a disability.
Why don?t you sue Jimmy Dean?
Indeed, some languages, e.g., formal Hebrew (or was it an archaic form thereof?), are properly written as consonants only.
saepk for ylesruof
It seems to me that the "do not call" list does the telemarketers a favor, by giving them advance notice of those who will decline politely (at best) or curse and slam the phone down (my choice). Anybody who registers will, most likely, belong to that group who have no interest in whatever might be offered. The telemarketers can then concentrate their efforts on the ignorami who aren't even aware of the do-not-call list (and therefore make the best marks), as well as those who know about opt-out list but prefer to remain callable (i.e. friends and relatives of the telemarketers, and the very, very lonely).
Before you flame me for what I'm about to say, I fully support the list. I hate telemarketers. The first judge (West) didn't have a problem with the list, just that the FCC was supposed to implement it, but then delegated illegally to the FTC. Congress has fixed that (in ONE DAY!) and El Presidente will sign it tomorrow (hey, even he's not that stupid). So Judge West was actually correct in his ruling. But it's been fixed, so it's a moot point.
/. and add a few checkboxes to the form... Have the VM guy add a few choices to the phone system...
The latest debacle is because the exemptions the FTC has carved out for charities, politicos, and surveys is essentially arbitrary. They can't do it. It's known in legal circles as a prior restraint on speech and with very narrow exceptions, is a no-no.
But they can EASILY fix it (and in probably less than one day). The lawsuit will go away, the list will live on, and everyone will be happy.
All they have to do is give you several choices:
1) Prohibit ALL unsolicited calls, no matter who they're from
2) Prohibit ALL commercial for-profit calls AND/OR
3) Prohibit ALL charitable solicition calls AND/OR
4) Prohibit ALL political calls AND/OR
5) Prohibit ALL survey calls...
That's it. Have the DBA stop eating and add a few fields. Have the web developer stop surfing
Problem solved... This setup - where the Gvmt doesn't get to decide what you get or don't get, but must simply issue the Order to protect you as you demand is supported in Supreme Court case law and other laws dealing with junk mail.
Oh, and by the way, I TOLD this to the FTC already back in January 2002 when I submitted a comment regarding the DNC list... Guess I was right eh?
My gf, who is a Linguist says "Linguists can get their tongue round anything",
;-)
Especially if they're a cunning linguist!
The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
You confuse "affect" and "effect" in a story also about scambled words ? Too rich.
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
Keep the pressure on your Congresscritters to make sure that the FTC fights this ruling, or comes up with a solution that doesn't conflict with the constitution and achieves the goal of ending unwanted telemarketing calls.
Ultimately, if it turns out that there is no constitutionally acceptable and effective solution, the next step is amending the constitution. Judging by the amount of angst telemarketing calls cause, it might just be possible to get an amendment up on this issue...
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
The problem at hand is the number of ways of arranging five or six particular letters (as is the case for the Jumbles(R) puzzles in some newspapers).
Your numbers are those for the number of distinct six- and five-letter orderings from all 26 letters, allowing repetition.
As noted by a burried AC post, the numbers for the problem at hand are 6! and 5!, giving an increase in the number of permutations of a factor of six (assuming all the letters are distinct, which is less likely with the longer jumbles, but whatever).
Would it be fair if the record companies started organising hired goons to harass the EFF's lawyers?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Well, back when the first part of Card's article on copyright was posted I found myself to be rather unimpressed by what he had written. My posting regarding that can be found here.
This part is somewhat better. I agree with his position that it's rather weird to pursue music fans for music piracy and that the increasingly hostile efforts of copyright holders are going to result in a backlash.
Nevertheless his proposals for reform are laughable.
When a corporation is listed as the "author" of a copyrighted work, then what does lifetime-plus-twenty or lifetime-plus-fifty really mean? Whose lifetime?
Well, when a corporation is listed as the author of a work, this only ever happens in the case of works for hire. Assignments of copyright don't change the authorship. The funny thing is, the law is awfully clear in 17 USC 302(c), that the term for works for hire are NOT based on the life of the author, it is a flat "95 years from the year of its first publication, or a term of 120 years from the year of its creation, whichever expires first."
This is awfully easy stuff -- if he's looked at copyrights he shouldn't be screwing this up.
And extending copyright to ludicrous lengths of time is against the public interest.
I totally agree with this. One hundred percent.
Twenty years after the author's death or the author's hundredth birthday, whichever comes last -- that's a workable standard to provide for the author and his or her immediate heirs.
Sadly, Card is merely reducing an insanely ludicrous length that we have now, to a mere ludicrous length. It's still ludicrous, though.
Copyright isn't intended to provide for authors and especially not to provide for their heirs. Which, incidentally, copyright is very BAD at doing, since few authors make enough money, or for enough time, to ever support themselves or their heirs. Many creative works have no economic value and most have no economic value after a short period of time. Card is making the mistake of thinking that his experiences as a successful author are anything at all other than atypical.
If Card wants authors to make money, he should encourage them to go out and get jobs. If Card wants authors' heirs to be provided for, he should support social welfare systems. What Card cannot do is he cannot force people to buy books, which is the basically the way that an author makes money from his copyrights, and while he wants to make up for that by making terms last for a long time, that still won't make people buy books.
Like it or not, most authors do not make money by dint of being authors. Art is not a lucrative pursuit for the vast majority of artists. Some artists are lucky, but that alone shouldn't dictate our policy.
And let's eliminate this nonsense about corporate authorship.
Here, Card has a reasonable point at least, though I disagree with him. There's a place for works for hire, first of all, and besides which, I see no rational way of preventing the common practice of copyright assignments anyway, which means that there's really no point. An author might not experience this normally, but how many people might be said to be authors of a movie? It's potentially hundreds of people -- ownership by so many is exactly why we don't have certain forms of commons. It just isn't feasible.
If a corporation claims to be the "author" for copyright purposes, then the whole life of the copyright should be twenty years, period.
I think the whole life of a copyright ought to be twenty years period no matter what. Why stop with only works for hire?
Frankly, I think FIVE years is enough, with some types of creative works (read: not software) being eligible for five year extensions up to a maximum of twenty to twenty-five years. Copyrights should be no longer than necessary; if an author can't be bothered to frequently reassert his de
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
NT
It takes only a 3/4 vote to pass a constitutional amendment. If they have enough votes to make something an amendment, that should be enough to make it a lesser law without question. It seems reasonable that a judge shouldn't overturn an almost unanimous vote, followed by another even more unanimous vote to reaffirm. Judges don't vote. It just takes one of them having a distorted/biased/lobbied view of the constitution to overturn a good and constitutionally legal law. If they keep that up, reading in between the lines and overturning unanimous and reaffirmed bills to fill their own wallets, it'll be the topic of the next constitutional amendment. Such an amendment should of course be passed but I don't want to wait that long to see this go into effect.
Plus as others have pointed out it's commercial speech, which many courts have upheld is not protected by the first amendment.
Luckily Congress can impeach judges. I hope they don't forget that.
I downloaded the WASTE source, just so that I'll have it if AOL takes it down again, and to perhaps mess around with it. Sounds like fun.
Lloyd SommererWant to annoy your friends? Scramble their websites.
Despite the claims, after spending concious effort in reading the first three words of that phrase, I was easily able to scan over the rest of it. Disclaimer: I am a speed reader, hence my automatic recognition ability may be a little more sensitive than some.
While this does appear harder to decypher than mere scrambling, my brain was able to easily get in the pattern of automatic recognition just like the scramble. I really do not think this is a fair comparision anyway.
The brain recognises words based on patterns. By scrambling the inner contents of a word, you do not aversely affect the letter distribution (this will vary depending on the length of the word) nor the brains ability to still immediately recognise most words in this distorted state. However, inversing the inner contents of a word is a completely different function - you are deliberatly inversing letter distances, not simply distorting the content.
Obviously, this is going to make it harder. However, for me at least, it only took a few words to get my brain in the pattern to automatically reverse as I scanned the text.
NO! the fourteenth amendment did not give corporations rights. That came from separate rulings (equally tortured)
The 14th amendment DID give Congress authority to enforce those rights, as previously the federal gov. simply did not have jurisdiction over most of it.
This has been the legal foundation for most of the important rulings from the supreame court. (Roe vs Wade, recent sodemy case, ten commandments in state court buildings, prayer in schools etc.) All of these rely on this interpretation of the 14th amendment. without it, it all falls to the individual states.
When I hang up on said telemarketer will I get arrested for violating his free speech rights?
Or worse-- be forced to listen to his sales pitch?
With all respect... So What?
The article didn't say, "if you reversed the internal letters"; it said if you randomly shuffle the internal letters...
No offense, but it's not a leap of intellect to figure out if you put the letters in the LEAST RECOGNIZABLE order it is going to make it harder to read...
And as the original article pointed out, it works much better for smaller words than larger ones.
Thank you captain obvious...
Next they'll tell me I am not allowed to cover my ears when a child cries out in the bus
Us /. users may have an unfair advantage over people new to computers here. Removing unneeded letters is how we fit everything into DOS 8.3 filenames!
Honestly, since Windows got long filenames in 1995, and other operating systems having had it for longer, who has really had to do that? /.ers and other technically minded people may have some advantage, but so would people who use SMS or IM frequently.
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!
I agree with MrLint that only living breathing people should have rights. Unfortunately, a pro-business Supreme Court held a slightly different opinion back in 1886. The writing of the opinion has a minor twist, but from a legal standpoint, it became precident.
Fortunately, since then the rights of corporations have been scaled back a bit (a rich man can spend whatever he wants to get elected, but a rich corp can't), but it'd be nice to have a nice tidy upper court decision to clear this bizarre legal theory off the books.
Luke, help me take this mask off
Added -> Korean -> English
Inside British Colombia soul wavering inside the nameless map basic specialist together opinion of language study, with by a research from the namely inside which it does not refer in easy opposition side is doubtful everyday in the onlooker and and the first flash the college which is sufficient in the situation machine conversion which is.
While it's a vast improvement over Fortran 77, I suspect most modernprogrammers Fortran 9x is not a particularly pleasant language to program in compared to many other languages; most developers probably wouldn't use it even if it had decent Linux support.
The "F" compiler breaks the one thing that makes Fortran 9x still somewhat attractive: fairly seamless backwards compatibility with Fortran 77. With Fortran 9x, at least you can take dusty deck Fortran 77 programs and without too much work add "advanced" features like dynamic memory allocation to them.
However, the fact that there are no open source Fortran 9x compilers for Linux is probably an additional problem for its adoption. People who might otherwise try to port Fortran 77 programs to Fortran 9x now just rewrite the stuff in C++. But, hey, overall, we are probably better off because of that.
Waste was removed because AOL told them to, now one of the sourceforge mirrors for it is twtelecom.dl.sourceforge.net. Yes, Time Warner Telecom, who is owned by AOL Time Warner is now offering it again. :-)
There were eight House members who voted against the bill to save the "Do Not Call" list at the FTC.
Bishop (UT) 202-225-0453
Meek (FL) 202-225-4506
Strickland 202-225-5705
Cannon 202-225-7751
Paul 202-225-2831
Terry 202-225-4155
Flake 202-225-2635
Ryan (OH) 202-225-5261
Come Friday morning, give em a call
Re. your sig: "We GAVE peace a chance. Boycott the ANTI-war machine."
Like heck we did. We claimed that the UN inspectors weren't finding weapons of mass destruction that we knew for a fact to exist, and basically short-circuted the lawful process for resolving these sorts of problems, including implying (and sometimes outright stating) that everyone else was lying, incompetent, or both.
Now that it turns out that we (or I should say, the Bush administration) was lying and/or incompetent, we go hat in hand asking the world to help pay to clean up the mess. The majority of the hijackers were Saudi Arabian; North Korea has nuclear weapons and may have delivery systems that could reach the western US. And instead of dealing with the real issues we are bogged down in a land war in asia, facing a $87,000,000,000.00 bill to rebuild a country that was never a credible threat. What sort of American wouldn't be against that sort of lunacy?
I am an American, and a republican, and I'm mad as all-get-out about what Bush has done. In the long run he may well turn out to have done more damage to our country than any president in recent history, and more damage to our party than any president (including Nixon).
-- MarkusQ
If that's what being a liberterian is, you can keep it.
My friend, an ex-terrormarketer, writes:
"I once worked for one of the most evil telemarketing companies ever. We would call people and ask them all kinds of personal questions. Things like where they worked, how many children they had, and so on. Then we would call their neighbors and have them confirm what they just told us.
More often than not, people would tell me to fuck off. Then I'd call their neighbors, and their neighbors would sell them out and tell me everything I wanted to know in a heartbeat. "Bob still works at Sears? Thanks. Two kids living at home? Thanks. I appreciate your help, Mister."
Muahahahaha.
We were allowed to do anything we wanted to get that data -- anything at all. I lied about my identity a lot. Sometimes I was a detective for the local police department. Sometimes I worked for the Social Security Agency. Sometimes I was confirming entries for that sweepstakes company. Anything to get the data. If that didn't work, I would harass people until they cracked. I had neighbors ratting on each other. I'd swap project books with a co-worker and we'd call each other's contacts, pretending to be "supervisors."
I was working in the belly of evil, and I became evil. I reveled in my evilness. I laughed and laughed at the things I did. I was like an evil god with a phone and a license to harass. I couldn't get fired because I got results. Nothing I did was too outrageous. It was a good time to be alive.
So now, when telemarketers call me, I know exactly where they are coming from, and I cut them no slack whatsoever."
I write today with Java, Delphi, C++, C#, etc, assumed to be OO, not on level Smalltalk or Python, etc, but anyway. (IMHO) I love Delphi ! Now, when it comes to performance I have just two choises, assembler or Fortran and I take Fortran any day. Why Fortran, first, it is one of the simplest languages and all the compilers know how to optimize, it translates almost straight to machine language in any hw architecture. It also has working libraries for most known tasks today ( a long time! ). have a nice day.
You take this way too seriously/personally. You must have the tummy grumbles because you are a telemarketer (aka: hard working american who has to take a job to feed their FAMILY).
Take a hint or two:
1. It's not the monkey on the other end of the phone we're so angry at. It's the telemarketing businesses. Stop working for them and they will go away.
2. Can I spend a minute to be nice to them? No. If you presume to know that I can, then the stock answer to you is no. My time is too valuable.
3. Civil while people call me on the phone? Case by case. If a telemarketer continues to try and talk their spiel overtop of my protests to stop, THEN I GUESS I'LL JUST HAVE TO GET A LITTLE MORE LOUD AND GRUFF, WON'T I?!?!?
4. Do I think the offer might be worth listening to? Absolutely not. It is not worth listening to. I use the intarweb to search/research/buy everything I want, therefore I have damn near everything I want except for electronics. I'm one of those people you hate buying presents for, because unless it's electronic, you won't have any luck. If it IS electronic, I know exactly what model I want, and chances are you haven't picked the same one.
5. Phone? Subsidy? Facts, please. That sounds like bullshit.
Further: There are jobs all over the place. The problem is not a lack of jobs, but a feeling that certain jobs are somehow "beneath you." I am a Ph.D. candidate in one of the core sciences. Over the term of my undergraduate and graduate work I have scooped shit, rendered fowl for food products, pushed food to customers in a restaurant, taken care of thousands of mice in a mouse research facility, built axles for DANA, and I've even pushed a broom or two. I think that if you consider the mental acumin it takes to accomplish success in any of these jobs you will find that it is "beneath" me. It wasn't beneath my pride, though, and especially not when grant money was tight and I had to find a pick-up job for the sake of the family.
Is it a tribute to the underground mail system (W.A.S.T.E.) in Thomas Pychon's book The Crying of Lot 49?
If it is that is supremly badass.
Hollow words will burn and hollow men will burn.
Actually,as soon as I got the meme mail with the news on the "scrambled letters are readable", I've put together this script to do it.
As I noted that a large text could become hard to read, I choose to limit the scrambling only to the 2nd-5th letters of each word...gives out great readability.
To get the source, go one directory up.
-><- no
I would certainly have the right to curse at somebody who cut me off in traffic. That's free speech.
If I were to call people and random and start cursing at them when they pick up the phone, this would be considered obnoxious behavior, right?
Free speech has nothing to do with behavior.
Besides, haven't courts ruled that commercial speech has less protection than other forms of speech?
Unix, because it's a terrible inconvenience to type four letters instead of two!
From the story
... 'Some animals are more equal than
But late Thursday, U.S. District Judge Edward Nottingham in Denver stepped into the fray, giving telemarketers a critical legal victory.
Nottingham agreed with the telemarketers' claims that allowing charitable solicitations but banning commercial calls "borrows from the reasoning of the pigs in George Orwell's 'Animal Farm.'
others.'"
I agree with the judge to a certain extent. Letting non-profit companies and orginisations and politicians call me is just plain wrong. They should rewrite the law and ban ALL telemarketing calls. They can use an opt-in list for anyone who wants calls from non-profits or politicians.
I hope all slashdotters will join me by boycotting every non-profit company or orginisation who calls them after they sign up for the do-not-call list, and by voting for the opponent of every politician who calls them after they have signed up for the do-not-call list. Fuck all of these weasels who think it's OK to call you when you have signed up for a list that clearly states that YOU DO NOT WANT TO BE CALLED! I signed up for the list because I don't want to be called so don't call me! A lifetime boycott and a lifetime of voting for your opponent awaits any company or politician who calls me. If everyone would do the same, we could finally end the scourge of telemarketing that this loophole in the law allows to continue.
Virtually no jurisdictions still require one to swear on a Bible. In the federal courts, a witness is required to swear or affirm that they will tell the truth, and no reference to God is made.
What god is responsible for "acts of God"?
This is a term of art chiefly used in insurance contracts. It means nothing more than, roughly, "utterly unpredictable catastrophe". The term isn't used or given legal recognition by the government.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
No, going to the legislators' offices in person with campaign contribution checks in thousand dollar increments gets things changed. Ask the *AA organizations how this works.
Tech Public Policy stuff
And anyone who debates whether or not we can read words with blatant misspellings and poor grammar has obviously never downloaded AIM.
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
the first thing that got to my mind reading todays slashback is the movie Brazil.. where a man gets taken away by government agencies for being a suspected terrorist because of a typo..
(a bug gets squshed in a teleprinter and the name tuttle becomes buttle)
I wonder if someone at RIAA did read the wrong ip-adress?
- I choked on the red pill and now I'm stuck in limbo
the studies that show that, even though vowels and other sonorants are the parts of speech we prolong while talking or singing, the semantic content of language is carried primarily in the consonants:
Well, sonorants, like m, n, r, l, and j, are important too. Try:
T t ysf--s hw -- wds y c dstd, v wh y dt wt dw vws -- th pg.
In any case, I think that's shown by the success of Arabic and Hebrew, that don't write vowels at all, and even by English, which frequently doesn't give enough information in its spelling to figure out which of the 15 vowels is used in the word.
Did anybody write a perl script to scramble the words this way?
Your right to swing your fist ends at my face.
Your right to enter my property ends at my "no trespassing" sign.
Your right to free speech ends at my notice that I don't wish to be disturbed.
There's been a lot of discussion about whether or not corporations even have a right to free speech, or if that right is held exclusively by individuals.
However, when the DMA says the DNC list isn't fair because it has loopholes for charities and politicians, isn't that a discrimination issue, not a free speech issue?
I think the DMA's case is completely bogus, but nevertheless, let's go ahead and block charities and politicians, too! I have nothing against charities, but I'm perfectly capable of seeking them out. They don't need to spend money calling me to get my help.
As for the right to free speech: it doesn't mean that you have the right to free speech in *any and every form*. If free speech was allowed in every form then it would be legal to deface the White House website to sell Viagra.
-Rich
~~~
Does anyone know Judge Nottingham's phone number? Because I think we should call him tonight during dinner and tell him what we think of his ruling. He shouldn't mind. After all, we have a Constitutional right to free speach, right?!
"Do I dare disturb the universe?"
The fundamental flaw in your argument:
If you declare there's no such thing as freedom of speech in order to accomplish something that disturbs you, then you risk someone turning around and limiting your speech, because it disturbs them.
That's not something I want to risk in any situation. And, in my opinion, nobody who disagrees with a large number of people on any issue, should want risk it either. To do so is simply careless, and is ignorant of the dynamic nature of culture and history.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Mod parent up... insightful!
Organic free-range music... yum!
Try reading the jumbled web and you'll see.
Just add these four simple words (which should be common sense but I guess it has to be spelled out for some people) to the Constitution:
Corporations are not persons.
Bam! No more first amendment issues. No more campaign finance issues. No more rooted government.
I was with you up until this:
It's a democracy (roughly). It's perfectly legal for the majority to oppress and condemn the actions of the minority, especially when the minority is not any specific culturally or racially defined block of people.
Define "oppress." Those are some extremely dangerous thoughts you got there, brother. Most atrocities of the twentieth century grew out of beliefs like that.
- Hail to our fearless misleader! Fool speed ahead!
We should take a few hundred volunteers. Send them to these peoples homes and ask them if they'd like to join the OSS community. We can follow-up the visit with a brochure that we'll gladly mail to them. Just to be sure they got a copy, we can stick a xeroxed copy of one in their windshield before we leave.
Freedom of speech is just that. It is *not* a right to force others to hear you, to interrupt others, to invade their homes, etc.
You want to stand on teh corner and wave a sign about how great your product is, fine. You wanna tell me all about it when I call you or walk into your store, fine. You wanna sell ads to the magazines, fine. But you have *no right* to demand that I listen to you, or to barge into my home, place of business, etc. Period.
I like to cost telemarketers as much as possible when they call me, as a penalty of doing something I don't approve of. My favorite method is to ask them to wait while I answer the door, then read slashdot for half an hour.
Here's my observation:
vn - hard, even in context
n - not so hard
so my proposed rule: thou may not exclude a vowel when it adds an additional syllable to a word.
as an aside: all this ought to be useful to people messaging on a telephone keypad
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
They don't need to worry about that law.
In Europe, where I come from, there is no such thing as 'free speech'. What citizens do enjoy is the 'freedom of expressing their opinion'. Expressing ones opinion is quite more constrained than all-encompassing 'speech', but I do have the feeling that this is exactly what is originally meant by 'free speech'.
Think of the advantages of using this. In Europe it is absurd to even consider that selling washing powder has anything to do with anyone's opinion. Corporations can have opinions (for instance that laying off people should be made easy under the law), but commercials and sales talks are no such things, and it is weird from our perspective that you guys even consider this seriously. If I however want to express my dislike of any person or party, on whatever grounds, that is my opinion and is respected. Yelling 'Fire' in a crowded theater is also pretty straightforward. 'Fire', speech as it may be, can hardly be construed as being an opinion. Is code 'speech'? Maybe, it sure isn't an opinion.
Following Slashdot for a while, most borderline cases about which 'speech' should be free or not, lies exactly between the line of expressing one's opinion vs. other utterances. Personally I think 'freedom of speech' should lie closer to 'freedom of expressing ones opinion' than to this weird 'freedom to make arbitrary utterances'. It seems many here think the latter is the important part, I disagree. It's the freedom to speak our minds freely without fear of being prosecuted that makes up our freedom.
You can argue free speach all you want. You can argue the DNC discriminates against coporations, but the fact of the matter is that if Telemarketers were less obtrusive (calling at dinner time. calling on Sunday morning), the DNC would not be needed. The DNC is there to correct a wrong. The DMA has pushed past it's legal limits and have invaded home privacy. Once a legal entity breaks a law or abuses it's power, laws or court rulings are needed to reign in the abuser, in this case telemarketers. The abuser should and will lose some of the rights because they intruded on others rights. eg. Microsoft had a anti-trust suit brought against it. They were found guilty and a restriction was placed on them. Unfortunately, this is not always the case such as the RIAA, etc.
This is yet another case of Judicial Tyrrany. The courts are out of control. Last I checked, legal precedent does not equal law! What we have are liberal judges who extend the law with unconstitutional precendent. This precedent then becomes law through further judicial ruling. As more precedents are set, we move further from the constitution. Right now the courts are left unchecked. There is supposed to be 3 branches of gov't with each having a check over the others. This has been broken as of late and the judicial branch has been unconstrained.
It's funny that the Dem's all voted for the DNC and that they believe the judicial system is run amuk, but when Bush nominates men and women who will level out the judicial system and prevent this tyrrany, they block the nominations. These judges that are not following the constitution are amazingly mostly apointed by Democratic Presidents. And they say the nominated judges that they are blocking are too partial and extreme. Right!
Many of our internal language comprehension algorithms seem to be ruled by stacks.
No, I'm not trying to say that we're a giant push-down-automata. There are various intermediaries between a push-down-automata and a full Turing machine. Some of the observable bottlenecks in human speech seem to suggest that we've got some kind of stack-based automata doing our language processing. Something like the "Bottom-up embedded push-down automata."
It would make plenty of sense that due to our habit of reading left to right, when reading a long word with reversed internal letters, we'd have to push every single letter. By the time we get to the second to last letter, we have some hope of popping and interpretting the word, but all our buffers are blown already. Too much of our language processing logic is occupied.
If it's a simple jumble, then there's fewer letters we need to push into the stack before we can start popping and understanding the words. If you have trouble with the whole word, you can start working on the next word, interpret that, and then keep popping use that information to guide your interpretation of the first word.
This makes sense, really. I swear. Someone tell me they follow what I'm saying.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
But I see your point...I'm pretty upset I can't use this list to tell the jesus freaks and the fucking police solicitors (Sory pig, I just gave on the interstate. How about you go take care of the crack heads accross town?).
Blar.
Only living breathing people have rights.
Is not true. This is sad, but corporate personhood is the law in the USA. So you are incorrect in saying that corps don't have rights, because they do.
Lasers Controlled Games!
This seems out of line with other court rulings on Constitutional matters. Actually, the courts have repeatedly ruled that commercial speech is less constitutionally protected than political speech. That's why, for example, we can have truth in advertising laws. Now, why that doesn't apply here, I don't know. The only thing I can imagine is that the preference for non-profit commercial speech torpedoed the deal.
One thing that interests me is that most of the coverage I'd heard of the decision was that it was a technical one covering the fact that the no-call list was run by the FTC instead of the FCC. Not a Constitutional matter at all.
It's interesting that you raise spam because they are indeed linked issues. My spam filter takes care of 90% of the drek I get each day. That leaves me 15-20 emails a day that I have to filter manually. All told, SPAM costs me maybe a minute a day to deal with. Balance that minute against legislation that can't possibly stem the flow without imposing draconian costs and I'm for letting my filters handle any spammers that come my way.
"But wait! Aren't filters the equivalent of a no trepassing sign?" you ask. Yes, they're very similar. The key difference is I'm not asking the state to enforce my choices - I'm doing it myself and dealing with the residue myself.
Bit of history - I come from a ranching family - we grew beef on the hoof. We had no trepassing signs and they handled most people. We still had people wander onto our land and almost all would apologize and leave when told they were trespassing. The few jerks who wouldn't, well we dealt with them too. Bottom line, we didn't want people bothering us and we dealt with those that did. It just wasn't a big deal.
Your background is different - maybe you are used to people doing for you what you could do yourself. I don't know. I just know that I've seen far too many cases of people giving up something and getting little in return. To me, first amendment rights are very precious and I'm not about to give them up just because it makes someone's life a little bit easier. You and I are different people - you appear to believe that "there oughta be a law." I believe we've got too many as it is and before we add another one, it better benefit more than it costs. So there it is - you and I are different and it looks like we just can't agree. Nonetheless, I'll defend your right to call me and tell me about your beliefs.
1^2=1;
yes...
(-1)^2=1;
OK...
1^2=(-1)^2;
yeah... substituting from above 1=1
1=-1;
I see where you got it, even if it is wrong...
1=0.
WTF? Where did you get -1=0? You can either add 1 to both sides and get 2=0 or subtract 1 from both sides and get 0=-2 (and therefore 2=-2), but, unless you define -1 to be the same as 0, I don't understand your last step.
Acts of massive stupidity are almost never covered by warranty. --me.
But I don't remember being able to share music on it.
Last time I heard the Constitution doesn't give rights to corporations. That whole idea is based on some bogus court case in the late 1800's. The fact is a corporation is a legal device created for the purpose of avoiding responsibility. Basically a corporate charter is a piece of paper that says the the people who own the business (through stock or whatever) can't be sued personally for anything that the corporation does wrong. In my opinion, that lack of responsibility should also come with a lack of rights associated with it. The legal fiction that corporations have some kind of status as persons under the US Constitution is based on a completely bogus premise. People have rights, but they also bear the obligation of responsibilities. The charter of a corporation has no purpose but to attenuate the personal responsibility of those who own a corporation.
I've read this whole subthread, and there's an interesting divergence between the opinions you two have.
While I completely understand both your wish to be self-reliant and your reluctance to add yet another law without clear benefits, I don't quite see why you rank your First Amendment rights so highly. If one person has a right to free speech, surely another has a right not to listen, just as one person's right to freedom of association does not prevent another's right to be free from harrassment. It's the old balance: with freedom comes responsibility.
Now, to you, spam and telesales may not be a problem. To others, clearly they are. As a 6'2" fit male in his 20s who's played combat sports since childhood, I have little to fear walking home alone across a dark park in my home town. The same does not apply to my girlfriend, my disabled friend, my mate's 90-year-old grandfather or my 5-year-old niece. Should we do away with mugging laws, because if someone was stupid enough to try it on me I could deal with the problem myself? Of course not; many others in society aren't in a position to do so, and the law is there to protect the vulnerable in such situations.
Obviously the consequences of telesales calls and spam aren't likely to be as severe, but the issue is the same. To an elderly person who finds it hard to move around their home, or a shift worker who sleeps during normal office hours, constant distractions when the phone rings are a real, serious, unreasonable imposition. To an impressionable 14-year-old boy, some of the spam that routinely gets sent around would probably be far more interesting than it is to you or me, though it would no doubt be just as damaging if that boy acted as the spammers wished.
I just don't see what's wrong with having a register that allows people to say that they don't wish to be disturbed by this stuff. It does no harm to anyone. Clearly someone who registers for this wasn't going to act on the calls/spam anyway, so it's actually in everyone's best interests for the register to be observed. (I can see the objection to having exemptions to that for certain parties, and if that's why the judge has thrown out the new rule, fair enough.)
Unfortunately, there are always some people who would put profit above politeness, and continue to harrass any potential customers even if those people made their wishes known without legal weight behind them. Thus in this case, I completely understand the widespread calls for a law to enforce those opinions. Spammers and telemarketers are generally bottom-feeding scum who live only to harrass and disturb the rest of society, and since voluntary approaches to this problem clearly haven't worked, I reckon it's a fair argument that society's right to go about its business in peace now trumps the scumbags' "rights" to "free speech".
You seem to be concerned that this is a step onto a slippery slope. I don't see why: society is not preventing those people from expressing an opinion, it's simply choosing not to listen.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
People seem a bit confused about "rights". You have a right if someone gives it to you. Your nation's government grants you certain rights, and it's your government's responsibility to defend those rights. Those rights are defined in various kinds of law, though lawyers may argue over interpretation. Rights can also be granted by, say, parents, employers, clubs, banks, friends.. People used to talk about their "God-given" rights. If a right is God-given, then God can give it and defend it. He may want his own people to participate in giving/defending those rights, but if it's God-given, then it's God-given. If someone hasn't granted a right, then you don't have it. You can argue that you (or someone else) SHOULD have a right, and your national constitution may grant you the right to say so.
-- All your bass are below two Hz