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.
"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."
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.
No, what I am saying, and what the judge said, is that the law cannot make distinctions between solicitous speech because such distinctions are reserved to the citizen.
0 57 852
The reason some such law, when properly drafted, will ultimately pass Constitutional muster is that it is an "opt out" law. The law as written opts you in to certain calls whether you want them or not.
The judge's decision stands in of your rights actually, not the rights of the callers.
If you are a Jehovah's Witness, or a Congressman running for reelection, you may find the fact that people have the right to choose not listen to you offensive.
At the risk of being selfserving myself here is a link to a post I made earlier today explaining my views on the legality of the do not call list:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=79968&cid=7
If the do not call list had made a distinction between various kinds of speech, but had allowed the citizen to opt out of each seperately this law might have met the Constitutional challenge.
"Press One if you don't want religous fanatics bothering you at dinner.
Press Two if you think your Congressman is a religous fanatic.
If you've simply had it up to here press Three, and then cancel your phone service.
Have nice, quiet day."
KFG
considering there have been two federal courts already rule against the do not call list
No, that is inaccurate. One federal court has ruled against the Do-Not-Call list. The other federal court merely ruled against an implementation detail of the Do-Not-Call list, or more specifically ruled against the ability of the FTC to implement the Do-Not-Call list without a mandate to do so from Congress or from the FCC.
it _does_ create two classes of speech, something the government cannot regulate.
It does not create a class of speech. It simply uses the existing two classes of speech, commercial and non-commercial, that already exist as a fixture of law and have for a long time.
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.
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
"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.'
The judge granted a summary judgment to the telemarketing firms, and barred the FTC from launching the registry next week.
"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," the judge wrote."
From the article, quoting the judge.
I think you'll find it line with my original post.
KFG
but the longer ones take considerably more processing since there are more preumttaions that have to be evaulated and rejected
26 times more, in fact.
11,881,376 versus 308,915,776
sig?
Excellent post. I should like to add that those who would claim that the "right to privacy" isn't a real right because the US Constitution doesn't mention it, well they need to refer to the 9th amendment:
Amendment IX
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
In other words, just because they didn't put it on their "top ten list", that doesn't mean it don't exist.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
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.
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 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).
indeed sir indeed. However i recall seeing about a book a while back that claims that that was not the actual decision.
There is a book called "Unequal Protection" by Thom Hartmann about this topic. I haven't yet had a chance to read it.
However your insight is valuable, so as of 1886 corporations had no rights.. what a terrible police state disaster that must have been.. Govt censoring the press and all sorts of bad stuff like that. I mean if you look at some of the other comments in this thread. That how people assume it must have been. Right? (add sarcasm liberally)
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
Except that you wasted two days essentially redoing what was already a finished project. The staples of FORTRAN are longitivity, usability and speed. Think about this: pretty much every FORTRAN code ever written can be compiled with a current complient f90 or f95 compiler. And this includes the pre fortran 66 stuff which is still amazingly abundant in the scientific world.
If you want FORTRAN without the bad habits use Pascal.