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?"
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/
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.
Ummm.... what does fortran have to do with any of this?
Davo -- Free speech, free software, AND free beer.
No, by enforcing decisions that are not the consumer's.
The law arbitrarily allows certain parties ( such as Jehovah's Witnesses) to be uneffected, even though the "consumer" may well wish that said parties cease soliciting them.
Although it may not appear to be on the surface, this is actually a good ruling. The bill needs to be written better.
Congress does not want to write it better. Why not?
Because their own campaign fund/vote solicitations are exempted from the law along with the Jehovah's Witnesses.
Remove this self-serving exemption and perhaps the law will be found to be Costitutionally compliant.
KFG
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??
Then the President signs it into law. As soon as that happens a lawsuit will happen and likely make its way to the SC with great haste, considering there have been two federal courts already rule against the do not call list. As nice as a DNC list might be, it _does_ create two classes of speech, something the government cannot regulate.
1 tequila 2 tequila 3 tequila floor
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.
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.
It's not saying that there shall be no exclusion of politcal fundraising or religious speech...it's just giving people the option of avoiding commercial speech.
Firstly, I'm a Libertarian, and I think there is absolutely nothing wrong with enforcing a person's decision to not be bothered by commercial phone calls to their home. It's the same thing as putting up a "No trespassing" sign on your property, and then calling the cops when somebody bangs on the door anyway. I don't want salesmen on my property, physically or otherwise.
Second, this bill is not meant to address problems associated with unwanted political or religious speech. It doesn't say that there won't be any such program in the future, or that any such program would be illegal. It simply doesn't address it. So, let's get rid of laws against grand theft auto (not the game, the crime of stealing a car) because it doesn't also protect us against purse snatchers. This program protects us against commercial telemarketers. If people get pissed off enough in the future, maybe we'll see programs to protects us from Senators and Jehovah's Witnesses.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
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.
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.
This reminds me of the Jumbles puzzle some newspapers carry. Usually the five-word jumbles are pretty easy, but the six-word jumbles are much harder, even if you have an extended vocabulary. Thing is, msot people have no problem skipping over the shorter jumblings, but the longer ones take considerably more processing since there are more preumttaions that have to be evaulated and rejected. Also, since shorter words tend to be more common, the meaning of a word can be determined from context.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
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.
Of course, judges don't (shouldn't) bow to publi pressure. But the reasoning ("it discriminates") is pure bullshit :) The Supreme Court has *always* ruled that commercial speech is less protected than political speech.
Additionally, congress is in the business of discriminating. Look at how many groups (sugar growers, home owners, stock holders, homeless, elderly, college students, etc. etc) get special benefits from congress.
It's kind of late to start saying it's a problem.
Example: telephone == tleepnohe == t[lee]p[noh]e
notice 'p' is in the center so unmoved. The quote from the post would be as follows:
"Acocrnidg to crad crraniyg lguniitscis peorsfsoalnis at an unnaemd, ueivnitsry in Birtsih Cuolmiba, and ctonrray to the dbuiuos clamis of the ucnietd reesrcah, a smilpe, mheacicnal ivneirson of ietnnral caahrtcers apperas sfufineict to cnofsue the erevadyy oonlkoer."
ZEN is a prime number in base-36
As nice as a DNC list might be, it _does_ create two classes of speech, something the government cannot regulate.
We have multiple kinds of speech already. Hate speech isn't protected, nor is speech specifically designed to incite violence.
This is covered under the right to privacy. Now, granted, there is no right to privacy guaranteed in the constitution, but through precedent, it is a *well* established right.
Yes, marketing companies have the right to share their message with me. They can display it on my TV, which I have to voluntarily turn on and upon which I expect there to be commercials. They can put their message up on a bulliten board.
The should NOT, however, have the right to call my telephone. Turning the TV is basically acceptance of the existance of commercials. Having your phone line plugged in is *not* conceeding that you will get calls that you don't want.
Telemarketing calls are annoying. Period. I did not want, nor was I expecting them.
When a marketing company puts up an advertisment on a bulliten board, they have to pay the owner of the bulliten board. When they call me, they don't have to pay me for the privilage of using *my* property to advertise to me? Why not?
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.
sig?
allowing charitable solicitations but banning commercial calls "borrows from the reasoning of the pigs in George Orwell's 'Animal Farm.' ...
'Some animals are more equal than others.'"
Yep. Humans should have rights, corporations should not.
We can debate all day over whether a 3rd world factory worker has a "right" to the same wage as an American one, or whether I have the "right" to not have my job outsourced to India, or whether immigration counts as a natural "right". But corporations? No. No debate at all. Corporations, which do not suffer from the same weaknesses as humans (don't naturally die, can't imprison the entire corporation, they wave off massive fines that would destroy a human as nothing more than an annoynace, their opinion carries FAR more weight with politicians than a "mere" human), do not deserve the same freedoms as humans.
More importantly, I agree that in this situation, we have differential enforcement of "rights", just not in the same way that you see it. If I placed ten million automated calls a day to the ATA or DMA, Officer Friendly would show up at my door to tell me to cut it out. Yet, when the ATA makes those same ten million calls to equally unwilling recipients, it somehow becomes a first amendment issue?
No. This entire mess involves nothing more than a well-placed judge acting as the lackey of Corporate America, no doubt for some shady-but-technically-legal compensation. Regardless of the charitable and political exclusions to the federal DNC, this registry takes an important step in taking back one portion of the lives of HUMANS from "the machine".
Churchs and governments are corporations.
I wish protection from them just as much as I want protection from MCI.
Why should the corporation of Sun Myung Moon have the right to ignore my "No Trespassing" sign?
This bill gives them explicit right to do so.
It is vile.
I am a human. My rights exceed those of any church, particularly those to which I do not belong. Make my "No Trespassing" sign mean "No Trespassing," instead of "No Trespassing unless you're selling The Watchtower" and I'll be all for it.
KFG
The law as written opts you in to certain calls whether you want them or not.
No, it doesn't. You currently already get those calls, and commercial calls besides (unless you're in a state with a no-call law). No option.
What this law does is provide you with a way to opt out of getting commercial calls, while not changing the current status of you vis-a-vis political or charitable calls.
-- Alastair
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.
". . .it will just result in the death of the DNC overall."
Only because of Congressional refusal to make the law comply with the Constitution. I don't know about you but I'm not willing to accept the premise that Congress has the right to pass and enforce uncontitutional laws simply because it affords me some personal advantage. The personal advantage I gain is a far poorer thing than the advantage that I loose.
Let me take your own argument and just change the players.
Let us posit that the do not call list allowed you to opt out of calls from Republicans, but exluded you from opting out of calls from Democrats. Make it vice versa if you wish. Makes no nevermind to me.
So, this would be legal because the Republicans have gained no benefit because they only retain a right they already have?
How about a law forbiding only certain speech rights to Jews/Niggers/Kikes/Micks and Catholics?
Perfectly Constitutional because it doesn't create a favored class because that favored class only retains rights they already have?
I think not.
You are allowing your wish to not recieve unwanted phone solicitations to color your thinking.
I think free speech rights are to damned important to allow any cracks in the ediface, particularly when they allow the government and churchs to drive wedges into those cracks.
The DNC is a sugar coated poison pill that tastes yummy going down, but will ultimately lead to death if swallowed.
The judge has placed a big skull and crossbones on the bottle. I think if you ignore it you will end up sorry.
KFG
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.
If that's what being a liberterian is, you can keep it.
Actually back in the 1980's the Standards Committee formally changed the name to Fortran. Of course, it only "took effect" in 1991 when that revision of the Standard was formally adopted.
For what it's worth, the orignal IBM paper used a capital F and small caps for the ORTRAN. The choice of all capitals after that time was driven, to some extent, by the lack of lower case characters in early computer character sets (12 5-bit "bytes" in a CDC 60-bit word for example).
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?"
First, let me simply say, you're wrong. Now let me explain why:
The reason some such law, when properly drafted, will ultimately pass Constitutional muster is that it is an "opt out" law
This law is an "opt out" law. It allows you to opt out of a certain selected type of phone call. It does not opt me in to certain calls. It just doesn't include them in the list.
the law cannot make distinctions between solicitous speech because such distinctions are reserved to the citizen
What this law calls for is an explicit declaration from the citizens that they individually do not want to hear this speech. It intrudes on their time, their property and their rights.
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.
You are right in that the law does not go far enough. I should be able to opt out of all solicitous phone calls. The judge's decision, however, directly confilcts my right to publicly tell telemarketers to bugger off.
It is for these reasons that I confidently predict the Apellete and Supreme courts will swiftly overturn this fool's decision.
bance.net
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.
I think free speech rights are too damned important to allow any cracks in the ediface,
I have a hard time figuring out your logic, but this really hits me hard. The DNC law is _not_ about free speech. Saying it is doesn't make it so. Making a phone call into someone else's private residence isn't free speech. It's something that every person has a right to forbid! There are already laws that allow this for individuals (stalking, restraining orders, etc); this law simply extends it to an entire class of calls which are especially annoying.
particularly when they allow the government and churchs to drive wedges into those cracks.
I don't think you meant what I'm reading, but I'm at a loss to guess what you actually meant. It looks like you're first saying that this DNCL puts cracks in the edifice of free speech, then you say that it allows churches and the gov't to drive wedges into the cracks. Huh?
If, for the sake of argument, the DNCL is breaking free speech, then surely its exemption of churches and politicians is its one *good* thing (or at least the one crack in its overall badness). If, on the other hand, the exemption of churches and politicians is a bad thing, surely the DNCL isn't breaking free speech. I don't see how you can have it both ways.
I also have to point out that the first amendment explicitly mentions only two types of expression: religious and political. In other words, it was explicitly intended to protect speech in order to allow those freedoms. Now, I'm not saying that this is at the expense of other types of speech, but I do have to point out that other types don't have the same explicit purposeful protection.
-Billy
If one accepted the rejection of property rights implicit in these two decisions, it would be legal to deface the White House itself to sell Viagra.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.