Slashback: Card, Fortran, Legibility

Slashback tonight brings you more on recent RIAA madness, the readability of scrambled words, word of the return of Nullsoft's WASTE, another decision against the FTC's do-not-call list, and more -- read on for the details. The issue is greyer than you might think. SirFozzie writes "A Denver, Colorado judge has blocked the implementation of the Do-Not-Call List for a 2nd time, hours after the House and Senate passed the bill overwhelmingly, claiming that telemarketer's free speech rights would be infringed if this was to take affect. In the MSNBC story, judge Edward Nottingham ruled that "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." What's next? Constitutional Amendment?"

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?"

Comments

Do not call ammendment

[Zeinfeld]

The idea that free speech gives a punk the right to have an automated telephone dialer call me and try to sell me a fraudulent prize is completely bogus.

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.

How are you going to enforce this?

[NightSpots]

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.

Re:How are you going to enforce this?

[mcc]

I have stated this in a couple discussions similar to this one, but:

Spam laws do not have to stop all spam. If they can simply stop all local spam, they have still won a mighty battle.

The reasoning for this is that while the law will have no effect against foreign spammers, isolating spam-- even in a limited way-- drastically assists in every form of nonlegal spam combat available today.

In other words, if laws cause all spam to originate from sources outside of the U.S., or from outside of the current state, that makes it easier and more effective to administrate a blacklist, to administrate a whitelist, or to administrate a spam filter. This will, indeed, result in a dramatic impact on the spam problem.

Moreover, one would hope that if an american company hired a korean spammer, the american company would be subject to the spam laws even though they acted through a foreign agent. Is this accurate?

Do not call...

[dbc]

"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.

fortran?

[Davorama]

Ummm.... what does fortran have to do with any of this?

Judge's tortured interpretation of the First

[Anonymous Coward]

... that telemarketer's free speech rights would be infringed if this was to take affect. ... judge Edward Nottingham ruled that "The Federal Trade Commission has chosen to entangle itself too much in the consumers' decision ..."

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??

PHONE CALLS ARE NOT FREE SPEECH

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

F is not Fortran

[BigFootApe]

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.

Re:Huh?

[meta-monkey]

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.

Ban charitable too

[rhysweatherley]

Fine. So ban the calls from charitable organisations as well. It's pretty much impossible to tell the difference between a real charitable organisation and a scam over the phone, so I hang up on all such calls as a matter of policy.

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.

Re:Counter-example Typos explained?

[Esion Modnar]

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.

Stuff

[Annatar2]

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.

Re:Huh?

[pla]

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".