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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?"
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.....
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
I wonder when WASTE will be ported to Linux & gcc. It fails to compile here with gcc 3.2.3
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.
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.
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.
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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.
Well perhaps this will get it thru people heads once and for all that a corporation having rights is a *fallacy*, Only living breathing people have rights. And in this case a judge doesn't want your right to privacy and the right to not be harassed protected.
I want everyone to think that Corps have right to take a strong hard look at the issue and *think* about all the implications there of.
Is there no case law on this situation? It appears that the whole "rights" system can be twisted to anyone's favour.
Well, I don't think we can really call rights a mere system. That said, there is case law on the subject. Personally I think it comes out on the side of the government in the case of at least a properly enacted do-not-call list, but I admit that there is room for people to debate the subject, and that we should always tread very cautiously when there is a hint of limiting the broad guarantee of free speech in the first amendment.
Take the heated debate over the displaying of the Ten Commandments (lookup Justice Ray Moore). It was taken down because it offended some people. But, it made other's proud. Why do those who stand for nothing get their way?
So, in the above example, someone's free speech rights *and* religious rights get trounced.
The funny thing is, the government has no guarantee of free speech, and the government is explicitly forbidden by the highest authority from endorsing religion, which the Ten Commandments in the context of the example above certainly did and were intended to do. So no one's free speech rights or right of free exercise were 'trounced' and by removing the statute, numerous people's right to not suffer an establishment of religion was affirmed.
Alright, now we're talking about a telemarketer's right to free speech. Almost ZERO people want to hear from telemarketers and almost nobody cares about the leeching bastards. Yet time after time their "rights" are being upheld. What gives!?
Well, there's little point in protecting speech that everyone does want to hear. If everyone is for it, it'll surely be heard anyway. Speech that is unpopular, on the other hand, is precisely what the first amendment is intended to protect; as so many people will be against it, such speech would surely be silenced otherwise. It's important that we not allow that to happen.
-- 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.
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
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.
You need to spend some time thinking about your phrase "religious rights." You seem to be a little confused about a very, very important American ideal.
You're right, I am confused. But the issue doesn't seem to be very cut and dried to me. For example, why does American paper money say "In God We Trust" on it?
Why does the American government refer to God when tragedies happen?
Why do you swear on a bible in court?
Doesn't sound separate to me. That's what I mean by "twisting" the laws to ones own advantage.
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?
Stop the Slashdot effect! Don't read the articles!
Perhaps saying that "corporations have no rights" is going too far; corporations do consist of people which have rights and so inevitably they must have some as well. For instance, even if "a corporation" does not have "the right to free speech", they can simply pay an employee to use their right to free speech on their behalf. Which is in fact how they "speak", since no speech can occur without somebody finally giving the final go-ahead to "speak" it (where "speak" is some domain-specific action, like "publish", "answer question", etc.).
... but it's only 62.5% of ONE single day for the aforementioned 10,000 person company (of which there are many).
But there is the need to recognize that corporations are inherently larger then individuals and as a result there is an inherent asymmetry in the power, and it is unjust to translate that directly into more legal power.
The problem is quite simply one of man power. Today, I have roughly 16 hours of wakefulness, assuming an 8-hour sleep cycle. Every workday, a corporation receives on average slightly more then eight man-hours from each employee. That is to say, for a 10,000 person company, for my 16 hours today, that company received 80,000 man-hours of life, 5000 times more then me.
Now suppose this company sues me, and we get into a protracted, drawn out lawsuit that occurs over the course of a year, and consumes roughly a quarter of my year meeting with lawyers, rotting in jail, preparing defense, worrying such that I can't productively do anything else, etc. (That's probably conservative on my part; it could easily completely destroy my year.) If I live a nearly-average (and conviently rounded) 75 years, that's a third of a percent of my entire life. (If you're willing to call it the entire year, that's one and a third of a percent of my life! If I died tommorow, that would be a full 4% of my life, as I'm near a rounded-by-luck 25.)
Let us suppose this lawsuit also eats four lawyers and the equivalent of one administrator year, for a total of 50 * 5 (fifty weeks, five days a week) * 40 (forty hours a week) * 5 (five people) = 50,000 thousand man-hours. Now, that may sound like a lot...
Corporations shouldn't necessarily be held "rightless", and probably can't be, but they certainly should not be considered "people". If they really were people, they'd be some pretty strange, and pretty powerful, people. One might even call them "superhuman"... correctly.
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."
Bollocks -- big, sweaty, steaming bollocks. F9x is an absolute joy to program in -- just the array syntax alone makes it so. And, despite what some C++ advocates may claim, it still holds the edge in terms of efficiency, when it comes to numerical simulations.
As for the lack of open source Fortran 9x compilers, that I agree with. However, there are two projects in SourceForge which are addressing this problem, and my current project (c. 50,000 lines of F95 code for simulating spectral emission from pulsating stars, due to be released under the GPL) is relying on the fact that there will be free compilers around when it is released.
In any case, the fact that there is no current open source compiler is not that much of a deterrent to most Fortran users. Think about it: most people who program in Fortran are actually using the language to solve numerical problems in some other discipline (such as engineering, or in my case astrophysics); they're not CS students looking for a free (beer or speech) compiler to do their linked list assignment on. Since these typical users are either embedded in a university department or a corporation, there are ample funds to buy whatever F9X compiler they might need. Lack of free (as in beer) compilers is just not a factor for most Fortran users, and most are too pragmatic to worry about free as in speech.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
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
Try reading the jumbled web and you'll see.