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?"