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?"
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.....
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/
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
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
That's the address of the US Court building, whose occupants are unlikely to take kindly to crank calls.
"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.
"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."
Ummm.... what does fortran have to do with any of this?
Davo -- Free speech, free software, AND free beer.
It must be in the scrambled sentence ...
I wonder when WASTE will be ported to Linux & gcc. It fails to compile here with gcc 3.2.3
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??
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Web Hosting Reviews
When friends can say, "Have you heard Eva Cassidy's music? Here, I'll send you a couple of songs, you won't believe how good she is," that's called "word of mouth," and what you'll get is more and more people who attend her live performances and buy her CDs.
... how can anyone be against this great technology?
Wow! File sharing can raise the dead
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.
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.
Us /. users may have an unfair advantage over people new to computers here. Removing unneeded letters is how we fit everything into DOS 8.3 filenames!
Karma: Marginal (mostly due to the border around the website)
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.
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.
Now it's from English -> German -> English -> Japanese -> English aka ALL YOUR BASE!!!!
Like opinion of the specialist of basic language study in the nameless map, and the everyday onlooker of the research namely internal letter which is not quoted on opposite side it is easy to confuse in the English Colombia, the sufficient university to the condition machine conversion being doubtful at first glance.
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
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.
but discards facilities such as EQUIVALENCE, which are difficult to teach, use, or debug Eh? EQUIVALENCE is the substitute for the lack of pointers that makes FORTRAN usable. Sheesh! Next these people will be telling us that GOTOs are bad for your health.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
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.
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).
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.
Added -> Korean -> English
Inside British Colombia soul wavering inside the nameless map basic specialist together opinion of language study, with by a research from the namely inside which it does not refer in easy opposition side is doubtful everyday in the onlooker and and the first flash the college which is sufficient in the situation machine conversion which is.
While it's a vast improvement over Fortran 77, I suspect most modernprogrammers Fortran 9x is not a particularly pleasant language to program in compared to many other languages; most developers probably wouldn't use it even if it had decent Linux support.
The "F" compiler breaks the one thing that makes Fortran 9x still somewhat attractive: fairly seamless backwards compatibility with Fortran 77. With Fortran 9x, at least you can take dusty deck Fortran 77 programs and without too much work add "advanced" features like dynamic memory allocation to them.
However, the fact that there are no open source Fortran 9x compilers for Linux is probably an additional problem for its adoption. People who might otherwise try to port Fortran 77 programs to Fortran 9x now just rewrite the stuff in C++. But, hey, overall, we are probably better off because of that.
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)
If that's what being a liberterian is, you can keep it.
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."
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
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).
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
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?"
Try reading the jumbled web and you'll see.
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.
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.