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

Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

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???

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.

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".

CNN...

[wo1verin3]

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.....

Re:CNN...

[Dun Malg]

Now, granted, there is no right to privacy guaranteed in the constitution, but through precedent, it is a *well* established right.

Excellent post. I should like to add that those who would claim that the "right to privacy" isn't a real right because the US Constitution doesn't mention it, well they need to refer to the 9th amendment:

Amendment IX

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

In other words, just because they didn't put it on their "top ten list", that doesn't mean it don't exist.

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.

Counter-example Typos explained?

[JojoLinkyBob]

I think we are somewhat subliminally "trained" to recognize typos as we see them more and mroe. At some point our brains recognize a pattern forming, and helps fill in the gaps.

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.

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.

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?

Re:Phone calls

[magarity]

That's the address of the US Court building, whose occupants are unlikely to take kindly to crank calls.

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.

Translation

[BuffJoe]

"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."

Re:Translation

[Waffle Iron]

That's too readable. Translations posted here are supposed to be compter-generated. Here it is again after English -> German -> English courtesy of Google:

Like opinion of the basic linguistics specialists of the map at a nameless, university looks sufficient in British Colombia and oppositely to the doubtful requirements of the not quoted research, a simple, mechanical conversion of the internal letters to confuse the daily Onlooker.

fortran?

[Davorama]

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

Re:fortran?

[slavemowgli]

Maybe WASTE is currently being rewritten in fortran...

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??

Not very well hidden agenda

[SuperBanana]

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.

The counter example for readability--old hat.

[RenderMonkey]

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.

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.

Linguists will suck the life out of the party....

[dodongo]

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.

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.

More of Orson Scott Card on Net music sharing

[zenpiglet]

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.

Wow! File sharing can raise the dead ... how can anyone be against this great technology?

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.

Open source Fortran

[mjc_w]

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.

Fortran and F

[khb]

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.

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.

Nah.. IT's better when you add Japanese to it!

[Genjurosan]

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.

HERE YOU GO - Plaintiffs' lawyers' contact info

[MobileDude]

Sean R.-Gallagher, Esq.
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/contac t.asp?at t_id=2410&att_nm=Sean+R%2E+Gallagher

Say "Hello!" to Marianne:
http://www.hhlaw.com/site/photos/5509.j pg

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/CornRe vereRobe rt.cfm

Ronnie's 'neck-o' the woods' with the same
http://www.dwt.com/lawdir/attorneys/LondonRo nald.c fm

I'm sure they'll enjoy citizens using their published information as much as we love telemarkets using ours....

ENJOY!

Re:Fortran has hobbled itself

[Aardpig]

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.