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Slashback: Card, Fortran, Legibility 544

Posted by timothy from the seattle-at-last dept.
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?"
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Slashback: Card, Fortran, Legibility More

Slashback: Card, Fortran, Legibility

Comments Filter:

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @07:06PM (#7059622)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Huh? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 25, 2003 @07:07PM (#7059623)
    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???

  • CNN... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by wo1verin3 ( 473094 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @07:07PM (#7059625) Homepage
    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... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by ArsonPerBuilding ( 319673 )
      Then the President signs it into law. As soon as that happens a lawsuit will happen and likely make its way to the SC with great haste, considering there have been two federal courts already rule against the do not call list. As nice as a DNC list might be, it _does_ create two classes of speech, something the government cannot regulate.

      • Re:CNN... (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        considering there have been two federal courts already rule against the do not call list

        No, that is inaccurate. One federal court has ruled against the Do-Not-Call list. The other federal court merely ruled against an implementation detail of the Do-Not-Call list, or more specifically ruled against the ability of the FTC to implement the Do-Not-Call list without a mandate to do so from Congress or from the FCC.

        it _does_ create two classes of speech, something the government cannot regulate.

        It does not

      • Re:CNN... (Score:3, Insightful)

        by zerocool^ ( 112121 )
        As nice as a DNC list might be, it _does_ create two classes of speech, something the government cannot regulate.

        We have multiple kinds of speech already. Hate speech isn't protected, nor is speech specifically designed to incite violence.

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

        Yes, marketing companies have the right to share their message with me. They can display i

        • Re:CNN... (Score:5, Informative)

          by Dun Malg ( 230075 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @08:46PM (#7060176) Homepage
          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 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Zeinfeld ( 263942 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @07:08PM (#7059636) Homepage
    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.

    • Of course, you always have the right to leave your phone off the hook when you're eating dinner.
      • Better yet, don't even have a land-line phone. Well, maybe if you can't get broadband. Even then, if you're not dialed up, turn off the ringer. Last I heard, it was still legal to not answer the phone!

    • Re:Do not call ammendment (Score:4, Interesting)

      by MrLint ( 519792 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @07:49PM (#7059873) Journal
      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.

      • Re:Do not call ammendment (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Jerf ( 17166 )
        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 "pub
    • From the article: ... claiming that telemarketer's free speech rights would be infringed if this was to take affect.

      Is there no case law on this situation? It appears that the whole "rights" system can be twisted to anyone's favour.

      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 r

      • Re:Do not call ammendment (Score:4, Interesting)

        by cpt kangarooski ( 3773 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @08:15PM (#7060006) Homepage
        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.
    • Technically, couldn't the marketers get sued for a form of DOS attack? Technically, as long as they keep you on the phone, no one else can use it.

  • Counter-example Typos explained? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by JojoLinkyBob ( 110971 ) <{moc.liamg} {ta} {otacyeoj}> on Thursday September 25, 2003 @07:09PM (#7059637) Homepage
    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.

    • I'll tie two of the stories together: I've recently downloaded a bunch of books by Orson Scott Card from Kazaa, and am reading them on my Palm. (I'm sure he would approve. ;-)

      However, many of them are not simply copied e-books; they appear to have been scanned then OCRed -- badly. So in many cases the words are grossly wrong (or sometimes are numbers, like "I'11" (eye-apostrophe-eleven)). I believe this has helped make me a better reader, because I have to question what I'm reading while I'm reading it

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:Counter-example Typos explained? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Esion Modnar ( 632431 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @07:46PM (#7059861)
      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.
    • Keeping with the first/last letter scheme, it appears that when the letters close to the beginning are moved all the way to the end, and vice versa, it tends to become much more confusing. If you keep the letters in proximity to their origional location, it becomes much easier. Using the quote from the post, if you keep the letters from the first half in the first half but scrambled and the letters in the latter half in the latter half but scrambled it becomes much easier to decipher. This is keeping with h

  • How are you going to enforce this? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by NightSpots ( 682462 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @07:09PM (#7059638) Homepage
    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.

    • Oh, you're going to go around suing every company in Asia and Europe? This simply isn't ever going to be enforced.

      Tell that to the RIAA.
    • Ah, you missed the point:

      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 Discover Card ads fill your spambox, you can sue the advertiser - Discover Card - no matter where the source server is and no matter how they disguise the money trail.

      Of course, after they lose their suit with me, they can sue their "marketing partner"

    • Re:How are you going to enforce this? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by mcc ( 14761 ) <amcclure@purdue.edu> on Thursday September 25, 2003 @07:57PM (#7059917) Homepage
      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?
      • Spam laws do not have to stop all spam. If they can simply stop all local spam, they have still won a mighty battle.

        It's still the wrong way to handle the spam problem. If more users were to use effective filters, and if all ISPs were to implement reasonable filters that were able to determine most forged headers and dropped mail from all open proxies and unsecured relays, the spam business would not be nearly so lucrative as it would be more difficult for the spammers to find addresses that actually vie

  • Do not call... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dbc ( 135354 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @07:10PM (#7059645)
    "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 (Score:5, Informative)

    by BuffJoe ( 307408 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @07:10PM (#7059646) Homepage
    "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."
    • If they were using them thar simple words, we wouldent have a problem!

    • Re:Translation (Score:5, Funny)

      by Waffle Iron ( 339739 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @07:43PM (#7059837)
      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.

      • Nah.. IT's better when you add Japanese to it! (Score:5, Funny)

        by Genjurosan ( 601032 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @08:01PM (#7059939)
        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.

  • fortran? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Davorama ( 11731 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @07:11PM (#7059653) Journal
    Ummm.... what does fortran have to do with any of this?
  • What am I missing? Where the Fortran story?

  • Linux port? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by daserver ( 524964 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @07:15PM (#7059676) Homepage
    I wonder when WASTE will be ported to Linux & gcc. It fails to compile here with gcc 3.2.3

  • Judge's tortured interpretation of the First (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 25, 2003 @07:17PM (#7059687)
    ... 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??
    • 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.

      Popular opinion is not law, nor does it override the constitution- that's explicitly clear right down to the way in which our senate+house are elected- in stages, so that government policy is not radically affected by a sudden change in public opinion. In a way, a slow moving government is a good one; look at the knee-je

  • Judge's finding in the Denver DNC-list case (Score:3, Informative)

    by Goonie ( 8651 ) * <.robert.merkel. .at. .benambra.org.> on Thursday September 25, 2003 @07:17PM (#7059689) Homepage
    The finding is available as this PDF document [uscourts.gov].

    Haven't had a chance to read it yet...

    • Here are the saliant points as I can read it. IANAL, but I probably could be, so this shouldn't totally suck:

      a) The judge tries to use as precedent rulings concerning the ability of people to have their name removed from a snail mail list. In the case of that, it requires a specific recipient of the request. That is, you have to tell the postmaster who it is you want to stop calling. Here, we're relying on governmental determination of who is and isn't a telemarketer as defined by the regulation. The

  • Not very well hidden agenda (Score:5, Informative)

    by SuperBanana ( 662181 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @07:18PM (#7059695)

    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.

    • No crap! I was reading the rules, and the fact that you completely sign away EVERYTHING related to the game you make, in return for $25,000 IF YOU WIN. WHAT about all the OTHER people who enter with good games but don't win? Guess what? You just slaved away to create a good game that someone else is going to sell, and you don't get a damned penny!

      What a load of bull, and I really hope you aspiring developers don't fall for this baloney.

  • The counter example for readability--old hat. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by RenderMonkey ( 569683 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @07:19PM (#7059701) Homepage
    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 [heupel.com] 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.
  • Excuse me, but when has WASTE not been availible? It was there(and at version 1.1) almost a month ago, last I checked.
  • The original example for scrambled text talked about random rearrangement of letters in a word.

    The example given is all but random rearrangement. Actually, every word is scrambled the same way, making them as different as the original as possible (keep the first and last letter the same, and invert all the remaining letters). So maybe yes, for truly random rearrangement of letters, it may be mostly understandable. I, for one, welcome our new random letter rearrangement overloards.
  • (IANAL) Even though Congress AND the House GAVE the FTC the authority to do this, how can a District Court Overrule them? WOuldn't it have to come from the Supreme Court?

    Yes, I do understand that he is complaining about First Admendment rights of the telemarketers, but isn't the telphone system regulated by the FCC? They should be able to put whatever restrictions on it they want. If the MDA et al, dont like it, find some other medium to peddle your crap to people who dont want it.

  • PHONE CALLS ARE NOT FREE SPEECH (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 25, 2003 @07:28PM (#7059747)
    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.

  • DNC list (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Compuser ( 14899 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @07:29PM (#7059756)
    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.
  • Another alternative to Fortran is C++ with Blitz++. Using templates, library builders are able to close the gap with or surpass Fortran speeds. And that is without any compiler optimization, which C++ recieves a lot of attention on because of its market status. Anyway, here is Blitz++ [oonumerics.org]. Here [oonumerics.org] are their goals and philosophy. Eat your hearts out, C programmers.

  • F is not Fortran (Score:5, Insightful)

    by BigFootApe ( 264256 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @07:30PM (#7059760)
    From the SAL [kachinatech.com] 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 word
  • 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 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rhysweatherley ( 193588 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @07:40PM (#7059819)
    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.

  • Wow... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by PipianJ ( 574459 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @07:41PM (#7059827)
    I never knew that unwanted harassment on a system I pay to be a part of was "free" speech...

  • Just one pesky little detail... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Mr_Huber ( 160160 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @07:44PM (#7059846) Homepage
    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 [commondreams.org] 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.
    • Yep, and if corporations don't have the right to free speech, it's within Ashcroft's power to muzzle the ACLU, Democratic Party, and New York Times, all incorporated entities. Ooops!
  • So now free speech extends to waking me at 0-dark-thirty? Calling me along with 5 other people and then hanging up on me when one of the others answers a split-second sooner? Filling up my answering machine with such hangup calls?

    No. Your right to swing your phone ends at annoying me in my own home without my express permission.

    Tell Rehnquist to raise up his Learned Hand and strike down these judicially unsupportable attacks on the Do-Not-Call list.
  • Someone needs to fire that judge for being so daft about the rights regarding free speech.

    If you can't even get our most basic rights correct, I'd hate to think how badly he butchers more obscure laws and rights.

    If he's concerned about telemarketers being hated more than charitable organizations, political campaigns then maybe he should work to get a list for those going as well.

    The American public has spoken against the telemarketers. The DNC list should go up for that.

    Then he can bitch and moan to ge
  • the judge's home phone

    Telemarketer: Good evening sir. Are you interested in buying a coupon book to support your local charity?
    Me: Not right now, but if you can give me a call tomorrow morning at <Judge's phone number>, I'll buy a few. I love to support charities!
    TM: <Judge's phone number>. Is that correct?
    Me: Yes.
    TM: Thank you sir!

  • Open source Fortran (Score:4, Informative)

    by mjc_w ( 192427 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @07:54PM (#7059902)
    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.

    • Re:Open source Fortran (Score:3, Informative)

      by tiohero ( 592208 )
      Intel's Fortran compiler for Linux is FREE for non-commerical use (not open-source). I'm told that it is very good. Its about time that there was a free F90/F95 compiler available. Intel F90 Compiler [intel.com]. I think that this will go a long way in promoting LINUX as a base for advanced scientific computing.

  • Fortran and F (Score:4, Informative)

    by khb ( 266593 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @07:55PM (#7059908)
    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 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Annatar2 ( 558541 ) <krygsheldNO@SPAMsbcglobal.net> on Thursday September 25, 2003 @07:56PM (#7059913)
    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.
  • There are two items I'd like to address:

    1. Please call this judge (since he believes in free speech) on his public phone and use your right to free speech to calmly and politely tell them that you are very upset that he ruled in favor of private for profit corporations to ring your private, individually funded, telephone.

    Judge Edward W. Nottingham
    Alfred A. Arraj United States Courthouse A1041 / Courtroom 14
    (303) 844-5018



    2. To address this entire situation: I'd like to say that I feel that it i

  • HERE YOU GO - Plaintiffs' lawyers' contact info (Score:5, Informative)

    by MobileDude ( 530145 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @08:03PM (#7059950) Homepage
    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!

  • About F (Score:3, Funny)

    by exp(pi*sqrt(163)) ( 613870 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @08:25PM (#7060043) Journal
    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.

  • How the FUCK (Score:4, Insightful)

    by TexVex ( 669445 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @08:46PM (#7060182)
    ...claiming that telemarketer's free speech rights would be infringed if this was to take affect...
    How the fuck is someone calling me on my telephone that I paid for and that requires monthly fees for it to work, protected free speech????????

    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".

  • The fortran bit - WATFIV (Score:3, Informative)

    by earthforce_1 ( 454968 ) <earthforce_1@yaho[ ]om ['o.c' in gap]> on Thursday September 25, 2003 @08:55PM (#7060234) Journal
    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)

    I quick google search revealed that a native 8086 version of it is now freely available at:

    http://digilander.libero.it/saracos/Download/utl il ty.htm

    Funny how a University of Waterloo compiler would wind up in Italy. Now, if I can just spark up an old PC-XT somewhere...

  • Nobody has mentioned ... (Score:3, Informative)

    by emkman ( 467368 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @09:05PM (#7060290)
    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.

  • Still Unimpressed (Score:4, Insightful)

    by cpt kangarooski ( 3773 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @10:11PM (#7060619) Homepage
    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 [slashdot.org].

    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

  • WASTE WASTE WASTE fork fork fork (Score:3, Informative)

    by Master Controll Prog ( 695769 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @11:12PM (#7061042) Homepage
    this vesrion of waste is better. [globaldisarray.org] do not use the other version. it is not as secure. it is not as stable.
    For those of you running the SourceForge version, I HIGHLY recommend you stop running it. Were you aware that all of your chats are logged by default? Does it not seem odd that your ENCRYPTED application logs all of your chat in plain text? That is NOT good. This is a change that will be added back in later as a preference, but is disabled in the GDA version. It also has several crash symptoms in various configurations. It also logs your downloads to your first SHARED directory, that's not good. You can download the WASTE.exe available on the GDA (
    http://waste.globaldisarray.org [globaldisarray.org]) website and copy it directly over your existing one. The libraries in use are identical.

  • Fortran has hobbled itself (Score:3)

    by penguin7of9 ( 697383 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @11:17PM (#7061074)
    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.

    • Re:Fortran has hobbled itself (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Aardpig ( 622459 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @11:47PM (#7061235)

      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.

  • Judge Nottingham's Phone Number (Score:3, Insightful)

    by dmarx ( 528279 ) * <(moc.liamhsuh) (ta) (xramd)> on Friday September 26, 2003 @07:00AM (#7062510) Homepage Journal
    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?!

  • Language Counter Example Blows Your Buffers (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Elwood P Dowd ( 16933 ) <judgmentalist@gmail.com> on Friday September 26, 2003 @10:24AM (#7063985) Journal
    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.

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