JMS@CARAT.ARIZONA.EDU (A drama about physicists must be paradoxical.) (11/20/90)
Archive-name: cookie/13-Nov-90 Original-posting-by: JMS@CARAT.ARIZONA.EDU (A drama about physicists must be paradoxical.) Original-subject: Mongo Huge Enormous Cookie File available finally. Archive-site: arizona.edu [128.196.128.233] Archive-directory: [software.vms.cookie] Reposted-by: emv@ox.com (Edward Vielmetti) Folks: A month or so ago I sent out a message asking about "cookie" files. For those of you who aren't familiar, a cookie file (sometimes called a fortune file) contains quotes, sayings, inanities, and non-sequiturs. It has become a bit of a macho contest to have the biggest cookie file on the block, and I believe that, with the help of those of you out there who sent in cookies, we have constructed what may be known as a truly large cookie file. Naturally, in the spirit of info-vax/comp.os.vms, it's time to share the cookies. However, given the 10,000 block size of the file, this isn't as easy as it seems. Initially, it's available via anonymous ftp to Arizona.EDU, a VMS system running MultiNet. Ftp to Arizona.EDU and cd to [software.vms.cookie]. There are three files, the cookie file itself, and two miserably awful Fortran programs to deal with it. Hint: don't use the Fortran programs! If someone out there is running VMSSERV and has an extra 5 megabytes to waste, please feel free to copy the file and offer via that avenue. Under no circumstances can I e-mail the file to you, as this would cause my own bottom to be hung from the highest flagpole, reserved for "those who abuse 9600 bps links." Finally, if you sent me a mag tape, I will send it back to you with the entire file on it. If you can't network it over, send me a magtape with postage to get it back to you, and I will write out the whole shebang. Some thoughts on the file: first, many many thanks to those of you who sent in cookie files. There are literally dozens of contributors. Second, I take back all the bad things I ever said about Terry Kennedy. After attempting to publicly humiliate him, he most graciously Fed Exed me 30,000 blocks of cookies, which have been incorporated into the file. Terry is the largest single contributor, and has a Most Macho Cookie file of his own (which is entirely contained within this new one, so don't go bothering the fellow, he's got a lot of work to do). Third, this file has a number of duplicates and near-misses. At the 10,000 block level, even my own propensity to waste time won't allow me to hand-pick through the entire file. I suspect that over 10% of the cookies are duplicates, which weren't found by my cookie-duplicate-finding program. For those of you who are stats freaks, the original, unsorted, unweeded file was over 40,000 blocks. 254 million page faults later... And finally, BE WARNED! This cookie file contains sayings which are rude, obnoxious, sexually explicit, and not fit for your boss to see. DO NOT INSTALL THIS AS AN AUTOMATIC RUN AT LOGIN! You will probably offend someone who was about to give you a very large grant/raise! You have been warned! Software: Well, the cookie file itself is the hard part. I have formatted it with the following rule: Cookies begin with a non-space character in column one. A multi-line cookie has a space as the first character of second and subsequent lines. For those of you who prefer %% separated cookies, the change is an exercise in TPU wildcards; it takes about 10 seconds to define the key, but several hours to run... Be warned that a tab is not a space. For those of you who are supremely lazy, I offer a program that I wrote once while quite inebriated the first day we got our new Fortran compiler, in the same directory on Arizona.EDU. You will need to run cookie-change to generate two mongo ugly files, and then edit COOKIE.FOR to put the correct #-of-cookies in the code (of course I compiled it in!). jms Joel M Snyder, The Mosaic Group, 627 E Speedway, 85705 Phone: 602.626.8680 (University of Arizona, Dep't of MIS, Eller Graduate School of Management) BITNET: jms@arizmis Internet: jms@mis.arizona.edu SPAN: 47541::uamis::jms "Pointers in C, it is to be admitted, can cause problems for the novice." PS: I was happy to see the message by KCHILES@ARAC.LLNL.GOV regarding privacy and the Constitution. I'm not a lawyer (and I don't play one on TV), but I had dinner with one last night, and we discussed the issue. The answer, of course, isn't clear. However, there was no "Constitutional Right to Privacy" before 1965, when Griswold v. Connecticut activated the vague, and previously dormant, Ninth Amendment. Some aspects of the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments were also brought into the discussion. Griswold v. Connecticut is interesting in that it really was a very broad interpretation of the constitution (and played heavily in the also-famous Roe v. Wade decision later). In Griswold v. Connecticut, seven of the justices agreed that a state law which prohibited the use of birth control devices violated a constitutional liberty, but they could not agree on the provisions that provided a source for this liberty. Decisions such as Griswold underline the Supreme Court's partial freedom from contraints imposed by law. In any case, the interpetation (include stare decisis) of this decision is still very narrow: laws which are state and federal laws cannot broach your home, but there is no application to the area of electronic eavesdropping (such as cellular or cordless telephones), or of private citizens spying on each other. There may be, of course, laws (such as the Privacy Act I mentioned in an earlier message) which govern a citizen's rights to privacy, but these are not based in the Constitution. Accordingly, a constitutional law scholar (who I just got off the phone with) says, when asked, "Is there a Constitutional Right to Privacy," "Absolutely not." There are, she points out, many aspects of our lives which have been interpreted, Constitutionally, as being private, and there are restrictions which emanate from the Constitution in this area. However, a claim that the Fourth Amendment provides a right to privacy (as some Info-VAX authors have made) is certainly unsubstantiated. In the majority opinion, such a claim was not made, but rather a much more vague one: "The foregoing cases suggest that specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance. Various guarantees create zones of privacy. The right of association contained in the penumbra of the First Amendment is one, as we have seen. The Third Amendment, in its prohibition against the quartering of soldiers "in any house" in time of peace without the consent of the owner is another facet of that privacy. The Fourth Amendment explicitly affirms the "right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures..." (Justice Douglas). (Many thanks to Aaron Leonard, by the way, not only for putting up the Cookie file on Arizona.EDU, but also by pointing me to the emanating penumbras. Aaron is also not a lawyer, and does not play one on TV.) Justice Black goes on expressing his displeasure about such claims: "The Court talks about a constitutional "right of privacy" as though there is some constitutional provision or pfovisions forbidding any law ever to be passed which might abridge the "privacy" of individuals. But there is not. There are, of course, guarantees in certain specific constitutional provisions which are designed in part to protect privacy at certain times and places with respect to certain activities. Such, for example, is the Fourth Amendment's guarantee against "unreasonable searches and seizures." But I think it belittles that Amendment to talk about it as though it protects nothing but "privacy..." One of the most effective ways of diluting or expanding a constitutionally guaranteed right is to substitute for the crucial word or words of a constitutional guarantee another word or words, more or less flexible and more or less restricted in meaning. This fact is well illustrated by the use of the term "right of privacy" as a comprehensive substitute for the Fourth Amendment's guarantee against "unreasonable searches and seizures." "Privacy" is a broad, abstract, and ambiguous concept which can easily be shrunken in meaning but which can also, on the other hand, easily be interpreted as a constitutional ban against many things other than searches and seizures." Unfortunately, I don't have any good references to point you at for discussions of the matter (expert advice is easier than the library, although much less reliable), but I can point you to the actual Griswold v. Connecticut ruling which I found in our own law library as 381 U.S. 479 (1965). PPS: This ruling is also interesting for the language used. Consider the opinion of Stewart: "Since 1879 Connecticut has had on its books a law which forbids the use of contraceptives by anyone. I think this is an uncommonly silly law. As a practical matter, the law is obviously unenforeable..."