Legal code is more like the Windows kernel than Project Gutenberg
Dan Kaminsky has produced slides showing the "information density" of several different blocks of text, including the corpus of Project Gutenberg, the Windows kernel, and the US legal code. The conclusion? The law has more structural similarities to software code than to the prose in Gutenberg's 17,000 books: "Legalese is a massively structured dialect. Symbols appear in very distinct patterns that are more reminiscent of machine code than text."
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Cory Doctorow
Upcoming appearances
* Feb 9, 2012, DeKalb, IL: Day of Doctorow, NIU
* Feb 10-12, 2012, Chicago, IL: Capricon 32
* Feb 13, 2012, Arlington, TX: UT Arlington College of Engineering Distinguished Speaker Series
* Feb 16, 2012, Victoria, BC: 13th Annual Privacy and Security Conference
Recent books:
* Context (essays)
* With a Little Help (short stories)
* For the Win (YA novel)
* Makers (adult novel)
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