Boing Boing: Legal code is more like the Windows kernel than Project Gutenberg

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Support Bloggers' Rights! HOWTO: Get a link posted to Boing Boing Boing Boing Mobile powered by Winksite Fark rules! This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. Boing Boing is a trademark of Happy Mutants LLC in the United States [and other countries]. Stats (About our stats) defeat censorware Policies Our first five years' worth of posts in one file	View a recent day: August 20 \| August 19 \| August 18 \| previous days \| by month and year Monday, August 6, 2007 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." Link posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:40:50 AM permalink \| Other blogs' comments View a recent day: August 20, 2007 \| August 19, 2007 \| August 18, 2007 \| August 17, 2007 \| August 16, 2007 \| August 15, 2007 \| August 14, 2007 \| previous days \| all BB archives by month and year Email this entry to: Your email address: Message (optional):	Boing Boing Sponsored by: Your Text Ad Here Get BB by email: