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extremist consumer activists are hurting their cause by conjuring up farfetched scenarios that expose them as kooks. (That last point certainly applies to those here who continue to predict that the government will take away general purpose computing capabilities, allow only "approved" software to run, and ban the use of Perl and Python without a license. Try visiting the real world sometime!)
Jack Valenti, President and CEO of the MPAA predicts the U.S. government will ban technologies that permit unrestricted copying. This of course would include such piracy tools as "cp", let alone such dangerously powerful hacker tools as Perl. If we are going to have life in prison for hackers, we certainly need to do something about Perl. Here in the real world, someone has done jail time for the heinious act of breaking rot 13, (actually xor with a short constant string, which is a slight generalization of the rot 13 algorithm) and anti terrorist legislation has just been passed that would have given him life, supposing that some actual harm had supposedly resulted from this major breakthrough. If our masters propose to put someone in jail for life for breaking rot 13, why not life for unauthorized possession of tools capable of writing programs that could break rot 13? --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG gClgqCOWiiYJmyo26JtGJfKmzOMw+edaV6tboz6a 27u1VUjI7/WkzuwYfackYJmmMV4qwifjviHltUQwY