Comments on PGP5.0 OCR (was Re: fyi, pgp source now available , internationally)

[Ryan Anderson]

On Mon, 11 Aug 1997, Adam Back wrote:

> How about a book full of 2D barcodes?  
> 
> As a plus perhaps the book would be more compact, as you could gzip it
> first -- the full source tree looks to be over a foot of doublesided
> paper!

Well, remember the reason we did this:  to get the code out of the US in a
way that the government couldn't screw with at all.  Readable text is
clearly a publication, and thus unrestrictable.  There is a chance,
however small, that gzip (and tarring I'd assume) the tree and then
putting it in as text (or bar-coding it) would cloud the issue some.
(Isn't part of this to do with human-readable as opposed to machien
readable?)

Besides, this way it's easier to spot the errors simply by comparing, with
bar-codes and such you'd never ever be able to look at the errors yourself
and find them.

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Ryan Anderson - <Pug Majere>     "Who knows, even the horse might sing" 
Wayne State University - CULMA   "May you live in interesting times.."
randerso at ece.eng.wayne.edu                        Ohio = VYI of the USA 
PGP Fingerprint - 7E 8E C6 54 96 AC D9 57  E4 F8 AE 9C 10 7E 78 C9
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