[free-sklyarov] (no subject)

[Xcott Craver]

On Thu, 4 Oct 2001, Karsten M. Self wrote:

> on Thu, Oct 04, 2001 at 12:12:07PM -0700, Seth David Schoen (schoen at loyalty.org) wrote:
> >
> > The famous such book is _A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal
> > Deviates_, published by the RAND Corporation.  It took a lot of
> > technical development work to generate so many strongly random numbers
> > at that time.
>
> Which implies a sweat-of-the-brow, not an original-work-of-authorship,
> argument for copyright.

	Well, I know this is not a legal argument, but a million truly
	random digits is a wicked huge amount of information, in terms
	of Kolmogorov complexity.  Meanwhile, a million *pseudo* random
	digits, or 100,000,000,000 phone numbers, is very little
	information in terms of Kolmogorov complexity, because a small
	computer program can generate them.

	Ditto with the difference between 1000^10000, and a number
	representing a novel.  The latter is a lot of information,
	whereas the former is just a lot of digits.

							-Xcott