Are you just retarded or do you not realize the scope of encrypted communication? Most shit transfered over an insecure medium is encrypted and rightly so. As soon as you put a backdoor into an encryption scheme you might as well not use it at all. This applies for everything from encrypteing and signing email to generating encryption keys for an ssh transaction. The argument about having nothing to hide is ridiculous. Do you mail letters without an envelope? Do you just have a bunch of novelty post card checks you use to pay your bills? Encryption is an electronic version of a security envelope.
Let's say for argument you're going to give someone a backdoor into an RSA style crypto scheme. The output you broadcast won't let anyone infer the original input without having knowlege of the primes used to generate the output. Hence brute force cracking is needed to decrypt a message you're not supposed to know. To give someone a backdoor would be to give them one of the primes that was used to generate the output so they could take your encrypted output and run it backwards through the process and figure out your original input. The lack of security of the original generators means your crypto is basically useless. Laptops and hard drives have been stolen from some of the most secure government locations in the country, how safe do you think these backdoors really are? Then there are symmetric schemes like CSS on DVDs. All it would take is the leak of one key to figure out the rest of the keys and then your entire crypto scheme is shot to shit.
You're also underestimating the power of the law in this country. Search warrants and phone taps are decided by a judge who knows if he or she hands out warrants and wiretaps that are complete horse shit they'll be out of a job. They're also people that have come from defence backgrounds that realize what shit some investigators offer the judge to get a warrant. To make your phone untapable don't use it or use a black box so they don't know you've answered the phone. Look into the history of phone tapping to figure out how to get around it. A payphone and a handheld voice recorder works wonders.
Something along those lines is in a letter I'm writing to both California Senators as well as my local Reps. You should probably do the same. Explain that anybody with even a shitty computer can write themselves a working encryption program. People have been writing Ceasars for years as sed macros, it's even easier than writing a block cypher. Very few common folk understand what the fuck encryption even is let alone how it works. Writing something to your represenatives giving them the lowdown on how easy it is to circumvent Clippers.
You're missing the point. MPEG4 allows for objectification of certain elements. If part of a frame is decided to be "background" it is tagged and encoded as such. So to see ONLY the frame to frame delta you can select to not download any scene object tagged as "background". You select which components you want to view. In fact MPEG4 has inherent support for chroma keying so a broadcast could just stick someone on a blue screen and send that feed and provide a static background to go behind them. Also the difference between MPEG1/2 and 4 is that objects (delta components) can be arbitrarily sized whereas in MPEG1/2 the encoding was based on blocks. THis is the specific reason why low bitrate MPEG1/2 videos look like shit. The block size is enormous compared to the size of the frame in order to get a high compression ratio (known as compression artifacts). MPEG4 can encode objects of any size and shape which lends to having much higher quality at higher compression ratios.
Let's say you're a billion dollar corporation who's just seen a huge tragedy happen in your home country possibly with several employees directly related to people involved in the tragedy. Are you going to force them to hope on a plane to some expo? Besides that, are you going to ask a bunch of other corporations to do the exact same thing? You won't be a billion dollar corporation for long with that sort of insensitive bullshit happening. It's also pretty ludicrous to try to hae a big international expo at the same time as a major downsizing in the worldwide travel market.
MPEG4 has been designed from the get go to support decent video quality at sub-ISDN speeds which means with a little buffering dialup users should be able to watch the same video that broadband users will have access to. The other design components of MPEG4 make it very usable for dialup users. If you encode your video properly, dial-up users can have their video stream app drop objects from the stream they don't want/need. Who needs the background of a news broadcast on a low bitrate connection? Turn off the loading of objects with "background" tags and it will just download the foreground object that is actually changing. You also have object based random access. So lets say the index of a stream says at frames 00340 through 00450 have some specific image or information you can only download those frames from that object. I think dialup users will be pretty satisfied with the features of MPEG4. Well I hope they will so my only options for downloading video are RAM and WMA.
So all of the computers RMS runs have no password and everyone runs around as root? It is a free world afterall. The U of Wash computer department has no forms to fill out and has no idea who is using their computer labs and systems? That's freedom.
Technically inclined people know that back doors to encryption and face scanning software is complete horse shit. You can't put backdoors in encryption because it negates the encryption entirely. You also can't make people that are already willing to break the law use only legal encryption, that's ridiculous. A couple of hours and even I could write a decent encryption program. Any crypto book ever written's got the RSA assymetric encryption algorithm in it. Face reognition is only as effective as your database behind it. If someone doesn't have a criminal record it isn't going to pick them out, unless you program it to pick up Arab facial features or something. Like another dude already said people planted by well organized terrorists don't make waves in their time before they're activated.
Stallman is trying to take the hippie way out by saying security is a bad thing. You can't be secure in a society that doesn't police itself. The price of freedom is eternal vigilence. The US got itself fucked up the ass because it wasn't paying attention. The proposals for encryption and face scanning and whatnot are kneejerk reactions by people aiming to make their constituants happy. If you convince people a law will make their kids safe they'll vote for it because they don't know any better. Politics is about bullshitting people. Political power is held by the best bullshitters. Stallman ought to get some of his crypto writing friends to write long logical letters to Congressmen and to media organizations. "Backdoors to encryption will make encryption only useful to criminals and the government". People won't support it if they are told whatfor. Stallman is just playing the hype game because it is all he knows. He's as bad as Fox news and MSNBC. Instead of presenting facts and giving those facts to people he's trying to build a hype fire to generate emotional response with the reverse harmonics of the media hype machines. Boo. So how about you folk write your letters explaining the technical infeasibility of these proposals and point out the wisdom of the centuries regarding police states. "The more you tighten your grip the more worlds will fall through your fingers" -- Princess Leia
That's such a fucking gay opinion. First off you're detracting cool factor because of licensing qualms that weren't really licensing qualms because RTLinux and the FSF worked out the problem. For fuck sake, Fujitsu said "hey lets let other dudes build a robot based on the design we already worked out!" That's pretty fucking open source. Attack on open Linux culture? You will never ever get laid.
Weird how I was just reading up on the G5 last night and figuring Mot could probably roll it out soon if they really wanted to. I'm hoping maybe Apple will stick the 64-bit G5 in their high end machines and load the G4 with its 64-bit instructions for use on the low end while phasing out (or scaling down) the use of the G3 though the 750CXe might make a nice little chip for IBM to stick in Netvistas and Thinkpads. The most important part of decisions Apple makes in terms of chip upgrades are the opinions of their development base. They'd have to make sure none of their big OS10 supports would jump ship if they asked them to recompile yet again so their apps would run 64-bit native. That though is part of the reason for such a push to get everyone spitting out Carbon and Cocoa apps, Apple can easily add 64-bit framework components to the existing frameworks so as little reworking has to be done on Mac apps.
If Apple goes entirely 64-bit with all of their systems they'd put serious strain on the Wintel workstation world. The transition to 64-bit is going to be much slower going for Wintel due to the sheer size of the Wintel market. It would take all of the PC manufacturers and developers a while to get all of their stuff up and running on XP64 because there's so much of it. Apple can easily just transition all of their boxes to a new ISA in one swoop. One day they're selling 32-bit G3 and G4s and the next they've got 64-bit G4 and G5s.
First of all the large pipeline is needed for fast chips without tons of cache memory because there's such a lag between the memory clock and processor clock (the processor is finished computing data bafore it can store it memory so has to wait a long time before it can write it back). The G5 is planned to have a good deal more cache then the P4 has, comparable to the Xeon version of the P4 which makes it more effective even at very high processor clock speeds. And secondly the G5 will be a MPPC 7500 series.
MOSR is the dumbest fucking place on the planet to get any information about upcoming Mac products from. Their "credible source" on the Quicksilver Macs said they would be released in speeds upwards of a GHz and would all have DDR memory. It's just gay horseshit. Please never mention them ever again.
I was cruising around and wandered into a Gateway country today. There was one of them demo rooms with the TV connected to a P3 930MHz with a GeForce2 Ultra. So there was the 3D Mark 2k1 icon on the screen so I bust it open and run the demo. I was floored by the graphics just in that demo. The first part of the demo with the statue in the rain I thought was nice looking, until I saw the forest scene with the trees and water. On the television you were hard pressed to tell that 1) it was computer generated and 2)it was being done in realtime. Then came the Matrix movie towards the end. That was just a badass fucking demo. When I first played Q3A I thought the graphics were nice until I got a GF2MX and realized the graphics were actually a little awe inspiring. UT was the same way. I'm fixing my game box so I'm not going to bother getting RCW yet but I'm anxious to play it. When the new Doom comes out I can only hope it is as much of an improvement as Q3A was over Q1. If you want a bit of eye candy for Windows the new 3DMark demo is actually really sweet looking. I think it's 3D demos are alot better than nVidia's. Too bad I can't make those trees my screen saver.
For fuck sake dude, a good sized rock can be used to kill someone. Does that mean rocks of particular sizes ought to be outlawed? Should the writers of compilers be held accountable for people who used their compiler to make a virus? Run of the mill network utilities can easily be used to DOS some poor sap with a slower connection than yours. You post vulnerabilities in order to expose the fact that company X doesn't test their shit properly and ought to learn how before they lose all their customers. I'd rather use a product that has had bugs exploited and fixed than one where I didn't know if it had been exploited or not. If you're the target of an exploit especially a dumbfuck exploit like macro virii then you live and learn.
I didn't say it was useful for anyone but Microsoft for fuck sake. Can you fucking read? I was responding to the glaring inaccuracy of the guy's statement. He berated the original poster saying C# was some sort of magical Microsoft-only language which it isn't. Besides, the entire reason for Mono (Ximian's.NET runtime) is to run.NET apps open source style. So your C# apps don't end up in the shitcan if you're not using a Microsoft OS. Jesus man get the net.
You dumb piece of horseshit. If a language is posted for standardization that means anyone can write their own compiler and distribute it without paying royalties. It isn't a technical hinderance but a legal one. Why don't you think before you write dickhead.
If Microsoft submitted it to the EMCA that means the GCC folks can compile it. Whether or not you can use Microsoft's libraries has nothing to do with whether or not it's portable.
Reading manuals is great until you find yourself in a situation that the manual doesn't cover and only a real expert in the program knows how to fix it. The experts aren't the ones writting the manuals in most places. Making RTFM suggestions ridiculous. Besides when you ask for help the first replies are always "RTFM asshole" assuming them anual holds all information. It'd be more helpful if they asked "hey asshole did you RTFM?". At least then they're have an open outlook so you could ask more questions.
You don't have to embed anything into a PowerPoint document. PP will merely use the XML generated from Word as its input and will change its appearance any way you want without changing the actual data from the XML file. It's pretty damn easy to do with a little bit of training. Talk to anyone who even halfway knows what they're doing in Office and they can tell you how easy it is to do whatever you want with any bit of data. DOn't go ranting about how Office sucks just because you have no idea what you're doing. That doesn't make it counter intuitive it just makes you hard headed.
Exactly. Any encryption book you ever buy has at least four chapters devoted to encoding scheme that obfuscate your messages so they can't be easily filtered.
What the fuck. Microsoft builds Office entirely out of COM objects and makes its documents linkable to all of the apps in the suite. THey also let you embed the functional portion of a suite app into a fucking document. They get bashed ad infinitum on slashdot. Now people realize THEY GOT IT FUCKING RIGHT and now need to fucking copy them. Admittedly ZDNet is populated by the low end of the computer using spectrum and caters to its ilk but seeing the discussions here is just ridiculous. Microsoft's whole ActiveX paradigm has been attacked countless times and now people are wishing Linux had the same capabilities. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. I guess people who develop open source software aren't the same people using it. Because it seems all the people using it couldn't think their way out of a fucking paper bag.
What in the holiest of holy fucks are you smoking? Word and Powerpoint since like Office 97 have been built out of COM objects. Recurring functions are just object methods that get reused by all of the Office apps. As for the document formatting, Office 2k and XP already handle this by saving content as XML and then attaching stylesheets and whatnot to the content data in order to give it context. A word document with a numbered list can easily be stuck onto a PowerPoint presentation, a change to the word document changes the PP doc. Where you get that it is a painful process I have no idea. You probably don't know how to fucking use Office so you're blaming your problems on the program.
Back in the day we called these "text files", in fact everything from memos to emails to configuration files were all just "text files". You could write an app in a couple of lines that would create and edit these "text file" things. Most command shells even have support for that stuff. Wierd.
If you look at the situation logically without the slashdot required kneejerk response you'll immediately recognize the flaws in any argument of "make X illegal for safety issues". If you make it illegal the only people that will have it are criminals. A couple semesters of calculus and computer programming will net you the expertise to write rudimentary encryption algorithms. Strong enough to take years to decode by which time it's far too late to be of any use at all. Does the government honestly believe that making it illegal to have non-Clipper encryption will keep people with illegal inclinations from using it? No they don't but propositions like this are meant to give the public something to make themselves feel more secure. Just remember the US government tried to ban booze and it backfired on them entirely.
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Are you just retarded or do you not realize the scope of encrypted communication? Most shit transfered over an insecure medium is encrypted and rightly so. As soon as you put a backdoor into an encryption scheme you might as well not use it at all. This applies for everything from encrypteing and signing email to generating encryption keys for an ssh transaction. The argument about having nothing to hide is ridiculous. Do you mail letters without an envelope? Do you just have a bunch of novelty post card checks you use to pay your bills? Encryption is an electronic version of a security envelope.
Let's say for argument you're going to give someone a backdoor into an RSA style crypto scheme. The output you broadcast won't let anyone infer the original input without having knowlege of the primes used to generate the output. Hence brute force cracking is needed to decrypt a message you're not supposed to know. To give someone a backdoor would be to give them one of the primes that was used to generate the output so they could take your encrypted output and run it backwards through the process and figure out your original input. The lack of security of the original generators means your crypto is basically useless. Laptops and hard drives have been stolen from some of the most secure government locations in the country, how safe do you think these backdoors really are? Then there are symmetric schemes like CSS on DVDs. All it would take is the leak of one key to figure out the rest of the keys and then your entire crypto scheme is shot to shit.
You're also underestimating the power of the law in this country. Search warrants and phone taps are decided by a judge who knows if he or she hands out warrants and wiretaps that are complete horse shit they'll be out of a job. They're also people that have come from defence backgrounds that realize what shit some investigators offer the judge to get a warrant. To make your phone untapable don't use it or use a black box so they don't know you've answered the phone. Look into the history of phone tapping to figure out how to get around it. A payphone and a handheld voice recorder works wonders.
Something along those lines is in a letter I'm writing to both California Senators as well as my local Reps. You should probably do the same. Explain that anybody with even a shitty computer can write themselves a working encryption program. People have been writing Ceasars for years as sed macros, it's even easier than writing a block cypher. Very few common folk understand what the fuck encryption even is let alone how it works. Writing something to your represenatives giving them the lowdown on how easy it is to circumvent Clippers.
I used to call this usenet but I don't know what kids call it today.
You're missing the point. MPEG4 allows for objectification of certain elements. If part of a frame is decided to be "background" it is tagged and encoded as such. So to see ONLY the frame to frame delta you can select to not download any scene object tagged as "background". You select which components you want to view. In fact MPEG4 has inherent support for chroma keying so a broadcast could just stick someone on a blue screen and send that feed and provide a static background to go behind them. Also the difference between MPEG1/2 and 4 is that objects (delta components) can be arbitrarily sized whereas in MPEG1/2 the encoding was based on blocks. THis is the specific reason why low bitrate MPEG1/2 videos look like shit. The block size is enormous compared to the size of the frame in order to get a high compression ratio (known as compression artifacts). MPEG4 can encode objects of any size and shape which lends to having much higher quality at higher compression ratios.
Let's say you're a billion dollar corporation who's just seen a huge tragedy happen in your home country possibly with several employees directly related to people involved in the tragedy. Are you going to force them to hope on a plane to some expo? Besides that, are you going to ask a bunch of other corporations to do the exact same thing? You won't be a billion dollar corporation for long with that sort of insensitive bullshit happening. It's also pretty ludicrous to try to hae a big international expo at the same time as a major downsizing in the worldwide travel market.
Though they should probably call it "MSVMS".
MPEG4 has been designed from the get go to support decent video quality at sub-ISDN speeds which means with a little buffering dialup users should be able to watch the same video that broadband users will have access to. The other design components of MPEG4 make it very usable for dialup users. If you encode your video properly, dial-up users can have their video stream app drop objects from the stream they don't want/need. Who needs the background of a news broadcast on a low bitrate connection? Turn off the loading of objects with "background" tags and it will just download the foreground object that is actually changing. You also have object based random access. So lets say the index of a stream says at frames 00340 through 00450 have some specific image or information you can only download those frames from that object. I think dialup users will be pretty satisfied with the features of MPEG4. Well I hope they will so my only options for downloading video are RAM and WMA.
So all of the computers RMS runs have no password and everyone runs around as root? It is a free world afterall. The U of Wash computer department has no forms to fill out and has no idea who is using their computer labs and systems? That's freedom.
Technically inclined people know that back doors to encryption and face scanning software is complete horse shit. You can't put backdoors in encryption because it negates the encryption entirely. You also can't make people that are already willing to break the law use only legal encryption, that's ridiculous. A couple of hours and even I could write a decent encryption program. Any crypto book ever written's got the RSA assymetric encryption algorithm in it. Face reognition is only as effective as your database behind it. If someone doesn't have a criminal record it isn't going to pick them out, unless you program it to pick up Arab facial features or something. Like another dude already said people planted by well organized terrorists don't make waves in their time before they're activated.
Stallman is trying to take the hippie way out by saying security is a bad thing. You can't be secure in a society that doesn't police itself. The price of freedom is eternal vigilence. The US got itself fucked up the ass because it wasn't paying attention. The proposals for encryption and face scanning and whatnot are kneejerk reactions by people aiming to make their constituants happy. If you convince people a law will make their kids safe they'll vote for it because they don't know any better. Politics is about bullshitting people. Political power is held by the best bullshitters. Stallman ought to get some of his crypto writing friends to write long logical letters to Congressmen and to media organizations. "Backdoors to encryption will make encryption only useful to criminals and the government". People won't support it if they are told whatfor. Stallman is just playing the hype game because it is all he knows. He's as bad as Fox news and MSNBC. Instead of presenting facts and giving those facts to people he's trying to build a hype fire to generate emotional response with the reverse harmonics of the media hype machines. Boo. So how about you folk write your letters explaining the technical infeasibility of these proposals and point out the wisdom of the centuries regarding police states. "The more you tighten your grip the more worlds will fall through your fingers" -- Princess Leia
That's such a fucking gay opinion. First off you're detracting cool factor because of licensing qualms that weren't really licensing qualms because RTLinux and the FSF worked out the problem. For fuck sake, Fujitsu said "hey lets let other dudes build a robot based on the design we already worked out!" That's pretty fucking open source. Attack on open Linux culture? You will never ever get laid.
Weird how I was just reading up on the G5 last night and figuring Mot could probably roll it out soon if they really wanted to. I'm hoping maybe Apple will stick the 64-bit G5 in their high end machines and load the G4 with its 64-bit instructions for use on the low end while phasing out (or scaling down) the use of the G3 though the 750CXe might make a nice little chip for IBM to stick in Netvistas and Thinkpads. The most important part of decisions Apple makes in terms of chip upgrades are the opinions of their development base. They'd have to make sure none of their big OS10 supports would jump ship if they asked them to recompile yet again so their apps would run 64-bit native. That though is part of the reason for such a push to get everyone spitting out Carbon and Cocoa apps, Apple can easily add 64-bit framework components to the existing frameworks so as little reworking has to be done on Mac apps.
If Apple goes entirely 64-bit with all of their systems they'd put serious strain on the Wintel workstation world. The transition to 64-bit is going to be much slower going for Wintel due to the sheer size of the Wintel market. It would take all of the PC manufacturers and developers a while to get all of their stuff up and running on XP64 because there's so much of it. Apple can easily just transition all of their boxes to a new ISA in one swoop. One day they're selling 32-bit G3 and G4s and the next they've got 64-bit G4 and G5s.
First of all the large pipeline is needed for fast chips without tons of cache memory because there's such a lag between the memory clock and processor clock (the processor is finished computing data bafore it can store it memory so has to wait a long time before it can write it back). The G5 is planned to have a good deal more cache then the P4 has, comparable to the Xeon version of the P4 which makes it more effective even at very high processor clock speeds. And secondly the G5 will be a MPPC 7500 series.
MOSR is the dumbest fucking place on the planet to get any information about upcoming Mac products from. Their "credible source" on the Quicksilver Macs said they would be released in speeds upwards of a GHz and would all have DDR memory. It's just gay horseshit. Please never mention them ever again.
I was cruising around and wandered into a Gateway country today. There was one of them demo rooms with the TV connected to a P3 930MHz with a GeForce2 Ultra. So there was the 3D Mark 2k1 icon on the screen so I bust it open and run the demo. I was floored by the graphics just in that demo. The first part of the demo with the statue in the rain I thought was nice looking, until I saw the forest scene with the trees and water. On the television you were hard pressed to tell that 1) it was computer generated and 2)it was being done in realtime. Then came the Matrix movie towards the end. That was just a badass fucking demo. When I first played Q3A I thought the graphics were nice until I got a GF2MX and realized the graphics were actually a little awe inspiring. UT was the same way. I'm fixing my game box so I'm not going to bother getting RCW yet but I'm anxious to play it. When the new Doom comes out I can only hope it is as much of an improvement as Q3A was over Q1. If you want a bit of eye candy for Windows the new 3DMark demo is actually really sweet looking. I think it's 3D demos are alot better than nVidia's. Too bad I can't make those trees my screen saver.
For fuck sake dude, a good sized rock can be used to kill someone. Does that mean rocks of particular sizes ought to be outlawed? Should the writers of compilers be held accountable for people who used their compiler to make a virus? Run of the mill network utilities can easily be used to DOS some poor sap with a slower connection than yours. You post vulnerabilities in order to expose the fact that company X doesn't test their shit properly and ought to learn how before they lose all their customers. I'd rather use a product that has had bugs exploited and fixed than one where I didn't know if it had been exploited or not. If you're the target of an exploit especially a dumbfuck exploit like macro virii then you live and learn.
I didn't say it was useful for anyone but Microsoft for fuck sake. Can you fucking read? I was responding to the glaring inaccuracy of the guy's statement. He berated the original poster saying C# was some sort of magical Microsoft-only language which it isn't. Besides, the entire reason for Mono (Ximian's .NET runtime) is to run .NET apps open source style. So your C# apps don't end up in the shitcan if you're not using a Microsoft OS. Jesus man get the net.
You dumb piece of horseshit. If a language is posted for standardization that means anyone can write their own compiler and distribute it without paying royalties. It isn't a technical hinderance but a legal one. Why don't you think before you write dickhead.
If Microsoft submitted it to the EMCA that means the GCC folks can compile it. Whether or not you can use Microsoft's libraries has nothing to do with whether or not it's portable.
Reading manuals is great until you find yourself in a situation that the manual doesn't cover and only a real expert in the program knows how to fix it. The experts aren't the ones writting the manuals in most places. Making RTFM suggestions ridiculous. Besides when you ask for help the first replies are always "RTFM asshole" assuming them anual holds all information. It'd be more helpful if they asked "hey asshole did you RTFM?". At least then they're have an open outlook so you could ask more questions.
You don't have to embed anything into a PowerPoint document. PP will merely use the XML generated from Word as its input and will change its appearance any way you want without changing the actual data from the XML file. It's pretty damn easy to do with a little bit of training. Talk to anyone who even halfway knows what they're doing in Office and they can tell you how easy it is to do whatever you want with any bit of data. DOn't go ranting about how Office sucks just because you have no idea what you're doing. That doesn't make it counter intuitive it just makes you hard headed.
Exactly. Any encryption book you ever buy has at least four chapters devoted to encoding scheme that obfuscate your messages so they can't be easily filtered.
What the fuck. Microsoft builds Office entirely out of COM objects and makes its documents linkable to all of the apps in the suite. THey also let you embed the functional portion of a suite app into a fucking document. They get bashed ad infinitum on slashdot. Now people realize THEY GOT IT FUCKING RIGHT and now need to fucking copy them. Admittedly ZDNet is populated by the low end of the computer using spectrum and caters to its ilk but seeing the discussions here is just ridiculous. Microsoft's whole ActiveX paradigm has been attacked countless times and now people are wishing Linux had the same capabilities. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. I guess people who develop open source software aren't the same people using it. Because it seems all the people using it couldn't think their way out of a fucking paper bag.
What in the holiest of holy fucks are you smoking? Word and Powerpoint since like Office 97 have been built out of COM objects. Recurring functions are just object methods that get reused by all of the Office apps. As for the document formatting, Office 2k and XP already handle this by saving content as XML and then attaching stylesheets and whatnot to the content data in order to give it context. A word document with a numbered list can easily be stuck onto a PowerPoint presentation, a change to the word document changes the PP doc. Where you get that it is a painful process I have no idea. You probably don't know how to fucking use Office so you're blaming your problems on the program.
Back in the day we called these "text files", in fact everything from memos to emails to configuration files were all just "text files". You could write an app in a couple of lines that would create and edit these "text file" things. Most command shells even have support for that stuff. Wierd.
If you look at the situation logically without the slashdot required kneejerk response you'll immediately recognize the flaws in any argument of "make X illegal for safety issues". If you make it illegal the only people that will have it are criminals. A couple semesters of calculus and computer programming will net you the expertise to write rudimentary encryption algorithms. Strong enough to take years to decode by which time it's far too late to be of any use at all. Does the government honestly believe that making it illegal to have non-Clipper encryption will keep people with illegal inclinations from using it? No they don't but propositions like this are meant to give the public something to make themselves feel more secure. Just remember the US government tried to ban booze and it backfired on them entirely.