Yes, that's kind of the same point. But Conway's Game of Life is extremely easy to study in silico and has much simpler rules than chemistry.

Correct. And you don't write it just once. I have written it many times, first literally as cells in a 2D array. I wrote it in assembly language too. I later wrote sparse list versions (since most cells are usually empty). I have written it using bit parallelism (generating 8x4 "bricks" of cells) with lookup tables, with lookup tables and with sparse representations. I wrote it as a Java applet for a now ancient web page (1995). I never implemented HashLife though.

Today https://sourceforge.net/projects/golly/ is fast and does about as much as most people need.

I like your letter, and I think it gets at a couple of things I've noticed:

• Very little mainstream media coverage since the arrest
• DMCA opponents much more vocal than DMCA proponents on this matter
• No attempt to put any kind of spin on the arrest in order to legitimize it

Why do I find this so insidious? Well, certainly it's tempting to say that the mainstream media won't cover this story because of centralized corporate control that supports the DMCA. I don't know if that's really it. Maybe the story is just too esoteric to make exciting copy for the average person. Any thoughts?

But isn't it interesting that we aren't seeing a lot of editorials explaining in detail why a non-dangerous alleged offender of a disputed law *should* be held without bail? I mean, if someone can point me to an article that says "Yes, for the good of society, Sklyarov should be under lock and key and here's why." then I'd be very interested in reading it. But it took just a feather's touch of pressure to get Adobe to back down from that position. It's untenable under any reasonable standard of the legitimate use of force.

Finally, there's no PR campaign from the pro-DMCA, pro-arrest camp. Why? Well, because there's no way to *put* a positive spin on using excessive force against a relatively powerless individual to settle a corporate dispute. So in this case, the best spin, the best PR, is simply no publicity at all. The average American who has heard the story at all simply believes that a "Russian hacker" has been apprehended by the FBI. This vaguely suggests that there must have been some sort of national security threat. The supporters of DMCA would like it for things to stay this way.

Here's the sad truth of the matter: power doesn't need reason or persuasion to justify itself. That's why those in favor of Sklyarov's arrest have been eerily silent. Of course, we supposedly live in a democratic society, so power supposedly resides with the people.

Well, the people do have power if enough of them raise their voices. Right now we just have the tech community raising a voice. And that's a wonderful thing, and I guess for such a small community it holds a lot of clout (heh, imagine a general IT strike for even one day).

But this is an issue that politicians will take seriously if there's enough public response. As the subject line says, we just need to educate more people about the implications of something that sounds rather obscure. Well, it's worth a shot.