News You Can Bruise for 2002 February 8 (entry 2)

Fri Feb 08 2002 13:47: Unlike most people, I do get paid to have ideas, though not all my ideas result in payment (these are known in the trade as "useless" ideas). So far today I've come up with two such ideas:

1. I remember, but cannot find, an instance in which a CGI interface to the United States Code was used as an example in the code-as-speech debate. Now, some of the laws in the United States Code criminalize the distribution of certain types of information. I don't think these laws are automatically bad, though I think that most of them are. But since you could break one of those laws just by making an HTTP request and getting data in response, you could write a program which had the same CGI interface as the USC program, but instead of returning the text of a law, returned some data which would cause you to violate that law. It would only work for a very small subset of the US Code, though: it would be difficult indeed to violate Section 1821 just by making an HTTP request that said "section=1821" and getting data back.

2. FreeCiv is played on a cylindrical projection of a planetary map. but surely the people in the FreeCiv world have the right to live on a round planet like the rest of us. So change FreeCiv so that the map wraps around on itself in all directions. I think this would drastically change the game for the better, though in general it would leave people more open to attack (since there would be more ways of approaching someone's city, such as across a pole).