  Motivated by the recent submission to cond-mat archives by J. Goodman
(cond-mat/0202383) whose results apparently discredit the approach we have
proposed in a recent paper (Phys. Rev. Lett., 88, 048702 (2002),
cond-mat/0108530), we report the results of the same experiment performed by
Goodman using three different data compression schemes. As a matter of fact the
three zippers display the same efficiency Goodman obtained using Naive Bayesian
Methods and not, as Goodman claimed, an efficiency three times smaller. We
point out the question of the extreme generality of approaches based on data
compression techniques and we list a large range of potential applications,
including those of interest for the physics community.
