3 ms·

Reminds me of this classic number: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_prime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_prime Basically: DeCSS source code (illega

• lonelappde 7y ago
  That article talks about specious attempt to hack the legal system, by claiming information can never be legally restricted because it can encode numbers, but doesn't say the result of the attempt.
  • cyborgx7 7y ago
    Copyright does make numbers illegal. I think it is less about "hacking" the legal system, and more about demonstrating how nonsensical it is.
    • dTal 7y ago
      Which it doesn't actually do. Whatever you think of copyright law, the nonsense lies in our contradictory intuition that information is "special" and numbers, even large ones, aren't. But beyond about, oh say, 128 bits[1], numbers take on all the properties we expect of "special" information. I can, for instance, encode a picture of you doing something embarrassing as a very large prime[2] number. Yet my protest of "it's just a prime number, bro!" isn't likely to calm you when I start passing it around to all your friends. Information is information. It's not unreasonable to have rules about the flow of information, however cleverly you've encoded it. [1] https://qntm.org/number https://qntm.org/number [2] The primality is of course totally irrelevant, but it makes it seem more "mathy"
• c3534l 7y ago
  If I ever get a tattoo, I think it's going to be of that.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]