4 ms·
Ah yes, fortunately governments have never in history successfully declared certain large integers illegal and prosecuted people for sharing them. Shooting som
by lxgr 1y ago
Ah yes, fortunately governments have never in history successfully declared certain large integers illegal and prosecuted people for sharing them.
Shooting someone is also "just physics", yet many governments have been known to frown upon it (depending on the context).
- dylan604 1y agoYou'll be okay as long as you print them on a t-shirt
- lxgr 1y agoYep, good thing nobody has ever been jailed for wearing a t-shirt with the wrong slogan.
- dylan604 1y agoyou missed the reference. as a history lesson, the deCSS code was written on a t-shirt and was deemed acceptable. having the deCSS compiled as an executable was deemed not acceptable.
- lxgr 1y agoI got the reference. Seems like it worked out quite nicely for the government/court though, given that deCSS isn't much use printed on a t-shirt, compared to in a binary on a computer?
- dylan604 1y agoyou can't share the compiled binary, but you can share a shirt. if you have the shirt, you can compile on your own. the t-shirt became the sharing network
- lxgr 1y agoThat’s the thing about speech: It’s very hard for governments to physically prevent it, but attaching consequences to making use of that capability usually works just as well.
- iamnothere 1y agoThe government failed to stop the spread of the DeCSS code and subsequent tools that were developed using that code. That’s kind of the point.
- lucianbr 1y agoEven a blank sheet of paper I think was enough to get someone in jail.
- JohnLocke4 1y agoIt is true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blank_paper_protest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blank_paper_protest More than anything, this is a good lesson in information theory. A blank sheet of paper isn't devoid of information just because it doesn't contain ink - rather, it is the context of the current situation that defines the information being conveyed. This is true in all forms of communication. This reminds me of a story I read once about when Victor Hugo had just published Les Miserables. Just after publication, he went to his vacation home due to the controversy he was sure was going to follow the publication of the book. Wanting to know how the reception was going, he mailed his publisher a letter simply containing a question mark. The publisher responded with only an exclamation mark, and Hugo immediately understood - he had written an eternal classic. (BTW, I read this in the book The User Illusion - a fantastic read)