[ExI] don't do it! was: RE: european history: was two years in the slammer forblammisphy?

Adrian Tymes wingcat at pacbell.net
Fri May 14 17:30:01 UTC 2010


--- On Thu, 5/13/10, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:
> proverbial
> jillions of monkeys pecking at typewriters, and one of them
> eventually
> theoretically produces the works of Shakespeare.  

Two problems with that:

1. It requires "infinite" monkeys or "infinite" time, neither
of which are actually available.  Even the universe has
existed for a finite - if large - time.  (This can be used to
illustrate the difference between "mind-bogglingly huge" and
"literally infinite".)

2. Even if one of them produced it, how would you find it
amongst the infinite amount of output?  The monkeys know not
what they made.  (And you'd have many more near-misses,
being a few characters to a few scenes off, than actual exact
copies.)

> Since
> there are infinitely many
> different combinations of bits (we might suppose) which
> could be interpreted
> as child pornography, then the algorithm that produces e
> theoretically
> contains every possible vile image that can be
> imagined.

This falls under problem 2 above.  An sequence of bits is
not child pornography until it is put in a context where
it can be recognized as such.  One could, in theory, use
an image of two 5 year olds going at it as a cryptographic
key - and so long as no one involved thought of that
sequence of bits as anything other than said key, it would
not arouse, titillate, or do the other things required to
fit the definition of "pornography".  (Of course, "no one"
includes the user of the key, thus requiring that the user
be unaware of the key's contents.  This also precludes
some third party giving the user this file to use as a
key, knowing what the file is when viewed as an image.)

> Then take
> the compressed file and compress again.  Repeat
> repeatedly, until one is
> left with a single bit, either a 1 or a 0.

If repeated compression was possible (it's no), why
stop there?  Compress once more.  Achieve the perfect
zen compression of no bytes.  :P

> By the same
> reasoning, either 1 or 0
> is evil, or rather contains the potential for all
> evil.  We don't know which
> one it is, the 1 or the 0, but one of them must be
> unspeakably evil.

Oh, they both are.  And 0 might or might not be the
lesser: if that's a signed number, 1 stands for -1.




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