[ExI] favor for a friend

[Adrian Tymes]

On Wed, Mar 24, 2021 at 10:24 PM spike jones via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
> True.  BUT DON”T DO IT!  Giovanni, don’t do it man.  It’s illegal!  Or if
> not, it’s highly unadvisable.
>
>
>
> Reasoning: any image or photograph can be (well actually it is)
> represented by a string of bytes representing the color of a pixel.
> Typically a modern internet-ready photo is about a megabyte-length string
> of bits.  An algorithm to calculate pi is infinite, in the sense that it
> will continue to produce bits indefinitely, but if so, then it generates
> any given string of bits, for instance 1010001101, about every thousand
> iterations (because 2^10 is about a thousand) and likewise any string of 20
> bits about every million bits, but the point is… every possible string of
> bits, regardless of how long… will turn up eventually.
>
>
>
> Some images are illegal, such as some types of pornography depicting
> minors for instance, and there are an infinite number of possible such
> images one would imagine, so all of those would be considered illegal, and
> all strings of bits, regardless of how long, will eventually be produced.
> Therefore… that pi-calculating algorithm will eventually produce child
> pornography.
>

Merely generating the bits is insufficient to violate the law.  One must
also isolate the bits, identifying them as a discrete thing.  So long as
the bits are unknown in a string of data, they have no legal meaning - and
thus, are not illegal in that state.
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