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Comment by jMyles | Hacker News Reader

The notion that a file can be illegal makes as much sense to the internet as a plant being illegal makes to the earth.

Especially when it has the side effect of inhibiting what otherwise might be a compelling solution.

Right, and the notion that murder is illegal makes no sense to the universe as humans are "merely" an aggregate of matter no different than any other. Nothing makes any sense to entities not capable of reasoning, that is a pointless tautology with no relevance to the discussion.

Your analogy doesn't hold up, as (for one) we have society and plants don't. I'm glad that child porn is illegal (which is usually distributed in files), as it makes the world safer for children.

Also: some plants are serious jerks.

If pi goes on forever, it contains any and all representations of child porn that could exist. The first person to calculate pi that far will be breaking the law. No, that doesn't make sense, nor does any sort of information being illegal. What does make sense is to legislate the actions that can generate that data, or the misappropriation of that data.

You took a poor example since pi is not known to be a normal number (see eg http://mathworld.wolfram.com/NormalNumber.html )

This number however is:

    0.0 1 10 11 100 101 110 111 1000 ...

This number contains all movies that have and will ever exist. However to specify where a 700mb harry potter movie is in this number, you'll need at least 700mb to represent the index. So in some sense harry potter 'exists' in this number - but in another sense its just a silly encoding method.

Hear hear. This is an easy-to-understand and concise thought experiment; use it often!

Great point !

no, it's a really contrived point.

Most law enforcement and judges don't ask what makes sense to the internet, even if you ignore users personal opinions about the matter.

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