• 12 Posts
  • 27 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: December 18th, 2023

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  • It’s not a gray area at all. There’s an EU directive on the matter. If an image appears to depict someone under the age of 18 then it’s child porn. It doesn’t matter if any minor was exploited. That’s simply not what these laws are about.

    Bear in mind, there are many countries where consenting adults are prosecuted for having sex the wrong way. It’s not so long ago that this was also the case in Europe, and a lot of people explicitly want that back. On the other hand, beating children has a lot of fans in the same demographic. Some people want to actually protect children, but a whole lot of people simply want to prosecute sexual minorities, and the difference shows.

    17 year-olds who exchange nude selfies engage in child porn. I know there have been convictions in the US; not sure about Europe. I know that teachers have been prosecuted when minors sought help when their selfies were being passed around in school, because they sent the images in question to the teacher, and that’s possession. In Germany, the majority of suspects in child porn cases are minors. Valuable life lesson for them.

    Anyway, what I’m saying is: We need harsher laws and more surveillance to deal with this epidemic of child porn. Only a creep would defend child porn and I am not a creep.




  • Not quite. Information always depends on context. It is not a fundamental physical quantity like energy. When you have a piece of paper with english writing on it, then you can read and understand it. If you don’t know the script or language, you won’t even be able to tell if it’s a script or language at all. Some information needs to be in your head already. That’s simply how information works.

    You take in information through the senses and do something based on that information. Information flows into your brain through your senses and then out again in the form of behavior. The throughput is throttled to something on the order of 10 bits/s. When you think about it for a bit, you realize that a lot of things are predicated on that. Think of a video game controller. There’s only a few buttons. The interface between you and the game has a bandwidth of only a few bits.


  • The Bit is a unit of information, like the Liter is a unit of volume. The Bit may also be called Shannon, though I do not know where that is commonly done.

    When people talk about a liter, they are often thinking about a liter of milk, or gas. That is, they are thinking of a quantity of a certain substance rather than of a volume in the abstract. People may also say liter to mean a specific carton or bottle, even if it no longer contains a liter of whatever.

    Similarly, people will say “bit” when they mean something more specific than just a unit of measurement. For example, the least significant bit, or the parity bit, and so on. It may refer to a lot of things that can contain 1 Bit of information.

    The fact that the headline is talking about bits/s makes clear that this is talking about how much information goes through a human mind per time unit.