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by SiempreViernes 2981 days ago
Well, I'm not sure it's fair to say the number itself is illegal: it's the code that breaks the law, the number just happens to be one way to express it.

A perfectly equivalent statement is that there are certain "strings that are illegal", but this is both trivially true and a clearly exposes the fallacy at play here.

A written death threat is still a death treat no matter the string encoding you use, so while yes it is an "illegal string", this is just incidental: its the threat that the string encodes that is really breaking the law.

1 comments

Not really disagreeing with you, but taking it even further:

A "written death threat" is not "illegal". I've seen plenty of such threats written on the boundaries of military sites or even electricity substations. Delivering death threats to a person may constitute illegal harassment, but so might delivering love letters. It all depends on the circumstances.

A warning is not the same thing as the sort of threat you get in trouble for. If the circumstances are 'conflating the meaning of terms' then yes, a lot of things - practically everything - can end up 'illegal'.
In much the same way that the word “fire” itself is not illegal, but shouting it in a crowded theatre may be.
No. Ken "Popehat" White wants you to read this:

https://www.popehat.com/2012/09/19/three-generations-of-a-ha...

Please use different phrasing to discuss lawful and unlawful speech in the future.