sage_joch

Part of this realization came to me because of an xkcd comic I read recently. Last year there were many revealed instances of the government violating the 4th Amendment through the forced cooperation of various tech companies. I don't believe it's a huge leap to assume they could do the same to the 1st Amendment if there were ever a caste system for Internet data.

Reasoning: an essay is a path/list of ideas, whereas a comment thread is a "manypath"/directed-graph of ideas. So the claim can be reduced to "'graph' is as fundamental a data structure as 'list'", which is uncontroversial.

This seems unlikely to be a "new" idea, but I stumbled into it by accident and thought it was cool. Java source code below:

  // This class is in the public domain.
  public class Numbers
  {
    public static void main(String[] args)
    {
      int numRows = 256;
      int numColumns = 128;
      for (int row = 0; row < numRows; row++)
      { 
        StringBuilder rowOutput = new StringBuilder();
        for (int column = 0; column < numColumns; column++)
        {
          if ((row & column) != 0)
            rowOutput.append("1");
          else
            rowOutput.append("0");
        }
        System.out.println(
          String.format("row/col %s:\t%s", row, rowOutput.toString()));
      }
    }
  }