This is both simultaneously false, and true but largely meaningless. If you mean the Mona Lisa is somehow directly encoded somewhere in pi, then of course it’s not. It’s just a number.
If you mean that when you feed the numbers starting with some offset of pi into a specific algorithm you will get a rendering of the Mona Lisa, then yes, but so what? Allow me to introduce you to the PiMona algorithm. I won’t bother you with the implementation details, but it takes exactly one integer parameter. If it’s 3, it produces a beautiful rendering of the Mona Lisa. Anything else and it generates random garbage. Turns out, it’s really easy to find where the Mona Lisa is encoded in pi! It’s right there at the start.
But let’s say you meant that the digits of pi at some offset, when encoded properly and fed into any algorithm that is theoretically capable of generating the Mona Lisa will cause that algorithm to do so, then sure. But that’s also true of random noise, and says more about the algorithm and the nature of random numbers than about the Mona Lisa somehow being encoded into the fabric of the universe (which I’m sure isn’t what you meant, but I’m just saying there’s nothing really special about pi in that regard, except that as far as we know, it continues infinitely).
I think they're going for more of a 'monkeys will eventually produce shakespeare' thing here. Which you can apply the same argument to - monkeys do not know english, don't know what they're typing, and theoretically english could devolve to a state where every sentence could be qualified as shakespeare, right? Your argument just seems unnecessarily pedantic.
And likewise the Romanian “dumneavoastră” evolved into… nothing, that’s still the polite form of “you” in Romanian. Interestingly though, it can be used in both the singular and plural, and takes verbs conjugated exactly the same way for both forms (i.e. the second person plural).
Note that Romanian also has a second person singular formal pronoun, "dumneata", though it's use today is very rare and isn't actually considered polite. This is probably since Romanian, like most Romance languages, often omits the subject in phrases, so the real politeness marker ends up being just the use of second person plural verb forms to refer to a singular speaker ("mă puteți ajuta" is far more common instead of "dumneavoastră mă puteți ajuta" without the omitted subject, while the informal version is the singular "mă poți ajuta", which "dumneata mă poți ajuta" would also require - all of these phrases meaning "can [you] help me").
The origin for both is more "your lordship" ("domnia ta/voastră") than "your mercy", as well.
Except that requiring you to testify in order to absolve yourself of guilt violates your Fifth Amendment right not to testify in a trial against you. It is up to the government to prove you did something, not up to you to prove you didn’t.
You can not testify all you want, but you should still be on the hook for your vehicle getting tickets, just like you are on the hook for your vehicle accruing toll fees.
If your car was magically stolen and returned, and you have no idea that it happened, or who could have done this... Well, that's certainly an interesting legal argument that you could make to a judge. I doubt he'll believe you.
In the old days it certainly happened. Joyriding. Take someone's vehicle for a spin, put it back. Illegal but nowhere near as serious a penalty. Car security systems have gotten a lot better since then.
Man, fuck Facebook Marketplace. I cannot figure out for the life of me why everyone decided to abandon the perfectly useable Craigslist for that unreliable, buggy, scam-laden pile of hot garbage. Never once have I had a single good experience with Facebook Marketplace.
It is a work in progress and is far from providing all the features you might expect from a later model 3174, but it does provide basic TN3270 and VT100 emulation.
+ TN3270
+ Extended Data Stream
+ Basic TN3270E
+ Device name (LU) negotiation
o SSL/TLS
I think that last one is a joke but I really don’t know enough about this sort of thing to be sure…
But at that point why bother with the fakery? Why does it matter if it's obviously of digital origin? As long as it's rendered down to an image problem solved.
Was the motivation for this benign (an employee skirting regulations) or malicious?
4 reems (4×500) is hardly a lot for commercial equipment to handle - paper trays will take a reem at a time. Document analysis would still show some shenanigans were in play, but you'd get a bit of variation at least.
If you mean that when you feed the numbers starting with some offset of pi into a specific algorithm you will get a rendering of the Mona Lisa, then yes, but so what? Allow me to introduce you to the PiMona algorithm. I won’t bother you with the implementation details, but it takes exactly one integer parameter. If it’s 3, it produces a beautiful rendering of the Mona Lisa. Anything else and it generates random garbage. Turns out, it’s really easy to find where the Mona Lisa is encoded in pi! It’s right there at the start.
But let’s say you meant that the digits of pi at some offset, when encoded properly and fed into any algorithm that is theoretically capable of generating the Mona Lisa will cause that algorithm to do so, then sure. But that’s also true of random noise, and says more about the algorithm and the nature of random numbers than about the Mona Lisa somehow being encoded into the fabric of the universe (which I’m sure isn’t what you meant, but I’m just saying there’s nothing really special about pi in that regard, except that as far as we know, it continues infinitely).
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