I wonder if anything legible ever comes of trying to run a "strings /dev/urandom"

strings /dev/urandom > /dev/pts/14
and wait ...

and if you have no luser at disposal for that you can allway ask john to find something in it.

No, no no. Pipe /dev/urandom into the midi synth!
Admittedly, you'd probably have to make a converter that converts 8 or 16 bit chunks to midi-compatible symbols, but I bet it'd sound awesome!

aplay /dev/urandom

for some cool white noise to lull you to sleep. Or maybe not.

I used to do that for a while until I started thinking that I was hearing the voice of Megatron (G1) trying to broadcast coded messages.

Statistically it should, if you try it enough times (cf Infinite monkey theorem). Might get better results with /dev/hwrng.

you could also get all photos taken in the world at any size. (bigger sizes means exponentially more nonsense to be filtered away....)

e: or even first ever fully distortion-less full detail photo of a yeti

yes. actually i was refering more to that post:
http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p=870876&postcount=8

if you give such a output to a wide public you can be sure that all the folks try to make some sense out of it and at least one comes up with a theory about its meaning. its not the monkey who types something but the human who tries to make some sense out of it,
.... well boils down to 42 in the end ...

Yeah, you really do need infinite monkeys. The thing is, the space is really really really large. Never mind high-res photos, even something as small as a monochrome 16x16 icon has enough permutations that even if you have every person on the planet scan 1000 of these every second there's not enough time to go through more than a tiny fraction of them before the end of the universe.

actually i do argue against that.
see maths is /full/ of errors and many are connected with infinity.

infinity is something humans can't grasp and have no way of proofing what happens when it comes to infinity. you would have to stop beeing human and become something godlike standing above the system to describe it. and thats been prooven: that we cannot proove it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6...eness_theorems

what they do now is still calucalate on theories based on more fundamental theories that have been prooven wrong.

it's a funny assumption they make that with infinite tries every possibility neccessarily occurs if they all have the same probability.

actually i do not think that every possible combination will occur by only giving freedom of infinite combinations. you would need something that ensures that /all/ possibilities /have/ to occur. there is no such restriction so some may never occur: we have that possibillity too.

still there is a high probability that something that makes sense comes out with random symbol combinations. for that you do not need infinite tries. you only need a brain that associates symbols with something.
my 2c