The question this should raise is "How often is this done without being detected?"
The extant laws are designed to be abused. That may, or may not, have been the intention, but that's the design. If it wasn't the intention, that just proves what kind of idiots passed the laws, and signed them into law. If it was the intention, then you need to wonder why laws were passed designed to make it easy to fraudulently convict people.
I code in Python too (among other things) and I ALWAYS use tab indents with the tab usually being set to 3 spaces for display purposes. (But if the code is deeply nested I may reset the display so that one tab == 2 spaces.)
OTOH, code deeply nested enough to require reseting the display is also deeply nested enough to be considered for refactoring.
N.B.: I use the same indentation whatever language I'm programming in at the moment. Python isn't a special case. (OTOH, this means I never use IDLE.)
I don't think I implied that management wouldn't be taxed on them...though they often manage to pay taxes at a very low rate. I was responding to the idea, as I understood it, that the money accumulated in corporations would end up either with the consumers or with the stockholders (401K, etc.). It does happen. It probably happens more often than not. But the times when it doesn't happen does an amount of damage all out of proportion to it's frequency.
They were willing to put their name above that article. So, yes, it's the Washington Post's editorial choice.
Calling it op-ed doesn't mean that they can disclaim association with it. They're the ones who chose to put it out to their subscribers. Unless they want to be considered on a par with the other tabloids, they need to stand behind what they print. If it's op-ed rather than "factual", they are defending the opinions as sane, reasonable, and in accord with the morals of their paper.
N.B.: I don't hold the Weekly World News or the National Enquirer to the same standard. I don't claim that they are willing to defend either the factual content or the moral stance of what they print. If the Washington Post wishes to join that elite collection, it's welcome to.
Are you sure that the web is still primarily English? I'm not. I suspect that this may be a case of observer bias.
(If it still is, it won't be two years from now. There are already large Spanish and Oriental sections that I occasionally wander in to by accident. [I don't know which Oriental, though I think it's usually either Japanese or Chinese from the script.])
How much of what the government does needs to be something anyone honorable would choke at defending before the government isn't something that should be defended?
Of course, it *could* be a bluff. An encrypted, compressed file generated from/dev/random. But the threat is that "This is a secret I haven't told anyone. What are you afraid it might be?"
And the only way to find out is to call their bluff. Who knows, if might be a video of the last party in Congress that got out of hand in a big way. (The mind boggles.)
Think of it as a doomsday device. After all, if a government can do it, why can't a person?
If you think you can answer that, tell me why a action performed in the name of a government doesn't count as an action performed by a person. (There are reasons why executioners used to cover their heads with a mask. Today, though, they don't bother. People have been conditioned not to care.)
And why are we in Afghanistan, anyway? A reason that isn't a palpable lie? (If you say 9/11, I'll say "Why did we wait so long?", and count it as a palpable lie.)
In a way you're right...but the problem is that if the corporation accumulates assets either management will steal them or a corporate raider will. This isn't guaranteed, but it happens with unfortunate regularity.
Well, maybe wrong, depending on your definition of simple. I tend to think of "y = mx + b" as simple. Let m be the tax rate, x be your income, and b be a negative value. (People who make less that so much not only don't pay taxes, they get benefits.) Now argue over what the values of m and b are, but the system will remain simple and hard to finagle. But it's not all or nothing. (It's only nothing if mx == -b.)
If you want more complexity, you could go with: ax^2 +mx + c = y, but I'd have a hard time defining in simple terms what a was, and m is no longer the slope. y is the of the tax, and c is an offset so that those with a low income are given a tax break And you could go on to higher powers if you want more complexity, without allowing finagling. (OTOH, it might get interesting if someone figures out how to pay a complex amount of taxes.)
What if you are interested in Objective-C, but not in Apple EULAs? Is there a good choice (is that a good choice) in that case?
I'm rather interested in using Objective-C on Linux, but not enough to fight with the old tutorials I've been able to find. (I suppose I could learn Objective-C++, but I've heard less than friendly things about it.)
Last time I looked at it I looked long enough to determine that the Foundation libraries supported Unicode (mandatory!), and I think I remember utf8. But that was string libraries, and I couldn't see how that translated into I/O. I'd need seek and tell, etc. Which probably means read binary files in C, convert into buffers, tell the string libraries to cast them into a Unicode string, etc. But I couldn't find any could tutorials about this.
Documentation is a real hassle. Last time I looked at Vala it looked quite interesting, until I started trying to figure out how to do the things I knew I needed to do...and the answer appeared to be "Use standard C libraries, but we don't bother to document that, because you're supposed to already know that." This just doesn't work. I can handle Java (though I hate their I/O routines and a few other features), Python is easy, Ruby is easy, D is easy (though a pain when you're needing to link with C libraries that require complex structures to be passed and match). But C and C++ seem to be undocumented. You're supposed to "just know" it. But I don't. I understand that gobj is important, but I can't find where it's documented, so if your language just says "And for this you call gobj", then you lose me. I don't have a history of C/C++ in Linux, and my history in MSWind dates back to the 1980's. (Actually I've got more history on the Mac II than in MSWind.)
Fortunately, for me, Python comes "batteries included", so I can get around that. (And it's got GOOD documentation. So does D. So does Java. So does Ruby. But both Ruby and D require C libraries, and that gets me back into trouble.)
Objective-C is in even worse position. It's documentation for the native language (the part I've found) isn't all that great. AND it requires you to use C libraries with no obvious documentation. (Granted this depends on what you are doing, but I know what I'm doing.)
So, it appears (to me) that Objective-C is only a decent choice if you are intending to develop on Apple hardware. If I'm wrong, I'd certainly like to know.
He *is* overstating the case. This doesn't mean that he's wrong in principle. A lot of the time every excuse for attacking a country that is given is obviously false. Of course, this doesn't mean that there is no reason, it just means that you can't determine what the reason is, and that it's probably something even more discreditable that you are guessing.
E.g., one plausible reason for the Afghanistan conflict is to test out new weapons. Nobody's going to admit that, but it's the most plausible excuse that I've come up with. (Same for Iran, but with lots more evidence that all the excuses were lies, but another plausible excuse: I've heard someone claim that it started because Iran started to sell it's oil for Euros rather than dollars. Don't know if that's true or not, and by now it doesn't matter. But the excuses that were provided were obvious lies, that were proved false over and over.)
So if you believe that the government isn't lying to you, then it's almost reasonable to claim that they are attacking countries at random. You can tell that the excuses that they offer are such that (from a central position) only a madman would believe them. And we've recently had a president who was clearly "mad", (I'm referring to the latter days of President Reagan), so that's not that implausible a suggestion.
This is based on stuff I read over a year ago, so there may be some lapses, but:
The plant being built in the Mohave uses mirrors to heat a tank of working fluid. (I forget what. I think they decided against liquid sodium.) It keeps working as long as the tank is hot enough. I forget how long it is expected to stay warm enough under load. (I keep thinking a week, but I think I'm confusing it with another plant.)
For this plant, think of solar as just another way of heating a boiler for a closed cycle steam engine. (it's a bit more indirect than that, but I think that's the basic design they settled on.)
There are ways around that, particularly for a fixed installation. Some are durable, but large (and somewhat expensive). Others are brief, but small and cheap. Electrolysis is relatively compact and durable and cheap, but not efficient. Nothing's perfect, but for any particular solution, there's one best choice. Unfortunately many of them only become cheap if widely adopted. OTOH, some depend on NOT being widely adopted. Like Lithium batteries. We're quickly running through good ores of Lithium, so expect the price to start rising. (This doesn't necessarily mean the cost of the batteries will go up. They may just become a lot smarter about how much Lithium they use per battery. Which is likely to reduce either their ability to hold a charge, or the number of times they can be charged. Or possibly just the cost of manufacturing them.)
I *really* like the concept of fuel cells, but that platinum catalyst has got to go. And no requirement for high temperature, either. A protein based catalyst would be nearly ideal, if it didn't slow down the charge or discharge rate. Which, unfortunately, it would be likely to do. So that would mean larger electrode surfaces. Which means either larger batteries or microsculpted electrodes. (Note that this isn't any battery that I know to be under development.)
Fuel isn't the crucial point. If the organization collapses, then the fuel might be there to be pumped, but it wouldn't help. After it's pumped it needs to be carted off the the fractional distilleries, which are themselves dependent on a large number of services, supplies, etc. And then the result needs to be distributed. And this is just along one chain.
If civilization has a real collapse, the population will revert to considerably below carrying capacity with low-tech. Probably all the way back to hunter gatherer, as most farms are dependent on external resources, and the others will probably be swarmed under by hungry mobs. (Survivalists are much too optimistic about this scenario. The Mormons, in their official liturgy, are more practical. You need an unassailable fort with seven years of provisions. The first two years you just sit out and don't even try to farm. By that point the remaining people should be widely enough spread out that it's safe to try farming. Hunting won't yet be practical, though, as the game will have been practically wiped out during those first two years.)
People say our civilization is fragile, and they are right. But they refuse to accept what that means if there's a real global breakdown. Even Somalia is not as bad as a true breakdown would be. Expect widespread cannibalism out of desperation. Possibly as many as one out of twenty adults would survive, though I doubt it. And most of those would be adult males. Who would kill each other over trifles. Survival would come from surviving family units, but there wouldn't be many of them. Perhaps as many as one in ten thousand of today's families, but probably less. People don't have the skills to survive in a radically de-civilized world. It's not like "going back to the old days" because in the old days most people had the skills of both the hunter and the farmer. And because draft animals were common. And because the game hadn't been systematically killed off. (Even birds are starting to become scarce. Even insects are scarce compared to when I was a child...and many birds depend on insects for their food supply.)
In the new "civilization" that rose from the ashes after a century or so, how the current civilization worked would be mythological tales or wonder. Pigeons would replace chickens. (With the smaller eggs laid less frequently that this implies. Breeding back to a decent chicken replacement would be a matter of millenia.)
OTOH, possibly things wouldn't be quite this grim. Some third world countries...ones with low population pressure...might come through relatively intact, and form a nucleus around which a renewed civilization could arise. But it would be a NEW civilization. In the intervening time the mechanisms used to maintain our current civilization would have decayed to bot being repairable, or perhaps even to rubble. Which would mean that the deep mines and wells that we currently extract resources from would be unusable. But perhaps some of the metal could be salvaged. And perhaps some reference works telling how to use the metal could be found. So this would lead to a renaissance...but one that could not be maintained, because it would be dependent on externalities that weren't sustainable. Perhaps they could come up with solar electric power, probably via a steam engine intermediate. Or perhaps they'd use wood fired steam engines. This could allow them to reach coal, which could allow furnaces to smelt the ores which are our modern junkyards. And on a low level this could allow sustained development for centuries. If they could preserve enough of our current knowledge, they might eventually be able to build back to our current situation. Etc. But have you noticed the vast chain of "perhaps" and "possibly" and "might"? I count this as a low probability outcome.
I'm about as political as most slashdot posters. I.e., I have views and I speak them, but I don't do much about them. No, the reason I don't qualify is that I don't believe in drawing a veil between normal life and religion. I feel that they need to be inextricably mixed.
I've never used bittorrent to download something illegal. I don't believe that I know of any occasion where someone has so used bittorrent.
I have no trouble believing that may people do use it illegally, but I really doubt that most use is for illegal activity. (Mind you, it's just doubt. But all of my personal knowledge is of legal activity. So I'll need actual verifiable evidence before I'll believe otherwise.)
But by the time the civilization collapses it's used up all of the readily available hydrocarbon deposits and metal deposits. (Civilization may require readily available copper deposits to be jump-started.)
So unless you can read the old CDs...or whatever storage medium replaces them...you can't learn enough to make a technological civilization out of what's left. You can probably go quite far with ceramics, glasses, etc., but none of those lead to electronics. And if you can't get to electronics you can't extract specialized materials out of low-value ores. (Well, possibly you could fractionally distill them...but just try doing that to extract iron. Zinc [zinc oxide?] you could get that way, though. Even if you get them that way, you get compounds, not metals. You need electricity to extract most metals from their compounds.)
I'm not sure you get a second chance at a technical civilization.
Actually, there's nothing wrong with the idea that the universe has an infinite amount of mass...but most of it would need to be outside of our light cone.
OTOH, this does mean that you need an alternative to the big bang. Branes would probably work.
Slashdot Mirror
The question this should raise is "How often is this done without being detected?"
The extant laws are designed to be abused. That may, or may not, have been the intention, but that's the design. If it wasn't the intention, that just proves what kind of idiots passed the laws, and signed them into law. If it was the intention, then you need to wonder why laws were passed designed to make it easy to fraudulently convict people.
I code in Python too (among other things) and I ALWAYS use tab indents with the tab usually being set to 3 spaces for display purposes. (But if the code is deeply nested I may reset the display so that one tab == 2 spaces.)
OTOH, code deeply nested enough to require reseting the display is also deeply nested enough to be considered for refactoring.
N.B.: I use the same indentation whatever language I'm programming in at the moment. Python isn't a special case. (OTOH, this means I never use IDLE.)
An elevated light rail system would definitely be better in many ways. It would also be *LOTS* more expensive.
It's because "should" isn't "will".
If you design a system that predictably breaks in a certain way, then you are designing the system to break in that way. Even if you won't admit it.
I don't think I implied that management wouldn't be taxed on them...though they often manage to pay taxes at a very low rate. I was responding to the idea, as I understood it, that the money accumulated in corporations would end up either with the consumers or with the stockholders (401K, etc.). It does happen. It probably happens more often than not. But the times when it doesn't happen does an amount of damage all out of proportion to it's frequency.
They were willing to put their name above that article. So, yes, it's the Washington Post's editorial choice.
Calling it op-ed doesn't mean that they can disclaim association with it. They're the ones who chose to put it out to their subscribers. Unless they want to be considered on a par with the other tabloids, they need to stand behind what they print. If it's op-ed rather than "factual", they are defending the opinions as sane, reasonable, and in accord with the morals of their paper.
N.B.: I don't hold the Weekly World News or the National Enquirer to the same standard. I don't claim that they are willing to defend either the factual content or the moral stance of what they print. If the Washington Post wishes to join that elite collection, it's welcome to.
Are you sure that the web is still primarily English? I'm not. I suspect that this may be a case of observer bias.
(If it still is, it won't be two years from now. There are already large Spanish and Oriental sections that I occasionally wander in to by accident. [I don't know which Oriental, though I think it's usually either Japanese or Chinese from the script.])
One thing it means is that the paper in question is ok with putting their name above something he wrote.
This isn't a happenstance choice. The Washington Post doesn't publish just any old piece of writing. This one met their standards.
Yeah, it was "Op Ed". Everything I said above applies to Op Ed pieces.
That doesn't make it something worth defending.
How much of what the government does needs to be something anyone honorable would choke at defending before the government isn't something that should be defended?
Of course, it *could* be a bluff. An encrypted, compressed file generated from /dev/random. But the threat is that "This is a secret I haven't told anyone. What are you afraid it might be?"
And the only way to find out is to call their bluff. Who knows, if might be a video of the last party in Congress that got out of hand in a big way. (The mind boggles.)
Think of it as a doomsday device. After all, if a government can do it, why can't a person?
If you think you can answer that, tell me why a action performed in the name of a government doesn't count as an action performed by a person. (There are reasons why executioners used to cover their heads with a mask. Today, though, they don't bother. People have been conditioned not to care.)
And why are we in Afghanistan, anyway? A reason that isn't a palpable lie? (If you say 9/11, I'll say "Why did we wait so long?", and count it as a palpable lie.)
In a way you're right...but the problem is that if the corporation accumulates assets either management will steal them or a corporate raider will. This isn't guaranteed, but it happens with unfortunate regularity.
Wrong.
Well, maybe wrong, depending on your definition of simple. I tend to think of "y = mx + b" as simple. Let m be the tax rate, x be your income, and b be a negative value. (People who make less that so much not only don't pay taxes, they get benefits.) Now argue over what the values of m and b are, but the system will remain simple and hard to finagle. But it's not all or nothing. (It's only nothing if mx == -b.)
If you want more complexity, you could go with:
ax^2 +mx + c = y, but I'd have a hard time defining in simple terms what a was, and m is no longer the slope. y is the of the tax, and c is an offset so that those with a low income are given a tax break And you could go on to higher powers if you want more complexity, without allowing finagling. (OTOH, it might get interesting if someone figures out how to pay a complex amount of taxes.)
What if you are interested in Objective-C, but not in Apple EULAs? Is there a good choice (is that a good choice) in that case?
I'm rather interested in using Objective-C on Linux, but not enough to fight with the old tutorials I've been able to find. (I suppose I could learn Objective-C++, but I've heard less than friendly things about it.)
Last time I looked at it I looked long enough to determine that the Foundation libraries supported Unicode (mandatory!), and I think I remember utf8. But that was string libraries, and I couldn't see how that translated into I/O. I'd need seek and tell, etc. Which probably means read binary files in C, convert into buffers, tell the string libraries to cast them into a Unicode string, etc. But I couldn't find any could tutorials about this.
Documentation is a real hassle. Last time I looked at Vala it looked quite interesting, until I started trying to figure out how to do the things I knew I needed to do...and the answer appeared to be "Use standard C libraries, but we don't bother to document that, because you're supposed to already know that." This just doesn't work. I can handle Java (though I hate their I/O routines and a few other features), Python is easy, Ruby is easy, D is easy (though a pain when you're needing to link with C libraries that require complex structures to be passed and match). But C and C++ seem to be undocumented. You're supposed to "just know" it. But I don't. I understand that gobj is important, but I can't find where it's documented, so if your language just says "And for this you call gobj", then you lose me. I don't have a history of C/C++ in Linux, and my history in MSWind dates back to the 1980's. (Actually I've got more history on the Mac II than in MSWind.)
Fortunately, for me, Python comes "batteries included", so I can get around that. (And it's got GOOD documentation. So does D. So does Java. So does Ruby. But both Ruby and D require C libraries, and that gets me back into trouble.)
Objective-C is in even worse position. It's documentation for the native language (the part I've found) isn't all that great. AND it requires you to use C libraries with no obvious documentation. (Granted this depends on what you are doing, but I know what I'm doing.)
So, it appears (to me) that Objective-C is only a decent choice if you are intending to develop on Apple hardware. If I'm wrong, I'd certainly like to know.
He *is* overstating the case. This doesn't mean that he's wrong in principle. A lot of the time every excuse for attacking a country that is given is obviously false. Of course, this doesn't mean that there is no reason, it just means that you can't determine what the reason is, and that it's probably something even more discreditable that you are guessing.
E.g., one plausible reason for the Afghanistan conflict is to test out new weapons. Nobody's going to admit that, but it's the most plausible excuse that I've come up with. (Same for Iran, but with lots more evidence that all the excuses were lies, but another plausible excuse: I've heard someone claim that it started because Iran started to sell it's oil for Euros rather than dollars. Don't know if that's true or not, and by now it doesn't matter. But the excuses that were provided were obvious lies, that were proved false over and over.)
So if you believe that the government isn't lying to you, then it's almost reasonable to claim that they are attacking countries at random. You can tell that the excuses that they offer are such that (from a central position) only a madman would believe them. And we've recently had a president who was clearly "mad", (I'm referring to the latter days of President Reagan), so that's not that implausible a suggestion.
This is based on stuff I read over a year ago, so there may be some lapses, but:
The plant being built in the Mohave uses mirrors to heat a tank of working fluid. (I forget what. I think they decided against liquid sodium.) It keeps working as long as the tank is hot enough. I forget how long it is expected to stay warm enough under load. (I keep thinking a week, but I think I'm confusing it with another plant.)
For this plant, think of solar as just another way of heating a boiler for a closed cycle steam engine. (it's a bit more indirect than that, but I think that's the basic design they settled on.)
There are ways around that, particularly for a fixed installation. Some are durable, but large (and somewhat expensive). Others are brief, but small and cheap. Electrolysis is relatively compact and durable and cheap, but not efficient. Nothing's perfect, but for any particular solution, there's one best choice. Unfortunately many of them only become cheap if widely adopted. OTOH, some depend on NOT being widely adopted. Like Lithium batteries. We're quickly running through good ores of Lithium, so expect the price to start rising. (This doesn't necessarily mean the cost of the batteries will go up. They may just become a lot smarter about how much Lithium they use per battery. Which is likely to reduce either their ability to hold a charge, or the number of times they can be charged. Or possibly just the cost of manufacturing them.)
I *really* like the concept of fuel cells, but that platinum catalyst has got to go. And no requirement for high temperature, either. A protein based catalyst would be nearly ideal, if it didn't slow down the charge or discharge rate. Which, unfortunately, it would be likely to do. So that would mean larger electrode surfaces. Which means either larger batteries or microsculpted electrodes. (Note that this isn't any battery that I know to be under development.)
Well...
I downloaded a copy of NetBeans 6.9 updated after the takeover. It's so unstable that I stopped using it nearly immediately.
Fuel isn't the crucial point. If the organization collapses, then the fuel might be there to be pumped, but it wouldn't help. After it's pumped it needs to be carted off the the fractional distilleries, which are themselves dependent on a large number of services, supplies, etc. And then the result needs to be distributed. And this is just along one chain.
If civilization has a real collapse, the population will revert to considerably below carrying capacity with low-tech. Probably all the way back to hunter gatherer, as most farms are dependent on external resources, and the others will probably be swarmed under by hungry mobs. (Survivalists are much too optimistic about this scenario. The Mormons, in their official liturgy, are more practical. You need an unassailable fort with seven years of provisions. The first two years you just sit out and don't even try to farm. By that point the remaining people should be widely enough spread out that it's safe to try farming. Hunting won't yet be practical, though, as the game will have been practically wiped out during those first two years.)
People say our civilization is fragile, and they are right. But they refuse to accept what that means if there's a real global breakdown. Even Somalia is not as bad as a true breakdown would be. Expect widespread cannibalism out of desperation. Possibly as many as one out of twenty adults would survive, though I doubt it. And most of those would be adult males. Who would kill each other over trifles. Survival would come from surviving family units, but there wouldn't be many of them. Perhaps as many as one in ten thousand of today's families, but probably less. People don't have the skills to survive in a radically de-civilized world. It's not like "going back to the old days" because in the old days most people had the skills of both the hunter and the farmer. And because draft animals were common. And because the game hadn't been systematically killed off. (Even birds are starting to become scarce. Even insects are scarce compared to when I was a child...and many birds depend on insects for their food supply.)
In the new "civilization" that rose from the ashes after a century or so, how the current civilization worked would be mythological tales or wonder. Pigeons would replace chickens. (With the smaller eggs laid less frequently that this implies. Breeding back to a decent chicken replacement would be a matter of millenia.)
OTOH, possibly things wouldn't be quite this grim. Some third world countries...ones with low population pressure...might come through relatively intact, and form a nucleus around which a renewed civilization could arise. But it would be a NEW civilization. In the intervening time the mechanisms used to maintain our current civilization would have decayed to bot being repairable, or perhaps even to rubble. Which would mean that the deep mines and wells that we currently extract resources from would be unusable. But perhaps some of the metal could be salvaged. And perhaps some reference works telling how to use the metal could be found. So this would lead to a renaissance...but one that could not be maintained, because it would be dependent on externalities that weren't sustainable. Perhaps they could come up with solar electric power, probably via a steam engine intermediate. Or perhaps they'd use wood fired steam engines. This could allow them to reach coal, which could allow furnaces to smelt the ores which are our modern junkyards. And on a low level this could allow sustained development for centuries. If they could preserve enough of our current knowledge, they might eventually be able to build back to our current situation. Etc. But have you noticed the vast chain of "perhaps" and "possibly" and "might"? I count this as a low probability outcome.
I'm about as political as most slashdot posters. I.e., I have views and I speak them, but I don't do much about them. No, the reason I don't qualify is that I don't believe in drawing a veil between normal life and religion. I feel that they need to be inextricably mixed.
Yeah, I'll dispute that.
I've never used bittorrent to download something illegal. I don't believe that I know of any occasion where someone has so used bittorrent.
I have no trouble believing that may people do use it illegally, but I really doubt that most use is for illegal activity. (Mind you, it's just doubt. But all of my personal knowledge is of legal activity. So I'll need actual verifiable evidence before I'll believe otherwise.)
You're forgetting the pantheists.
But by the time the civilization collapses it's used up all of the readily available hydrocarbon deposits and metal deposits. (Civilization may require readily available copper deposits to be jump-started.)
So unless you can read the old CDs...or whatever storage medium replaces them...you can't learn enough to make a technological civilization out of what's left. You can probably go quite far with ceramics, glasses, etc., but none of those lead to electronics. And if you can't get to electronics you can't extract specialized materials out of low-value ores. (Well, possibly you could fractionally distill them...but just try doing that to extract iron. Zinc [zinc oxide?] you could get that way, though. Even if you get them that way, you get compounds, not metals. You need electricity to extract most metals from their compounds.)
I'm not sure you get a second chance at a technical civilization.
Actually, there's nothing wrong with the idea that the universe has an infinite amount of mass...but most of it would need to be outside of our light cone.
OTOH, this does mean that you need an alternative to the big bang. Branes would probably work.
P,S.: Check into the "Church of Perfect Liberty" if you want to see how the current laws apply. (That's no me, I don't qualify. But THEY do.)