>>The doors may be closed (actually, they rarely are), but the cameras are still rolling inside.
Interesting.
Out of curiosity, then what's the point of a closed door session if everyone can just watch the streaming video live? (Or after it gets archived, I guess.)
Shouldn't the linker remove unreferenced functions?
I've had this problem with gcc for a while, with C++ code. I was writing some embedded code, and I wanted to use some simple C++. Just by adding a #include of one of the stream libraries. the executable grew by 200k, even though none of it was referenced. The C++ code in iostream is template-generated anyway, so even if the compiler wanted to include the code, it can't until I instantiate it.
There's utilities you can run to pull unused object code out of your file, to make the executable smaller.
But in general, if you are care about a 300k increase in your executable, you should probably be using C anyway.
Well first, it's not as simple as comparing any two places. Not to drag out trite sayings, but correlation does not necessarily indicate causation. Traffic is better in Orange County, fine. Are the same things going on in both areas? Is the the same population, same industries, same use of land? Where's the traffic flow coming from, and where is it going to? There are loads of variables.
Sure. But OC and LA make up one contiguous metropolitan area. There have been interstate expansions going on in OC since, well, at least the early 80s. LA is running a city on roads that have been left mostly unchanged since the 1960s. The I-5, which is the main north-south corridor for California, drops to a single lane right in the middle of LA (at the merge with the I-10 and the, uh, 101 I think). I don't think you need to be a traffic engineer to understand that forcing your most important artery in a state down to a single lane will do anything but cause eternal traffic jams. Nowadays I only drive through LA in the middle of the night unless someone is holding a gun to my head. The traffic is just too bad otherwise.
Second, are people really utilizing the public transportation there? I haven't been to LA in... well I guess it's over 10 years now, but to my recollection, you kind of needed a car. It was all spread out, busy roads and highways all over the place. That's not what I'm talking about. Throwing a light rail into LA and expecting it to take care of your transportation problems is like throwing an antivirus onto Windows ME and expecting it to take care of your security problems.
Sure, my wife, who is from LA, was horrified by how bad the bus system was in San Diego (where we met). The bus system can get you anywhere in LA. The trouble is, unless they have a dedicated bus lane (which they do on some interstates), the buses get bogged down on the same 1960s-era roads. The light rail and subway systems have decent ridership numbers. If its going where you're going, it's a good alternative to the nightmarish road commute.
But you're right, you do need a car, really. As the song goes, nobody walks in LA.
But the larger point I was trying to make was that, contrary to the view that our society would fall apart if everyone didn't have their own car, most people simply didn't have that kind of transportation option a few decades ago. Basically, we already know how to live without cars (that is, most people not needing cars in their day-to-day lives). We don't need to figure it out. The only reason we can't is because our cities have been so poorly planned.
Workers used to have to live within walking distance of a street car stop. The car allowed people to live further away. The problem is, there's not a whole lot of incentive to go back the other way. Even in the Bay Area (where I lived for three years), you could only really go without a car in the city itself. Living in Daly City / South San Francisco, where I did, everyone had a car. There was a bus stop right in front of my apartment, but taking a bus to get to the BART to get to SFO turned a 15 minute car drive into about an hour and a half ordeal. So I drove. And people drive across the Bay Bridge every day because it's still easier for them than mass transit, and the Bay Area has a tremendously expensive mass transit system.
Even in our current mess of traffic, cars still win in a lot of situations. People won't stop driving for global warming or other impersonal factors, and most people like the extra land they get in the suburbs and slower pace than city life. I'm not sure if investing in roads is a really good solution, but none of the other solutions work very well either.
My thoughts on city design for some cities I've been to in the last year: San Diego has invested a lot into roads, and the roads are usable. Rush hour is bad, but rush hour is not eternal. Orange County has invested a lot into roads, and
>>Users in a business generally have very little if any incentive to follow any security policy that does not happen automatically, without any intervention on their part.
Depending on the policy, it might even be the reverse. At SAIC, a friend of mine wanted to install vim, because, well, that's what he used to write code, and he was a lot more productive with it. But SAIC doesn't allow users to install software, and the process of getting "a new app approved" was, to say the least, Byzantine. So he tried a couple different things: 1) He disabled their security system. In less than 10 minutes, a sysadmin came down to bitch at him not to do that. And wouldn't help with the vim thing. 2) I think he installed a debugger next or something, to the same effect. 3) He finally just ended up sshing out to his home linux box, copying all of his (classified) source files to his home machine so he could edit them in vim, and then would copy them back. This worked. Probably would have gotten him fired if caught, but fuck it, he was a low paid intern and just didn't care that much.
So the upshot was that the company's strict security policy resulted in all their classified source code being put onto what was a lot less secure box.
>>We can't build enough roads in and around major cities to handle all of the traffic. We can't keep up with the energy demand.
We can, actually. Looking at Orange County vs. Los Angeles as a natural experiment, we can see that Orange County, which invested money in rods, is busy but usable. LA had a mayor that decided that investing the money in public transportation was instead the way to go. So they have a light rail system, a subway, and a nice bus system... and the worst roads in the country. When you drive south on the I-5 it's like a breath of fresh air when you cross over into OC. People go from 35 to 75.
And we've managed to keep up with the energy demand, so I'm not sure what you're talking about.
>>However, it's really the result of deliberate decisions made a handful of decades ago. There wasn't really any such thing as "suburbs" 100 years ago. Lots of policy-makers decided to bet the future of America on the auto industry.
It's not quite like that. The notion of the suburbs didn't really exist before WWII - upon return, and coincident with several factors: the GI bill, the development of prefab construction making independent homes cheap, and societal norms changing so that being a homeowner was part and parcel of the father/leader of the household, caused the explosion of suburbs. If you look at Time Magazine covers from this time period, you'll see the father/mother/sister/brother family idealized along with buying a house for the first time. The fact that city centers kind of sucked helped (and the exodus made them suck more), and the availability of cars made it possible, but those were the main factors in the development of the suburbs.
>>It's not that everyone needs a car because we have low population density; it's that we have a low population density because we've spaced ourselves out on the assumption that everyone would have a car.
Sort of. America is still a really big place compared with Europe and Japan, and so the economics of rail are always going to be more challenging. I follow the high speed rail commission here in California, and it's really tough.
>>It sounds like he has every intention of making a huge profit, he'd just prefer to have taxpayers build his plant, offer him some nice tax "incentives", maybe waive an inconvenient environmental protection rule or two first...
To be fair, environmental nuts are the reason that China is doing most of this kind of stuff nowadays.
Because it's sooo much better for the earth when China spits out CO2 than us, right?
>>Well roads aren't generally expected to function as businesses.
Really? I pay three hundred bucks a year to use the roads here in California. And that's not counting money from taxes I pay to the federal government or from the CA general fund.
>>I'm afraid it's more basic: Most Americans don't have any idea that it's possible to have a society where every person doesn't have their own car.
It's even more basic - in America, it's not possible to get by without a car.
It has to do with population density.
All of England is packed into a country the size of California, and even they struggle to keep their rail systems profitable.
On the day that I gave a guest lecture on global warming at a local community college (and all the students knew we would be talking about global warming), I took a poll: 100% of the students drove their cars to the campus, even though they could have taken the bus. Now, though, they can't take the bus - not enough students were riding it, so they shut the line down.
So China is building infrastructure that will let them transport goods throughout Asia and Europe very quickly and cheaply. Meanwhile, here in the US, people are fighting against the idea of building highspeed rail even between a handful of cities that are right next to each other.
If we don't turn it around, our economy is going down the tubes.
Given how incompetently AMTRAK has been run, and the relative success of the car, it's no wonder that Americans are suspicious of putting money into trains.
While I did vote for the California High Speed Rail Network, I did so only after reading over their papers and deciding they actually had a pretty good plan. But I'm under no illusions that it will be cheaper than car, or air. It will simply allow me to bypass LA's hideous 1960's era interstates, and for that I'm willing to pay billions.
>>I've fought a few simple traffic tickets and watched how everyone from the attorneys to the cops to the judge would just lie and gloss over laws. It's a joke.
Yep. The CHP officer had sword under oath two different speeds when I protested one ticket. Judge didn't care in the slightest.
>>In the case of the authorities wrongly matching someone to a genetic fingerprint, not only must two people have coincidentally matching fingerprints, but they must both match the "offending" fingerprint. My guess is that those odds are pretty damn low.
Not as low as you'd think. DNA testing is based on the idea that genes are all independent from each other. But as it turns out, there's a lot more covariance between genes (both introns and extrons I'd imagine) than people thought. So those astronomical figures you see bandied about about false positives are really just wishful thinking.
A DNA database would ensure that hundreds of people get convicted every year due to false positives.
For example, read up on the history of hand washing - scientists disregarded hand washing as being beneficial because they "knew" there wasn't any benefit to it, and ignored evidence to the contrary. Or how much trouble it took to get doctors to wash their scalpels between conducting dissections and using them on women giving birth.
They "knew" that there couldn't be any causal connection, flying in the face of evidence, continued to believe so for quite a long time, and mocked people that suggested washing. All the women died in childbirth because they were embarrassed by the male doctors looking at their nudity. Obviously.
>>Because from a scientific viewpoint, that is how you do it.
Only if you're not a very good scientist. And I'm being serious here - this bias is one of the most pervasive and hard to eradicate from science - people "knowing" something a priori, and rejecting any evidence that disagrees with it.
This happens all the time, and is *bad*. Really bad. It's how the scientific process breaks down, and dogma sets in.
>>When there are multiple possible reasons for an unknown symptom to occur, you cannot just say it was caused by any of them without proof.
Right. I'm not saying it is proof that vaccines caused it, or anything. Far from it. It IS a data point, though - otherwise healthy baby has inexplicable seizure after taking vaccines. It may or may not have been caused by the vaccine. What I'm annoyed about, though, is that the doctors a priori said it couldn't have anything to do with the vaccine, thus assuming the conclusion. There could be a million events just like that one, but all of them tagged "atypical" and disregarded.
I've researched the issue before, and stand by the statement that he paid lip service to Christianity because he was, well, a politician, but he privately hated Christianity.
>>Why should that be chalked up to "vaccine related"?
Why shouldn't it be? Or rather, why are you dismissing out of hand that it had nothing to do with the vaccine. IF we're investigating if vaccines are healthy, AND we're dismissing any events like this a priori because we know that vaccines are safe, THEN this is not a scientific investigation at all, because by assuming the conclusion we're ruling out any possible contrary facts.
This is the issue I'm having with it. You're getting the entire correlation is not causation thing backwards - in an empirical study one must collect data to evaluate the truth of a hypothesis. In this case, you're making the same fucking mistake by assuming the hypothesis to disregard a point of data.
>>I should have said that Hitler was born Catholic, and still claimed he was Catholic later in life.
That page of quotes you, uh, quoted was biased. Hitler privately despised religion (he was a believer in the Will to Power after all). As the head of a Christian nation, though, he couldn't very well say that.
>>(While I have a newborn myself and can imagine the stress such a situation would cause, your story is an example of availability bias.)
Sure, absolutely.
My point is that IT WAS NOT REPORTED AS VACCINE RELATED, so you have a bias in your safety reporting system. Let's pretend that 1% of vaccinations cause severe side effects 24 hours later. If they're not reported as vaccine-related, then the system will say that they're perfectly safe, when they're not.
>>If you want to go to a specific school, you must adhere by their rules. I am sure there has to be some alternative schools out there that don't have immunization requirements.
There's not. It's state law you have to be immunized by a certain age (and show your card when you enroll. And it's also the law that you have to go to school (and for a time here in California a couple years back, home schooling was illegal as well), so don't pretend people have much choice about schooling. I think you might be able to get a religious exemption, but it's been a while since I looked at the issue.
That said, I think the medical safety of vaccines is far from clear. Last year, a friend of mine's kid got a series of vaccines, and that night went into seizures and nearly died. The hospital treated it as a mysterious brain problem unrelated to the vaccines.
So, if these events are not being reported as vaccine related, how can we say that vaccines are safe?
Well, if you have software on your $400 laptop that can do the digital to analog / analog to digital just like you say, the solution is clear: hold one laptop up to each ear.
That's still going to be $800, but that's a lil' cheaper than the $1200 pair you were looking at.
>>"The government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion." - John Adams
If you're going to blindly quote people, you should at least know what you're talking about. This was in a treaty to the (Muslim) Barbary Pirates in Tripoli, and was writing this as a sort of diplomatic goodwill.
What you probably don't know was that he got into deep shit for it, because the people at the time did in fact believe America was founded on the Christian religion.
There were a series of popular uprisings against the USSR, especially in the satellite states. They were all brutally suppressed. Tanks before teatime and all that.
Then Gorby said that the USSR would no longer slaughter everyone that protested, and the whole thing unraveled nearly overnight.
That makes a pretty strong case for why/how the USSR held together.
Slashdot Mirror
>>The doors may be closed (actually, they rarely are), but the cameras are still rolling inside.
Interesting.
Out of curiosity, then what's the point of a closed door session if everyone can just watch the streaming video live? (Or after it gets archived, I guess.)
There's utilities you can run to pull unused object code out of your file, to make the executable smaller.
But in general, if you are care about a 300k increase in your executable, you should probably be using C anyway.
Sure. But OC and LA make up one contiguous metropolitan area. There have been interstate expansions going on in OC since, well, at least the early 80s. LA is running a city on roads that have been left mostly unchanged since the 1960s. The I-5, which is the main north-south corridor for California, drops to a single lane right in the middle of LA (at the merge with the I-10 and the, uh, 101 I think). I don't think you need to be a traffic engineer to understand that forcing your most important artery in a state down to a single lane will do anything but cause eternal traffic jams. Nowadays I only drive through LA in the middle of the night unless someone is holding a gun to my head. The traffic is just too bad otherwise.
Sure, my wife, who is from LA, was horrified by how bad the bus system was in San Diego (where we met). The bus system can get you anywhere in LA. The trouble is, unless they have a dedicated bus lane (which they do on some interstates), the buses get bogged down on the same 1960s-era roads. The light rail and subway systems have decent ridership numbers. If its going where you're going, it's a good alternative to the nightmarish road commute.
But you're right, you do need a car, really. As the song goes, nobody walks in LA.
Workers used to have to live within walking distance of a street car stop. The car allowed people to live further away. The problem is, there's not a whole lot of incentive to go back the other way. Even in the Bay Area (where I lived for three years), you could only really go without a car in the city itself. Living in Daly City / South San Francisco, where I did, everyone had a car. There was a bus stop right in front of my apartment, but taking a bus to get to the BART to get to SFO turned a 15 minute car drive into about an hour and a half ordeal. So I drove. And people drive across the Bay Bridge every day because it's still easier for them than mass transit, and the Bay Area has a tremendously expensive mass transit system.
Even in our current mess of traffic, cars still win in a lot of situations. People won't stop driving for global warming or other impersonal factors, and most people like the extra land they get in the suburbs and slower pace than city life. I'm not sure if investing in roads is a really good solution, but none of the other solutions work very well either.
My thoughts on city design for some cities I've been to in the last year:
San Diego has invested a lot into roads, and the roads are usable. Rush hour is bad, but rush hour is not eternal.
Orange County has invested a lot into roads, and
>>Users in a business generally have very little if any incentive to follow any security policy that does not happen automatically, without any intervention on their part.
Depending on the policy, it might even be the reverse. At SAIC, a friend of mine wanted to install vim, because, well, that's what he used to write code, and he was a lot more productive with it. But SAIC doesn't allow users to install software, and the process of getting "a new app approved" was, to say the least, Byzantine. So he tried a couple different things:
1) He disabled their security system. In less than 10 minutes, a sysadmin came down to bitch at him not to do that. And wouldn't help with the vim thing.
2) I think he installed a debugger next or something, to the same effect.
3) He finally just ended up sshing out to his home linux box, copying all of his (classified) source files to his home machine so he could edit them in vim, and then would copy them back. This worked. Probably would have gotten him fired if caught, but fuck it, he was a low paid intern and just didn't care that much.
So the upshot was that the company's strict security policy resulted in all their classified source code being put onto what was a lot less secure box.
>>We can't build enough roads in and around major cities to handle all of the traffic. We can't keep up with the energy demand.
We can, actually. Looking at Orange County vs. Los Angeles as a natural experiment, we can see that Orange County, which invested money in rods, is busy but usable. LA had a mayor that decided that investing the money in public transportation was instead the way to go. So they have a light rail system, a subway, and a nice bus system... and the worst roads in the country. When you drive south on the I-5 it's like a breath of fresh air when you cross over into OC. People go from 35 to 75.
And we've managed to keep up with the energy demand, so I'm not sure what you're talking about.
>>However, it's really the result of deliberate decisions made a handful of decades ago. There wasn't really any such thing as "suburbs" 100 years ago. Lots of policy-makers decided to bet the future of America on the auto industry.
It's not quite like that. The notion of the suburbs didn't really exist before WWII - upon return, and coincident with several factors: the GI bill, the development of prefab construction making independent homes cheap, and societal norms changing so that being a homeowner was part and parcel of the father/leader of the household, caused the explosion of suburbs. If you look at Time Magazine covers from this time period, you'll see the father/mother/sister/brother family idealized along with buying a house for the first time. The fact that city centers kind of sucked helped (and the exodus made them suck more), and the availability of cars made it possible, but those were the main factors in the development of the suburbs.
>>It's not that everyone needs a car because we have low population density; it's that we have a low population density because we've spaced ourselves out on the assumption that everyone would have a car.
Sort of. America is still a really big place compared with Europe and Japan, and so the economics of rail are always going to be more challenging. I follow the high speed rail commission here in California, and it's really tough.
>>It sounds like he has every intention of making a huge profit, he'd just prefer to have taxpayers build his plant, offer him some nice tax "incentives", maybe waive an inconvenient environmental protection rule or two first...
To be fair, environmental nuts are the reason that China is doing most of this kind of stuff nowadays.
Because it's sooo much better for the earth when China spits out CO2 than us, right?
>>Well roads aren't generally expected to function as businesses.
Really? I pay three hundred bucks a year to use the roads here in California. And that's not counting money from taxes I pay to the federal government or from the CA general fund.
>>I'm afraid it's more basic: Most Americans don't have any idea that it's possible to have a society where every person doesn't have their own car.
It's even more basic - in America, it's not possible to get by without a car.
It has to do with population density.
All of England is packed into a country the size of California, and even they struggle to keep their rail systems profitable.
On the day that I gave a guest lecture on global warming at a local community college (and all the students knew we would be talking about global warming), I took a poll: 100% of the students drove their cars to the campus, even though they could have taken the bus. Now, though, they can't take the bus - not enough students were riding it, so they shut the line down.
Given how incompetently AMTRAK has been run, and the relative success of the car, it's no wonder that Americans are suspicious of putting money into trains.
While I did vote for the California High Speed Rail Network, I did so only after reading over their papers and deciding they actually had a pretty good plan. But I'm under no illusions that it will be cheaper than car, or air. It will simply allow me to bypass LA's hideous 1960's era interstates, and for that I'm willing to pay billions.
>>I've fought a few simple traffic tickets and watched how everyone from the attorneys to the cops to the judge would just lie and gloss over laws. It's a joke.
Yep. The CHP officer had sword under oath two different speeds when I protested one ticket. Judge didn't care in the slightest.
>>In the case of the authorities wrongly matching someone to a genetic fingerprint, not only must two people have coincidentally matching fingerprints, but they must both match the "offending" fingerprint. My guess is that those odds are pretty damn low.
Not as low as you'd think. DNA testing is based on the idea that genes are all independent from each other. But as it turns out, there's a lot more covariance between genes (both introns and extrons I'd imagine) than people thought. So those astronomical figures you see bandied about about false positives are really just wishful thinking.
A DNA database would ensure that hundreds of people get convicted every year due to false positives.
>>The only thing we need to worry about in this equation is religious nutbags that won't listen to reason.
Seriously!
Those damn Buddhists might all set themselves on fire in protest or something.
Or are you talking about the anti-train sect of Christianity?
Or the HSRNO Jainists that worry about insects being killed by the trains?
Damn religions. They're all the same.
>>NOBODY expects the ACTA imposition.
Hey, meet the new guy.
He's a lot like the old guy.
For example, read up on the history of hand washing - scientists disregarded hand washing as being beneficial because they "knew" there wasn't any benefit to it, and ignored evidence to the contrary. Or how much trouble it took to get doctors to wash their scalpels between conducting dissections and using them on women giving birth.
They "knew" that there couldn't be any causal connection, flying in the face of evidence, continued to believe so for quite a long time, and mocked people that suggested washing. All the women died in childbirth because they were embarrassed by the male doctors looking at their nudity. Obviously.
>>Because from a scientific viewpoint, that is how you do it.
Only if you're not a very good scientist. And I'm being serious here - this bias is one of the most pervasive and hard to eradicate from science - people "knowing" something a priori, and rejecting any evidence that disagrees with it.
This happens all the time, and is *bad*. Really bad. It's how the scientific process breaks down, and dogma sets in.
>>When there are multiple possible reasons for an unknown symptom to occur, you cannot just say it was caused by any of them without proof.
Right. I'm not saying it is proof that vaccines caused it, or anything. Far from it. It IS a data point, though - otherwise healthy baby has inexplicable seizure after taking vaccines. It may or may not have been caused by the vaccine. What I'm annoyed about, though, is that the doctors a priori said it couldn't have anything to do with the vaccine, thus assuming the conclusion. There could be a million events just like that one, but all of them tagged "atypical" and disregarded.
First Google hit I got. You could also try: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1699/was-hitler-a-christian
I've researched the issue before, and stand by the statement that he paid lip service to Christianity because he was, well, a politician, but he privately hated Christianity.
>>Why should that be chalked up to "vaccine related"?
Why shouldn't it be? Or rather, why are you dismissing out of hand that it had nothing to do with the vaccine. IF we're investigating if vaccines are healthy, AND we're dismissing any events like this a priori because we know that vaccines are safe, THEN this is not a scientific investigation at all, because by assuming the conclusion we're ruling out any possible contrary facts.
This is the issue I'm having with it. You're getting the entire correlation is not causation thing backwards - in an empirical study one must collect data to evaluate the truth of a hypothesis. In this case, you're making the same fucking mistake by assuming the hypothesis to disregard a point of data.
>>I should have said that Hitler was born Catholic, and still claimed he was Catholic later in life.
That page of quotes you, uh, quoted was biased. Hitler privately despised religion (he was a believer in the Will to Power after all). As the head of a Christian nation, though, he couldn't very well say that.
http://www.puritanfellowship.com/2007/11/adolf-hitler-hated-christianity.html
>>(While I have a newborn myself and can imagine the stress such a situation would cause, your story is an example of availability bias.)
Sure, absolutely.
My point is that IT WAS NOT REPORTED AS VACCINE RELATED, so you have a bias in your safety reporting system. Let's pretend that 1% of vaccinations cause severe side effects 24 hours later. If they're not reported as vaccine-related, then the system will say that they're perfectly safe, when they're not.
>>If you want to go to a specific school, you must adhere by their rules. I am sure there has to be some alternative schools out there that don't have immunization requirements.
There's not. It's state law you have to be immunized by a certain age (and show your card when you enroll. And it's also the law that you have to go to school (and for a time here in California a couple years back, home schooling was illegal as well), so don't pretend people have much choice about schooling. I think you might be able to get a religious exemption, but it's been a while since I looked at the issue.
That said, I think the medical safety of vaccines is far from clear. Last year, a friend of mine's kid got a series of vaccines, and that night went into seizures and nearly died. The hospital treated it as a mysterious brain problem unrelated to the vaccines.
So, if these events are not being reported as vaccine related, how can we say that vaccines are safe?
Well, if you have software on your $400 laptop that can do the digital to analog / analog to digital just like you say, the solution is clear: hold one laptop up to each ear.
That's still going to be $800, but that's a lil' cheaper than the $1200 pair you were looking at.
>>"The government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion." - John Adams
If you're going to blindly quote people, you should at least know what you're talking about. This was in a treaty to the (Muslim) Barbary Pirates in Tripoli, and was writing this as a sort of diplomatic goodwill.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Tripoli
What you probably don't know was that he got into deep shit for it, because the people at the time did in fact believe America was founded on the Christian religion.
But don't let me challenge your dogma.
>>Yes, obviously that means it can't have been an issue of race...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_(cryptography)#Magic_and_United_States_Executive_Order_9066
>>No Hitler was Catholic.
Hitler was nominally Christian. In reality, he was an occult theosophist. I suggest you read more on the subject.
Or not, he's a rather disturbing person.
>>"OK, well all that you've managed to show me is that you have absolutely no understanding of the 2nd law of thermodynamics."
If you think there's a 2nd law of thermodynamics, you're mistaken.
It's not a law, more of a very strong statistical probability.
In a state of maximal entropy with random motion going on, guess what happens to the entropy levels? It has to decrease.
>>Why did the USSR last for so long?
There were a series of popular uprisings against the USSR, especially in the satellite states. They were all brutally suppressed. Tanks before teatime and all that.
Then Gorby said that the USSR would no longer slaughter everyone that protested, and the whole thing unraveled nearly overnight.
That makes a pretty strong case for why/how the USSR held together.