This is a bit of a tangent from the parent post, but I'm curious, and there's a lot of smart people here so I'm sure someone can answer:
I understand the benefits of having a shared connection: if neighbors A, B, C, and D use the internet for nothing but email all day, except for every now and then downloading a big file or two, then A can get more bandwidth for his download by sucking up some of the unused bandwidth from B, C, and D; instead of getting only his share (25% )of the shared connection to their block, he can use 85% of it for a little while, and nobody minds because they weren't using it anyway. It's better, in some ways, than having a guaranteed amount of bandwidth which is usually more than you need and occasionally less than you need.
But, why can't it be set it up so that if A is using 85% of bandwidth, while B, C, and D are each using their normal 5% for email, and then suddenly D wants to use his full 25% for a bit, A gets kicked down to 65% of the bandwidth until A is done with his more intensive usage? In other words, why can't they BOTH guarantee that you'll get, say, 5Mbps at all times you want it, but ALSO let you use more than that if not everyone on your block is maxing theirs out?
Like on the LAN at my house here; we've got four people living here, one of whom uses BitTorrent a lot, another one of which is a gamer who can't stand the damn lag that the torrenter's constant downloading causes, so we configured the router so that BitTorrent gets lowest priority, and whenever anything else wants to use the connection, torrent gets throttled. Why isn't that possible to do on a per-household basis: you get full priority up to (e.g.) 5Mbps, and while you're free to use more bandwidth beyond that if it's available, if any other household on the block wants to use some portion of the remaining bandwidth, you get throttled to make room for them.
Based on that post, it looks like you value your constitutional rights and your Corvette, and not much else. Are you always this angry? People should be angry. Not enough people are angry enough, about the right things, and that's what lets thinks like the story in TFA happen.
It is indeed a distant dream -- such a beautiful system of bureaucratic power and unquestionable hierarchy -- yet we must do what we can to stop out-of-control communication amongst the proletariat from further endangering the established, and righteous, distribution of power. See, here's where you give the spoof away. No self-respecting leader of a righteous, God-fearing western democracy (nor any patriotic supporter of such) would ever use such despicable Marxist terminology in his speech. And of course, the righteous, well-meaning revolutionary communist leaders *are* the proletariat (the personal manifestation of the dictatorship thereof, no less), and so would not be referring to that upstanding social class in the third person.
Macs still do. Yet another of the little bonuses you get from Apple. Not just a "restore" disc that wipes your HD and makes it like it was out of the box, but actual install discs for all the software that comes with the computer, so if something gets borked - even the OS - you just reinstall that one thing and the rest of your apps and data are unharmed. The OS install discs even work on *gasp* other computers besides the one it shipped with, so if you can only find one install disc and it's not for the machine you want, so long as that machine is older than that install disc, it should work. (You're on your honor not to install it on machines that aren't licensed for that version of the OS, though). Comes with real paper manuals too.
At least, they were still like that a year or two ago when we bought our latest machine at work.
Don't like copyrights?... then don't buy the material, don't use it in any form - legitimate or pirated, don't consume the content in any way at all. If you actually have some talent, make your own! While you might have a good pragmatic point that the only way the RIAA et al will be obsoleted and these kinds of laws will go away is if people stop consuming their media at all (though I'd argue against that pragmatic point too), the above sounds to me very similar to saying "Don't like the laws in this country? Then move to another one."
Both the copyright infringers and other people who may complain about other unjust laws being enforced on them have a very simple (and IMO legitimate) argument: "Leave me the hell alone, I'm not doing anything wrong." No one should have to stop doing something that's morally permissible just because it's legally forbidden, and saying that they can go way the hell out their way (move to another country / make their own free media) to do something roughly equivalent is not an answer. If there's nothing wrong with it, then there's nothing wrong with it and the damn state should mind its own business.
I know you're probably trolling, but I'd even take this analogy even further. I've made this analogy between governments and operating systems before, I'd apply the same analogy to corporate management, etc etc. What makes an analogy valid is that the things analogized all are similar in particular relevant ways, and the thing that makes all of these thing similar is that they are all systems of power which ostensibly exist to facilitate the smooth operation of those over which they have power.
Schools ostensibly exist to facilitate learning, governments ostensibly exist to facilitate social interaction, corporate management ostensibly exists to facilitate workplace productivity, and operating systems ostensibly exist to facilitate the operation of a computer. And all of these systems do their ostensible job best when they give you unobstructed access to what you need to do what you want (i.e. they get out of the way of competent people), they provide assistance to those who need it (in a way that helps them become competent people), and an aspect I neglected to mention because in such systems it is often emphasized to the neglect of the former two: they keep you from doing things that would compromise the objective that the system is designed to facilitate.
A good school system needs features much like a good operating system: it should make the resources you need to do what you want to do available to you and then get the hell out of the way, so that the more capable people aren't hindered by something that's supposed to be there to help; and it should offer clear instructions and guidance for those less capable people to figure out what they want to do and what they need to do it.
In an OS, this means having a clear intuitive interface that lets capable users see what's there and what can be done with it, that's not always bugging you and trying to second-guess what you want, or worse, telling you what you want; and then having well-written online help and guides/wizards/whatnot that ask the user what they want, and then tells them how to do it. (For anyone who remembers AppleGuide from pre-OSX Macs, that I think was the ideal system; each step told you what to do in text, and then circled the interface elements it was talking about on screen to walk you through actually doing the thing, rather than doing it for you).
In a school, this means that you have broad and deep educational materials available for capable and adventurous students to pursue at their leisure, and you don't bog them down with so much asinine crap that they don't have the time or energy to pursue those things; and it means that your *instructional* resources (i.e. teacher time) are devoted to helping the slower kids master the basics. The bright kids don't need extra instruction to excel; they'll get the standard instruction well enough and then look up more on their own if you make such resources available to them. The slow kids don't need a vast library of supplementary materials; they're having trouble enough with the basic stuff and don't need to be overloaded with more information. A well rounded school should have both: devote extra attention to the kids who need it more (the slow ones), and have extra material readily available for the fast kids to pursue while you're helping the slow ones.
I'm sure someone will complain that some slow kid will have his self-esteem hurt because the fast kids are allowed to move ahead of them, but then look at the flip side: the slow kid is getting the lion's share of the teacher's attention. Nobody's being unjust to him. If his self-esteem is hurt because someone else learns faster than him, he needs to grow up (I know, they're kids, but this is how they become adults) and realize that sometimes people have different levels of talents, and so long as special privileges aren't being afforded to the smart kids who need them least, then nobody has done anything against the slow kids.
I wouldn't know what the earliest versions of ClarisWorks had, I think I started using it around version 2 or 3. Definitely hasn't been at all related to HC since it was renamed AppleWorks.
AFAIK Slashdow has always let followup posts be modded higher than earlier posts (so an interesting or insightful response to a troll can be +5 and the original troll still modded to oblivion), but then, your UID is about half of what mine is, so maybe you know better. Odd that you got modded Overrated when you hadn't been rated at all...
I think the point of the parent poster was that if you have a theory, like quantum theory, which predicts that we will be unable to predict certain results, how could you empirically verify that theory, or at least that prediction of it? You could falsify it - by showing that we can in fact predict the results which said theory predicts we should not be able to predict - but just showing over and over that we keep failing to make successful predictions does not establish that such predictions are impossible, and thus does not verify the prediction of our theory that such predictions are impossible. Consider a formally similar "theory" from a very different camp: that certain phenomena do not have natural causes, i.e. they are miracles. While you can falsify this (by showing a natural cause), you can never verify it; at best, all you can show that we still can't tell what the natural causes for those phenomena are, but not that there *are* in fact no natural causes for for those phenomena.
Of course, in general it's practically impossible to ever actually *verify* any scientific theory; we just build our confidence in them because they make many successful predictions and we have been unable to falsify them thus far, despite our best efforts. But it's always possible something new observation could throw a wrench in the whole thing. So quantum theory isn't any worse off in that regard than any other theory. And of course there are logical proofs from the axioms of quantum theory that prove that certain predictions are impossible, but that's just to say that it's a theorem of quantum theory that certain predictions are impossible - which is sort of begging the question, since the question is whether quantum theory is right about that.
Which I guess is pretty similar to your conclusion - if you accept quantum theory as established (i.e. having held up well to testing), then you've got to accept its implications like randomness, including quantum randomness, just as a matter of course. But what people like the GP are saying is that quantum theory's particular prediction that we cannot predict certain things is in itself untestable, and another theory might come along later which successfully predicts the same things that quantum theory successfully predicts, but also predicts that we can make the predictions that quantum theory says we can't, i.e. describes a method for making such predictions. But unless something like that comes along and shows that we *can* make such predictions, it's an open question whether or not we can, because it's impossible to show that we *can't*, and it seems to me a rather defeatist attitude to just say "oh well, it's completely random", just as much to say "oh well, it's a miracle". Maybe it is - but it's more productive to keep searching for an explanation.
If I'm not mistaken Appleworks was a continuation of and improvement to HyperCard. The rest of what you said is spot on, but... what?
HyperCard was more like an early version of the web, only the whole "site" had to be contained in one file and you downloaded it (or sneakernetted it) instead of accessing it remotely. A HyperCard stack was a series of interactive pages (cards) containing text and graphics and other elements (later any QT file could be embedded), any of which could link to other pages in the stack just like a hyperlink in an HTML doc.
AppleWorks was an office suite containing a word processor and spreadsheet, draw and paint programs, and database and communications programs (I gather the later was something like telnet, though I never made use of it or the database myself). It had nothing at all to do with HyperCard and was nothing at all like it. Where are you drawing that comparison from?
To my knowledge, bacteria, or the bacteria-like organisms thought to precede them, are the simplest such things currently known, or in any meaningful way theorized. It's been speculated that maybe there was an RNA-based life form that was simpler, but I don't believe any actual model for such has ever been suggested. Ever hear of the mimivirus?
Marx made extensive use of Kantian dialectics, in which you have the thesis battling the antithesis until the synthesis arose. Methinks you have the wrong philosopher.
Yes, that is the one thing that makes me wary of this idea. Under my system there is nothing prohibiting you from loaning money, or from allowing people to purchase things from you on installment (i.e. I could "rent" out a spare house if I had one, but every rent payment would increase the percent of the renter's ownership in the house, until he eventually owns it and I have no further basis to collect rent from him). But while with tangible goods being sold on installment there's perfectly good incentive to do so - you're still making a profit by selling something you have excess of, the profit is just coming in over time instead of all at once - I'm not sure what anyone's incentive would be to loan something out, e.g. loan out money, where the only thing they're getting back is the money they lent out.
The one thing allowable within this system that I can think of is that you COULD sell money for more than it's face value, on installment - e.g. "I'll sell you $500,000 for $750,000, payable in installments of $25,000 a year". Use that money to buy a $500,000 house and it's much like a 30-year, 5% APR mortgage. It's still not precisely a loan at interest, because the profit to be made is a fixed amount, so the debtee can't get stuck in a cycle of owing more and more money because he can't yet afford to pay off what he already owes.
Now that I think about it, however, if there's still incentive for people to sell things on installment, then there's little need for loans. The guy with a space house can't get any profit out of that house unless he sells it off, and if nobody can afford to buy it all at once (because nobody's that rich, and nobody can get loans because there's no incentive to loan money, ignoring the above), the only way he'll be able to get any profit out of it would be to sell it on installment. Which, in the end, just means that after you've rented a place for a certain period of time, you own it; or alternately, when you move, you sell your stake in the house and use that money to get a head start on buying into your new place, like people do with mortgaged houses now.
I've got no ethical problem with people owing each other money, i.e. debt in general. (Though I think it's a bad practical idea to go into debt if at all avoidable). I don't even have a problem with people charging more for things that will be paid off over time, e.g. if you want to buy this on installment I'm gonna charge you extra for it. All I have a problem with is one party keeping what they get permanently while the other party only gets what they get for a limited period of time, which allows the former party to accumulate wealth from the latter party solely by virtue of him already having excess wealth (i.e. something he can afford to lend out). In that vein, I suppose I wouldn't have an issue (though it's unclear how this figures into the contract-ethics basis of my anti-rent stance) with someone getting something temporarily in exchange for something temporary. So, say a bank offers to lend someone $12,000 (interest free) for a year, and demands in exchange that, at the end of that year, the lendee lends the bank $1,000 (interest free) for 12 years. That seems like it would be a just transaction.
Point being, there are plenty of ways to work around the inconveniences that not being able to enter into an enforceable rent contract would impose. In Islamic countries, usury is still prohibited, but people manage to get around it (see the Wiki article on Islamic Banking). Of course, in sharia law (and apparently in older Catholic canon law as well) "usury" only seems to refer to lending *money* at interest, and some of the ways people circumvent such prohibitions is by complex loopholes involving rental contracts (see contractum trinus). It seems to me the only way a usury-free economy is likely to ever actually be implemented is by force of one of these large religious powers which supports similar notions... but then, I think I'd personally rather live in a secular society with a usury-laden market than live in a usury-free theocracy.
No problem with brevity, I understand that people have important work to do. Just a slow day for me here.
I'm familiar with and quite sympathetic to Proudhon's mutualism (in fact I called my general ethical stance that, trying to moderate between egoism and altruism, before I found out that that name was already taken by a more specific theory), though I disagree with him on some points. While we both have a problem with usury, I wouldn't lump all profit in general in to that category, for if I can somehow manage to buy something for $5 and turn around and sell it for $10 without any otherwise illegitimate shenanigans going on (identifying and preventing such shenanigans being the challenge of building an ethical economic system), then I'm obviously adding some sort of value, convenience if nothing else, otherwise nobody would buy it from me at the higher price. I also don't see land as any different than any other property, and so I think people should be able to own it; though as all resources begin as publicly owned goods (rather than unowned as some libertarians would have it), the initial privatization of a formerly public resource should only be allowed if the public is duly compensated (as in, a purchase price is paid; to lease land from the government is no better than leasing it from a private individual or corporation, and makes people just as dependent upon their employers as private leasing does).
Now that you link me to that wiki, I also recall reading of Distributivism before, and it does indeed sound similar to the desired end result I'm looking for (which I've called an "owner's society", i.e. a society in which everyone is an owner of the things they need to survive). However, that page at least seems somewhat lacking on a description of the legislative means of accomplishing those ends; that is, it seems to say that it'd be great if things were like so, but what sort of laws would get things like so and keep them there, without further negative consequences? Communism likewise aims to see the broad distribution of wealth amongst many people, and a highly competitive capitalist market should in theory involve many small businesses all operating on thin profit margins, so everybody who cares at all about economics being the least bit egalitarian (in which category I would include many capitalist theorists, even if not the practitioners of those theories) seems to want ends similar to those. The question for those who care also about liberty as well as equality is, what notion of rights and obligations, if enforced, would provide for such equality without sacrificing liberty? That's what excites me so much about this rent-free market idea: it seems like it could achieve egalitarian ends by libertarian means. (Or perhaps, as you put it, "a socialist economy inside a free market system").
As to the free rider problem, I honestly don't see it as a problem that people benefit from positive externalities; its negative externalities that we need to worry about. I really don't care if my neighbors' view gets nicer (and thus their property value goes up) because I planted some nice trees and a pretty garden in my yard; I wanted a pretty yard, I paid for it and got it, and if others benefit from that too, that's fine with me. Now if my neighbors clean up their properties by dumping their garbage on the street and in each others' (and my) yard, that's a problem, a negative externality, and that kind of thing needs to be prevented. You seem concerned more with negative externalities like the tragedy of the commons; where we all put in to providing a public resource (education, insurance, etc) and some people take advantage of that without paying in to it. I consider that a negative externality because it's along the lines of people throwing their garbage into the street because they know I pick up whatever garbage I find when I'm walking around, because I like a clean neighborhood. There's plenty written on this that I'm sure you've read already, pointing out the problem that someone living in a
What I see is that the free market has failure modes which create a similar problem to the concentration of power in a governmental system. You have runaway feedback loops where those with money have more power to influence the market, tilting the playing field towards them and gaining more money with which to tilt the playing field even further. This leads to concentration of wealth and power into fewer and fewer hands. Eventually, people will be born who do not have the means to buy control of their own means of production. Those people will be virtual slaves to those who do own the means of production.
I ask you, what in your system would keep this from happening?
Hi spun, long time no chat.
I'm popping into this conversation to share a relevant idea with you that I've came up with recently, that I haven't seen much written about (been scouring the internet for prior iterations of such thoughts), and I'd appreciate your input on it. All other commentators welcome as well of course.
You mention runaway feedback loops where having money enables you to extract more money from those who have less than you, and you ask, what could keep this from happening? My traditional answer to that question has been a somewhat socialist one: people must have some responsibility to a collective body, in particular I advocated a partial redistribution of wealth based on a sort of dynamically progressive income tax. (I think we've discussed this before).
However, more recently it dawned on me that a much more libertarian solution - that is, a solution that requires less centralized (democratic, collective) power and government (or pseudo-government) intervention, rather than more - would be simply to declare rent contracts invalid, and so not enforce them. That is, a contract to let someone use something for a temporary period of time in exchange for a permanent payment should be no more enforceable than a contract selling yourself into slavery. Beyond that, anyone trying to enforce such a contract is just guilty of theft, just as someone trying to enforce a slavery contract is just guilty of assault. Proudhon was close, but not quite: it's not property per se that is theft, it is RENT which is theft. Note also that as a consequence of this, interest on loans is abolished (as that's simply rent on money; "I'll rent you some dollars at a rate of 5 cents per year for each dollar" = 5% APR loan), and also wage labor (as that's the worker renting himself to the employer).
This way, you cannot acquire wealth simply by having wealth. You can't rent out a spare house you have and use the money to buy a new house and then start renting that and so forth, eventually becoming a land-lord of feudal proportions; if you have property you're not using, and you want to profit from it, you'll have to sell it, which will result (in the short term) in a huge influx of new properties for sale on the market, lowering prices drastically. (Though as to the privatization of new properties from public land, and how those people came to be property owners in the first place, I agree that it was originally an illegitimate transfer from public to private property, and that the privatization of new property should require a payment [only one-time, though] to the public for compensation; however, making reparations for that is no more feasible or just than making reparations for the slave trade, for though both were at the time horrible injustices, they were committed by no one who is alive today, and to punish the living for their grandparents' crimes would be wrong. All we can do now is start doing things right from here on out and let the inequalities slowly level out).
This way, you cannot take all the riches you've somehow come into, lend them at such rates as the interest alone pays all your expenses, and never have to work again. If you have excess wealth and want to profit off of it, invest it. Actually invest it, as in, but portions of profitable companies, fund promising startups, etc. Th
Why is it that the obsession is with confusion rather than learning. At a time when many people are turning to stupidities like Intelligent Design because it claims to have "answers" perhaps some of the blame can be put on horrible reporting which seems unable to distinguish between finding new info and being "confused" "lost" or "puzzled". There's nothing wrong with saying that scientists are confused, perplexed, puzzled, baffled, befuddled, or any such thing in a context like this. It's perfectly true: they make some observation which doesn't jive with theoretical predictions and the natural human response to that us "huh, that's weird". The problem with folks like the ID people is just that they have difficulty sitting with unanswered questions. Calling a state of mind where you an unable to answer a question you'd like to answer "puzzled" or some such is entirely accurate - getting uncomfortable with that state and making up a bullshit answer just to relieve your anxiety is the harm.
So yes. Scientists are puzzled by these new findings. And they find that a fun and exciting state of mind to be in, as it allows them to think and reason, theorize and experiment, and generally do all that fun sciencey stuff that they got into this business for, in the end hopefully finding an answer to the question that's puzzling them. Saying a scientist is "puzzled" by new findings is like saying a videogamer is "challenged" by a new release - that's a good thing, and it'd be a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of gamers to think that someone saying a new game is challenging was a bad thing. Likewise, non-puzzling scientific findings are as dull as unchallenging video games. Nobody cares about the amazing finding that the sun rose this morning. Now two of them rose... that would be puzzling, interesting, and if we meet the challenge and solve the puzzle, quite rewarding.
While the on-topic point you're making is fine, I'd like to note, slightly off topic, that the giant burger image next to "heart disease" is a little misrepresentative. "Heart disease" is what's usually put down as cause of death if nothing else gets you first and you just "get old and die". There is no cause of death called "old age" - something specific fails, and that's usually your heart, so most people who live long healthy lives and then keel over in their 70s, 80s, or 90s get lumped in under "heart disease". Thus, the heart disease statistics are greatly inflated beyond what you'd see if it only included people dying in their prime due to bad diet, etc.
That conclusion is also implicit in the laws of physics, particularly the second law of thermodynamics. If you extrapolate a finite amount of time into the past, assuming entropy to be finite and increasing, at some point all the energy in the universe was concentrated at a single point in a state of minimum entropy. There is nothing that can precede that point without assuming that the law of entropy does not hold for all time, and thus either the universe must have a finite age, or our most basic understanding of how it works must be incorrect.
The second law of entropy is merely a statistical phenomenon. Given a high-entropy closed volume of gas it is entirely possible that all the gas molecules will spontaneously end up pressed against one wall of the container; it's just incredibly, incredibly unlikely given the huge number of other things that the gas molecules could be doing. There's no special force out there irresistibly pushing everything into a more evenly distributed state, that is just by far the most likely way for a system to evolve.
On the small scale, entropy momentarily decreases all the time: consider an arbitrary volume of intergalactic space containing only two hydrogen atoms, which just happen to be on a collision course. As they come together in one part of our arbitrary volume, the entropy in that volume decreases - the matter contained within it is less evenly distributed. (Of course, from that low-entropy state the volume quickly devolves back into a high-entropy state). Now, the odds of three such hydrogen atoms all coalescing like that are clearly much much lower; the odds of four, far lower still; and so it quickly becomes incredibly, unimaginably improbable to see large systems spontaneously decrease in entropy.
But given infinite tries, everything possible, no matter how improbable, will occur. The odds of getting a googleplex of sixes in a row in a series of d6 rolls is incredibly improbable; but roll that d6 an infinite number of times and it'll happen in there somewhere. Thus, it is not a problem for all the matter in the universe to have been at a minimal entropy state at one time and there have been times before it where the entropy state was higher; it's just that the odds of the universe spontaneously entering that minimal entropy state from a higher entropy one are unimaginably low. But, if time is infinite, then it's to be expected that at some point in that infinite time, such a thing would occur. And if time is infinite in both directions, then after the universe has been blown apart into nothing but dust and light, after all the protons have decayed, and the universe is nothing but a thin, cold soup of quarks and quanta - at some unimaginably distant time beyond even then, the incredibly unlikely will occur again, and somehow or another all that scattered energy will wind up clumped together again in a low-entropy state, which it won't likely stay in for long, thus exploding once more and beginning the long descent into chaos.
And, as you can get the same effect as rolling a die infinite times just by rolling infinite dice at once, so too if space is infinite, then somewhere out there, likely so far away that all our protons will have decayed before the earliest light from it crosses any light ever emitted by anything even remotely known to man, that's happening right now. Another "universe" is being born, another big bang - still technical a part of the same universe as us but so distant that we can completely ignore it forever for all practical purposes, for nothing we know, not even matter as we know it, will be around by the time it interacts with us. So we have a vision of an infinite stormy sea of universes - each big bang like the falling crest of a choppy wave, descending from its improbable low-entropy state into a more "flat" high-entropy state, but sending out energy in all directions as it does so, energy which will eventually contribute to the formation of another wave crest somewhere else, all on a scale so inconceiv
When people talk about the universe expanding, what they mean is that the distances between particles throughout the universe are increasing. From the subatomic to the intergalactic, everything is moving further apart. The "size of the universe" is (simplistically) the largest distance (in 4D spacetime) between any two particles within the universe, which can be simplistically calculated from any given frame of reference as (at most) the age of the universe multiplied by the speed of light. Since the age of the universe is constantly increasing (from our point of view as entities within the universe), the size of the universe increases as well. Implicit in your answer is the belief that the universe is also of finite age. If the universe is infinitely old (and is not a closed curve in all spatial dimensions), would not the universe also have to be infinitely large, by your measure?
A recent article reported here on Slashdot posited the idea that true singularities never actually form, and all matter that has fallen "into" a black hole is actually still right there on the event horizon, orbiting at fantastic velocities near the speed of light, and thus, given long enough time, it will eventually escape (the upshot of this being, in the aforementioned article, that information is not really lost into a black hole, and the Hawking radiation black holes give off is not truly random but contains information about what "fell into" the black hole, since nothing ever really fell in at all, it's just been ripped up into quarks and quanta and spinning around the event horizon for aeons, and is now escaping).
It seems to me that if that theory is correct, it would also resolve your question about overlapping event horizons. Nothing is really trapped inside a black hole, it's just very tightly bound in orbit around it, and another similarly massive object passing nearby could capture it away. Though, now that I try to visualize this with intersecting event horizons, the only way I can make sense of it is to imagine the particles not actually "on" the event horizon but rather spinning around inside of it - hidden from the outside world but never hitting any singularity at the center of it, and thus maintaining the possibility of escaping - so that when the two event horizons intersect, a particle orbiting the center of gravity of one black hole could follow a "figure 8" path and end up orbiting the other center of gravity. The problem with this picture is that the particles orbiting within the event horizon would need to be travelling faster than light to do so. However, now that I think about that, I don't see why it's a problem for a particle to be accelerated past the speed of light by a sufficiently strong gravity field, if granting the possibility of such fields existing (as we do when postulating black holes), since gravity and acceleration are indistinguishable in relativistic physics, so granting the possibility of so strong a gravity field is granting the possibility of something being accelerated (by said field, at least) faster than the speed of light. Granted, I don't understand much of the mathematics used to describe these phenomena, and that probably rips huge holes in my wild speculation here, but... it was fun while it lasted.
I think you have an odd sense of "poorest of the poor".
I'm 25 years old, just finished at university (with a crappy degree that won't be of much use to me), and have been working between half and full time at about 2x minimum wage for the past five years while in school. I rent a room in a four-bedroom house with some friends of mine, at the lowest rates I can find in this town. (Admittedly an expensive town - Santa Barbara, CA - but it's where I grew up and I'm still here). I couldn't afford to rent the whole house out at these rates, much less make payments on a house of my own. I have a crappy 15-year-old car (which I own outright), a five year old computer, and not many other possessions besides clothes, bedding and kitchen wares. I've got no debt, and I managed to save up a few thousand dollars before moving out of my father's shit hole of a house (parents are dirt poor), but if it weren't for those meager savings, "one fender bender, one alternator failure, one radiator failure or one medical emergency" would put me in the dire straights you describe.
Yet apparently, I'm well above the government-defined poverty level (I make between $17K and $20K a year; poverty level is apparently around $10K/yr), and I appear to be better off than most of the people my age I know in person (though people I meet online seem remarkably more wealthy for some reason). The only reason I have any money saved up is because I worked a year or so without paying any rent before moving out on my own, and because my folks are poor enough that most of my education has been free; and because I work every waking hour I'm not in school and live within the limits of what I can make off of that. I don't have to live off ramen or cup-o-soup. But I'm still in with the "poorest of the poor" in your book - because I rent, I own an old car, and one big catastrophe could put me back at ground zero or worse, into debt.
I'll totally agree with you that people who make $50K+ a year and are drowning in debt just don't know how to live within their limits, but not everybody who makes less than that is "the poorest of the poor" - some people are a lot poorer. (And this is only considering within America; by comparison to most [though certainly not all] of the world, we're all stinking rich). I honestly don't know whether or not to consider myself poor anymore; in comparison to most of my friends I seem to be rich, but then the impression I get from people like you online is that I should be paying off my own home and investing in a retirement fund by now.
I guess the point I'm making is regarding your comment "But for this section...". Not everybody reading Slashdot is a successful engineer making big money in Silicon Valley; and the people besides that group aren't all "the poorest of the poor". We may be poor (I really don't know anymore), but there's a lot of us out here, and we're not some kind of marginalized minority fringe group with no representation on the Internet, so please don't talk about us in the third person and lump us in with the poor kids working the fry basket at McDonalds.
Well if you want to pick nits yes. The GPL does not repeal copyright in exactly the same way the 13th amendment repeals slavery. Really, the analogy you'd want to go for here is that GPLing a project is like freeing a slave. The GPL has no effect on what laws are in effect one way or another. Even then though, GPLing a project is *not* like freeing a slave, for exactly the reasons I listed before. It's not just a little bit different, it's entirely different. GPL is a license to use a copyrighted work the way that one might license other to use ones slaves (or, I suppose, license one's slaves to do certain things). It might be a less restrictive license than other copyright license, but it is still more restrictive than no license at all.
So what? The point stands that a restrictive clause can have the net effect of increasing liberty. Only if that restriction merely prohibits others from restricting each other. A restriction that obligates others to help each other does *not* increase liberty, even though it accomplishes a nice thing (though by not-so-nice means).
I would argue that that's not truly free at all. There's no guarantee that I will be free to modify the code of such a licensed work. If they've distributed the code public domain, you're be free to modify it all you want. And in a world free of intellectual property (I don't just oppose copyright, but patents as well; trademark is more of a fraud-related thing), there'd be little to no incentive for them not to share the code with those who wanted it. But if for some reason someone wants to distribute a compiled program and not the code, who are you to tell them that they HAVE to distribute the code, just because they also used code you've distributed? They're not stopping you, or anyone else, from using or distributing the code you released; they're just, for some reason or another, not releasing their new code, or only distributing a copy of your binary and not also a copy of your code. Yes, I agree, it's a nice thing to have easy access to the code for everything, but it's not something you have a legitimate ethical claim to. It's *good* of others to share the code they write, and to help people who they share programs with get the code to those programs, but it's not *wrong* of them to refrain from doing so. The only relevant thing which would be *wrong* is if they restricted others from distributing something.
In short: refraining from helping someone do something is not equivalent to restricting someone from doing something. There can be unjustly excessive obligations just as well as there can be unjustly excessive restrictions. In the modal logic of this all, an obligation is just a restriction of a negation, or conversely, a restriction is just an obligation of a negation. That is, to say that you are restricted (properly speaking, "forbidden") from doing X, is to say you are obligated to not do X; and to say you are obligated to do Y, is to say you are forbidden from not doing Y. But liberty is freedom from obligation or restriction; liberty is permission. Liberty is saying "you are not forbidden from doing X" or "you are not obligated to do X", which are NOT equivalent to "you are obligated to do X" or "you are forbidden from doing X", respectively.
The GPL exchanges restrictions for obligations, which are really just another form of restriction. Liberty is freedom from restriction and obligation. Liberty is permission. And the GPL is NOT permissive; it is obliging.
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"Do you hear that, Mr. Baggins? That is the sound of inevitability. That is the sound, of your death. Goodbye, Mr. Baggins."
"My name.... is FRODO!"
This is a bit of a tangent from the parent post, but I'm curious, and there's a lot of smart people here so I'm sure someone can answer:
I understand the benefits of having a shared connection: if neighbors A, B, C, and D use the internet for nothing but email all day, except for every now and then downloading a big file or two, then A can get more bandwidth for his download by sucking up some of the unused bandwidth from B, C, and D; instead of getting only his share (25% )of the shared connection to their block, he can use 85% of it for a little while, and nobody minds because they weren't using it anyway. It's better, in some ways, than having a guaranteed amount of bandwidth which is usually more than you need and occasionally less than you need.
But, why can't it be set it up so that if A is using 85% of bandwidth, while B, C, and D are each using their normal 5% for email, and then suddenly D wants to use his full 25% for a bit, A gets kicked down to 65% of the bandwidth until A is done with his more intensive usage? In other words, why can't they BOTH guarantee that you'll get, say, 5Mbps at all times you want it, but ALSO let you use more than that if not everyone on your block is maxing theirs out?
Like on the LAN at my house here; we've got four people living here, one of whom uses BitTorrent a lot, another one of which is a gamer who can't stand the damn lag that the torrenter's constant downloading causes, so we configured the router so that BitTorrent gets lowest priority, and whenever anything else wants to use the connection, torrent gets throttled. Why isn't that possible to do on a per-household basis: you get full priority up to (e.g.) 5Mbps, and while you're free to use more bandwidth beyond that if it's available, if any other household on the block wants to use some portion of the remaining bandwidth, you get throttled to make room for them.
Seems like it'd be the best of both worlds.
Macs still do. Yet another of the little bonuses you get from Apple. Not just a "restore" disc that wipes your HD and makes it like it was out of the box, but actual install discs for all the software that comes with the computer, so if something gets borked - even the OS - you just reinstall that one thing and the rest of your apps and data are unharmed. The OS install discs even work on *gasp* other computers besides the one it shipped with, so if you can only find one install disc and it's not for the machine you want, so long as that machine is older than that install disc, it should work. (You're on your honor not to install it on machines that aren't licensed for that version of the OS, though). Comes with real paper manuals too.
At least, they were still like that a year or two ago when we bought our latest machine at work.
Both the copyright infringers and other people who may complain about other unjust laws being enforced on them have a very simple (and IMO legitimate) argument: "Leave me the hell alone, I'm not doing anything wrong." No one should have to stop doing something that's morally permissible just because it's legally forbidden, and saying that they can go way the hell out their way (move to another country / make their own free media) to do something roughly equivalent is not an answer. If there's nothing wrong with it, then there's nothing wrong with it and the damn state should mind its own business.
I know you're probably trolling, but I'd even take this analogy even further. I've made this analogy between governments and operating systems before, I'd apply the same analogy to corporate management, etc etc. What makes an analogy valid is that the things analogized all are similar in particular relevant ways, and the thing that makes all of these thing similar is that they are all systems of power which ostensibly exist to facilitate the smooth operation of those over which they have power.
Schools ostensibly exist to facilitate learning, governments ostensibly exist to facilitate social interaction, corporate management ostensibly exists to facilitate workplace productivity, and operating systems ostensibly exist to facilitate the operation of a computer. And all of these systems do their ostensible job best when they give you unobstructed access to what you need to do what you want (i.e. they get out of the way of competent people), they provide assistance to those who need it (in a way that helps them become competent people), and an aspect I neglected to mention because in such systems it is often emphasized to the neglect of the former two: they keep you from doing things that would compromise the objective that the system is designed to facilitate.
A good school system needs features much like a good operating system: it should make the resources you need to do what you want to do available to you and then get the hell out of the way, so that the more capable people aren't hindered by something that's supposed to be there to help; and it should offer clear instructions and guidance for those less capable people to figure out what they want to do and what they need to do it.
In an OS, this means having a clear intuitive interface that lets capable users see what's there and what can be done with it, that's not always bugging you and trying to second-guess what you want, or worse, telling you what you want; and then having well-written online help and guides/wizards/whatnot that ask the user what they want, and then tells them how to do it. (For anyone who remembers AppleGuide from pre-OSX Macs, that I think was the ideal system; each step told you what to do in text, and then circled the interface elements it was talking about on screen to walk you through actually doing the thing, rather than doing it for you).
In a school, this means that you have broad and deep educational materials available for capable and adventurous students to pursue at their leisure, and you don't bog them down with so much asinine crap that they don't have the time or energy to pursue those things; and it means that your *instructional* resources (i.e. teacher time) are devoted to helping the slower kids master the basics. The bright kids don't need extra instruction to excel; they'll get the standard instruction well enough and then look up more on their own if you make such resources available to them. The slow kids don't need a vast library of supplementary materials; they're having trouble enough with the basic stuff and don't need to be overloaded with more information. A well rounded school should have both: devote extra attention to the kids who need it more (the slow ones), and have extra material readily available for the fast kids to pursue while you're helping the slow ones.
I'm sure someone will complain that some slow kid will have his self-esteem hurt because the fast kids are allowed to move ahead of them, but then look at the flip side: the slow kid is getting the lion's share of the teacher's attention. Nobody's being unjust to him. If his self-esteem is hurt because someone else learns faster than him, he needs to grow up (I know, they're kids, but this is how they become adults) and realize that sometimes people have different levels of talents, and so long as special privileges aren't being afforded to the smart kids who need them least, then nobody has done anything against the slow kids.
Also, I replied to your email and got a message from your mailserver that I'm "blocked for spam". Wth?
Ah yes kermit, I remember that now.
I wouldn't know what the earliest versions of ClarisWorks had, I think I started using it around version 2 or 3. Definitely hasn't been at all related to HC since it was renamed AppleWorks.
AFAIK Slashdow has always let followup posts be modded higher than earlier posts (so an interesting or insightful response to a troll can be +5 and the original troll still modded to oblivion), but then, your UID is about half of what mine is, so maybe you know better. Odd that you got modded Overrated when you hadn't been rated at all...
I think the point of the parent poster was that if you have a theory, like quantum theory, which predicts that we will be unable to predict certain results, how could you empirically verify that theory, or at least that prediction of it? You could falsify it - by showing that we can in fact predict the results which said theory predicts we should not be able to predict - but just showing over and over that we keep failing to make successful predictions does not establish that such predictions are impossible, and thus does not verify the prediction of our theory that such predictions are impossible. Consider a formally similar "theory" from a very different camp: that certain phenomena do not have natural causes, i.e. they are miracles. While you can falsify this (by showing a natural cause), you can never verify it; at best, all you can show that we still can't tell what the natural causes for those phenomena are, but not that there *are* in fact no natural causes for for those phenomena.
Of course, in general it's practically impossible to ever actually *verify* any scientific theory; we just build our confidence in them because they make many successful predictions and we have been unable to falsify them thus far, despite our best efforts. But it's always possible something new observation could throw a wrench in the whole thing. So quantum theory isn't any worse off in that regard than any other theory. And of course there are logical proofs from the axioms of quantum theory that prove that certain predictions are impossible, but that's just to say that it's a theorem of quantum theory that certain predictions are impossible - which is sort of begging the question, since the question is whether quantum theory is right about that.
Which I guess is pretty similar to your conclusion - if you accept quantum theory as established (i.e. having held up well to testing), then you've got to accept its implications like randomness, including quantum randomness, just as a matter of course. But what people like the GP are saying is that quantum theory's particular prediction that we cannot predict certain things is in itself untestable, and another theory might come along later which successfully predicts the same things that quantum theory successfully predicts, but also predicts that we can make the predictions that quantum theory says we can't, i.e. describes a method for making such predictions. But unless something like that comes along and shows that we *can* make such predictions, it's an open question whether or not we can, because it's impossible to show that we *can't*, and it seems to me a rather defeatist attitude to just say "oh well, it's completely random", just as much to say "oh well, it's a miracle". Maybe it is - but it's more productive to keep searching for an explanation.
HyperCard was more like an early version of the web, only the whole "site" had to be contained in one file and you downloaded it (or sneakernetted it) instead of accessing it remotely. A HyperCard stack was a series of interactive pages (cards) containing text and graphics and other elements (later any QT file could be embedded), any of which could link to other pages in the stack just like a hyperlink in an HTML doc.
AppleWorks was an office suite containing a word processor and spreadsheet, draw and paint programs, and database and communications programs (I gather the later was something like telnet, though I never made use of it or the database myself). It had nothing at all to do with HyperCard and was nothing at all like it. Where are you drawing that comparison from?
Except that Adams himself said that even he wouldn't sink so low as to make jokes in base-13.
Yes, that is the one thing that makes me wary of this idea. Under my system there is nothing prohibiting you from loaning money, or from allowing people to purchase things from you on installment (i.e. I could "rent" out a spare house if I had one, but every rent payment would increase the percent of the renter's ownership in the house, until he eventually owns it and I have no further basis to collect rent from him). But while with tangible goods being sold on installment there's perfectly good incentive to do so - you're still making a profit by selling something you have excess of, the profit is just coming in over time instead of all at once - I'm not sure what anyone's incentive would be to loan something out, e.g. loan out money, where the only thing they're getting back is the money they lent out.
The one thing allowable within this system that I can think of is that you COULD sell money for more than it's face value, on installment - e.g. "I'll sell you $500,000 for $750,000, payable in installments of $25,000 a year". Use that money to buy a $500,000 house and it's much like a 30-year, 5% APR mortgage. It's still not precisely a loan at interest, because the profit to be made is a fixed amount, so the debtee can't get stuck in a cycle of owing more and more money because he can't yet afford to pay off what he already owes.
Now that I think about it, however, if there's still incentive for people to sell things on installment, then there's little need for loans. The guy with a space house can't get any profit out of that house unless he sells it off, and if nobody can afford to buy it all at once (because nobody's that rich, and nobody can get loans because there's no incentive to loan money, ignoring the above), the only way he'll be able to get any profit out of it would be to sell it on installment. Which, in the end, just means that after you've rented a place for a certain period of time, you own it; or alternately, when you move, you sell your stake in the house and use that money to get a head start on buying into your new place, like people do with mortgaged houses now.
I've got no ethical problem with people owing each other money, i.e. debt in general. (Though I think it's a bad practical idea to go into debt if at all avoidable). I don't even have a problem with people charging more for things that will be paid off over time, e.g. if you want to buy this on installment I'm gonna charge you extra for it. All I have a problem with is one party keeping what they get permanently while the other party only gets what they get for a limited period of time, which allows the former party to accumulate wealth from the latter party solely by virtue of him already having excess wealth (i.e. something he can afford to lend out). In that vein, I suppose I wouldn't have an issue (though it's unclear how this figures into the contract-ethics basis of my anti-rent stance) with someone getting something temporarily in exchange for something temporary. So, say a bank offers to lend someone $12,000 (interest free) for a year, and demands in exchange that, at the end of that year, the lendee lends the bank $1,000 (interest free) for 12 years. That seems like it would be a just transaction.
Point being, there are plenty of ways to work around the inconveniences that not being able to enter into an enforceable rent contract would impose. In Islamic countries, usury is still prohibited, but people manage to get around it (see the Wiki article on Islamic Banking). Of course, in sharia law (and apparently in older Catholic canon law as well) "usury" only seems to refer to lending *money* at interest, and some of the ways people circumvent such prohibitions is by complex loopholes involving rental contracts (see contractum trinus). It seems to me the only way a usury-free economy is likely to ever actually be implemented is by force of one of these large religious powers which supports similar notions... but then, I think I'd personally rather live in a secular society with a usury-laden market than live in a usury-free theocracy.
No problem with brevity, I understand that people have important work to do. Just a slow day for me here.
I'm familiar with and quite sympathetic to Proudhon's mutualism (in fact I called my general ethical stance that, trying to moderate between egoism and altruism, before I found out that that name was already taken by a more specific theory), though I disagree with him on some points. While we both have a problem with usury, I wouldn't lump all profit in general in to that category, for if I can somehow manage to buy something for $5 and turn around and sell it for $10 without any otherwise illegitimate shenanigans going on (identifying and preventing such shenanigans being the challenge of building an ethical economic system), then I'm obviously adding some sort of value, convenience if nothing else, otherwise nobody would buy it from me at the higher price. I also don't see land as any different than any other property, and so I think people should be able to own it; though as all resources begin as publicly owned goods (rather than unowned as some libertarians would have it), the initial privatization of a formerly public resource should only be allowed if the public is duly compensated (as in, a purchase price is paid; to lease land from the government is no better than leasing it from a private individual or corporation, and makes people just as dependent upon their employers as private leasing does).
Now that you link me to that wiki, I also recall reading of Distributivism before, and it does indeed sound similar to the desired end result I'm looking for (which I've called an "owner's society", i.e. a society in which everyone is an owner of the things they need to survive). However, that page at least seems somewhat lacking on a description of the legislative means of accomplishing those ends; that is, it seems to say that it'd be great if things were like so, but what sort of laws would get things like so and keep them there, without further negative consequences? Communism likewise aims to see the broad distribution of wealth amongst many people, and a highly competitive capitalist market should in theory involve many small businesses all operating on thin profit margins, so everybody who cares at all about economics being the least bit egalitarian (in which category I would include many capitalist theorists, even if not the practitioners of those theories) seems to want ends similar to those. The question for those who care also about liberty as well as equality is, what notion of rights and obligations, if enforced, would provide for such equality without sacrificing liberty? That's what excites me so much about this rent-free market idea: it seems like it could achieve egalitarian ends by libertarian means. (Or perhaps, as you put it, "a socialist economy inside a free market system").
As to the free rider problem, I honestly don't see it as a problem that people benefit from positive externalities; its negative externalities that we need to worry about. I really don't care if my neighbors' view gets nicer (and thus their property value goes up) because I planted some nice trees and a pretty garden in my yard; I wanted a pretty yard, I paid for it and got it, and if others benefit from that too, that's fine with me. Now if my neighbors clean up their properties by dumping their garbage on the street and in each others' (and my) yard, that's a problem, a negative externality, and that kind of thing needs to be prevented. You seem concerned more with negative externalities like the tragedy of the commons; where we all put in to providing a public resource (education, insurance, etc) and some people take advantage of that without paying in to it. I consider that a negative externality because it's along the lines of people throwing their garbage into the street because they know I pick up whatever garbage I find when I'm walking around, because I like a clean neighborhood. There's plenty written on this that I'm sure you've read already, pointing out the problem that someone living in a
What I see is that the free market has failure modes which create a similar problem to the concentration of power in a governmental system. You have runaway feedback loops where those with money have more power to influence the market, tilting the playing field towards them and gaining more money with which to tilt the playing field even further. This leads to concentration of wealth and power into fewer and fewer hands. Eventually, people will be born who do not have the means to buy control of their own means of production. Those people will be virtual slaves to those who do own the means of production.
I ask you, what in your system would keep this from happening?
Hi spun, long time no chat.
I'm popping into this conversation to share a relevant idea with you that I've came up with recently, that I haven't seen much written about (been scouring the internet for prior iterations of such thoughts), and I'd appreciate your input on it. All other commentators welcome as well of course.
You mention runaway feedback loops where having money enables you to extract more money from those who have less than you, and you ask, what could keep this from happening? My traditional answer to that question has been a somewhat socialist one: people must have some responsibility to a collective body, in particular I advocated a partial redistribution of wealth based on a sort of dynamically progressive income tax. (I think we've discussed this before).
However, more recently it dawned on me that a much more libertarian solution - that is, a solution that requires less centralized (democratic, collective) power and government (or pseudo-government) intervention, rather than more - would be simply to declare rent contracts invalid, and so not enforce them. That is, a contract to let someone use something for a temporary period of time in exchange for a permanent payment should be no more enforceable than a contract selling yourself into slavery. Beyond that, anyone trying to enforce such a contract is just guilty of theft, just as someone trying to enforce a slavery contract is just guilty of assault. Proudhon was close, but not quite: it's not property per se that is theft, it is RENT which is theft. Note also that as a consequence of this, interest on loans is abolished (as that's simply rent on money; "I'll rent you some dollars at a rate of 5 cents per year for each dollar" = 5% APR loan), and also wage labor (as that's the worker renting himself to the employer).
This way, you cannot acquire wealth simply by having wealth. You can't rent out a spare house you have and use the money to buy a new house and then start renting that and so forth, eventually becoming a land-lord of feudal proportions; if you have property you're not using, and you want to profit from it, you'll have to sell it, which will result (in the short term) in a huge influx of new properties for sale on the market, lowering prices drastically. (Though as to the privatization of new properties from public land, and how those people came to be property owners in the first place, I agree that it was originally an illegitimate transfer from public to private property, and that the privatization of new property should require a payment [only one-time, though] to the public for compensation; however, making reparations for that is no more feasible or just than making reparations for the slave trade, for though both were at the time horrible injustices, they were committed by no one who is alive today, and to punish the living for their grandparents' crimes would be wrong. All we can do now is start doing things right from here on out and let the inequalities slowly level out).
This way, you cannot take all the riches you've somehow come into, lend them at such rates as the interest alone pays all your expenses, and never have to work again. If you have excess wealth and want to profit off of it, invest it. Actually invest it, as in, but portions of profitable companies, fund promising startups, etc. Th
So yes. Scientists are puzzled by these new findings. And they find that a fun and exciting state of mind to be in, as it allows them to think and reason, theorize and experiment, and generally do all that fun sciencey stuff that they got into this business for, in the end hopefully finding an answer to the question that's puzzling them. Saying a scientist is "puzzled" by new findings is like saying a videogamer is "challenged" by a new release - that's a good thing, and it'd be a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of gamers to think that someone saying a new game is challenging was a bad thing. Likewise, non-puzzling scientific findings are as dull as unchallenging video games. Nobody cares about the amazing finding that the sun rose this morning. Now two of them rose... that would be puzzling, interesting, and if we meet the challenge and solve the puzzle, quite rewarding.
While the on-topic point you're making is fine, I'd like to note, slightly off topic, that the giant burger image next to "heart disease" is a little misrepresentative. "Heart disease" is what's usually put down as cause of death if nothing else gets you first and you just "get old and die". There is no cause of death called "old age" - something specific fails, and that's usually your heart, so most people who live long healthy lives and then keel over in their 70s, 80s, or 90s get lumped in under "heart disease". Thus, the heart disease statistics are greatly inflated beyond what you'd see if it only included people dying in their prime due to bad diet, etc.
That conclusion is also implicit in the laws of physics, particularly the second law of thermodynamics. If you extrapolate a finite amount of time into the past, assuming entropy to be finite and increasing, at some point all the energy in the universe was concentrated at a single point in a state of minimum entropy. There is nothing that can precede that point without assuming that the law of entropy does not hold for all time, and thus either the universe must have a finite age, or our most basic understanding of how it works must be incorrect.
The second law of entropy is merely a statistical phenomenon. Given a high-entropy closed volume of gas it is entirely possible that all the gas molecules will spontaneously end up pressed against one wall of the container; it's just incredibly, incredibly unlikely given the huge number of other things that the gas molecules could be doing. There's no special force out there irresistibly pushing everything into a more evenly distributed state, that is just by far the most likely way for a system to evolve.
On the small scale, entropy momentarily decreases all the time: consider an arbitrary volume of intergalactic space containing only two hydrogen atoms, which just happen to be on a collision course. As they come together in one part of our arbitrary volume, the entropy in that volume decreases - the matter contained within it is less evenly distributed. (Of course, from that low-entropy state the volume quickly devolves back into a high-entropy state). Now, the odds of three such hydrogen atoms all coalescing like that are clearly much much lower; the odds of four, far lower still; and so it quickly becomes incredibly, unimaginably improbable to see large systems spontaneously decrease in entropy.
But given infinite tries, everything possible, no matter how improbable, will occur. The odds of getting a googleplex of sixes in a row in a series of d6 rolls is incredibly improbable; but roll that d6 an infinite number of times and it'll happen in there somewhere. Thus, it is not a problem for all the matter in the universe to have been at a minimal entropy state at one time and there have been times before it where the entropy state was higher; it's just that the odds of the universe spontaneously entering that minimal entropy state from a higher entropy one are unimaginably low. But, if time is infinite, then it's to be expected that at some point in that infinite time, such a thing would occur. And if time is infinite in both directions, then after the universe has been blown apart into nothing but dust and light, after all the protons have decayed, and the universe is nothing but a thin, cold soup of quarks and quanta - at some unimaginably distant time beyond even then, the incredibly unlikely will occur again, and somehow or another all that scattered energy will wind up clumped together again in a low-entropy state, which it won't likely stay in for long, thus exploding once more and beginning the long descent into chaos.
And, as you can get the same effect as rolling a die infinite times just by rolling infinite dice at once, so too if space is infinite, then somewhere out there, likely so far away that all our protons will have decayed before the earliest light from it crosses any light ever emitted by anything even remotely known to man, that's happening right now. Another "universe" is being born, another big bang - still technical a part of the same universe as us but so distant that we can completely ignore it forever for all practical purposes, for nothing we know, not even matter as we know it, will be around by the time it interacts with us. So we have a vision of an infinite stormy sea of universes - each big bang like the falling crest of a choppy wave, descending from its improbable low-entropy state into a more "flat" high-entropy state, but sending out energy in all directions as it does so, energy which will eventually contribute to the formation of another wave crest somewhere else, all on a scale so inconceiv
A recent article reported here on Slashdot posited the idea that true singularities never actually form, and all matter that has fallen "into" a black hole is actually still right there on the event horizon, orbiting at fantastic velocities near the speed of light, and thus, given long enough time, it will eventually escape (the upshot of this being, in the aforementioned article, that information is not really lost into a black hole, and the Hawking radiation black holes give off is not truly random but contains information about what "fell into" the black hole, since nothing ever really fell in at all, it's just been ripped up into quarks and quanta and spinning around the event horizon for aeons, and is now escaping).
It seems to me that if that theory is correct, it would also resolve your question about overlapping event horizons. Nothing is really trapped inside a black hole, it's just very tightly bound in orbit around it, and another similarly massive object passing nearby could capture it away. Though, now that I try to visualize this with intersecting event horizons, the only way I can make sense of it is to imagine the particles not actually "on" the event horizon but rather spinning around inside of it - hidden from the outside world but never hitting any singularity at the center of it, and thus maintaining the possibility of escaping - so that when the two event horizons intersect, a particle orbiting the center of gravity of one black hole could follow a "figure 8" path and end up orbiting the other center of gravity. The problem with this picture is that the particles orbiting within the event horizon would need to be travelling faster than light to do so. However, now that I think about that, I don't see why it's a problem for a particle to be accelerated past the speed of light by a sufficiently strong gravity field, if granting the possibility of such fields existing (as we do when postulating black holes), since gravity and acceleration are indistinguishable in relativistic physics, so granting the possibility of so strong a gravity field is granting the possibility of something being accelerated (by said field, at least) faster than the speed of light. Granted, I don't understand much of the mathematics used to describe these phenomena, and that probably rips huge holes in my wild speculation here, but... it was fun while it lasted.
I think you have an odd sense of "poorest of the poor".
I'm 25 years old, just finished at university (with a crappy degree that won't be of much use to me), and have been working between half and full time at about 2x minimum wage for the past five years while in school. I rent a room in a four-bedroom house with some friends of mine, at the lowest rates I can find in this town. (Admittedly an expensive town - Santa Barbara, CA - but it's where I grew up and I'm still here). I couldn't afford to rent the whole house out at these rates, much less make payments on a house of my own. I have a crappy 15-year-old car (which I own outright), a five year old computer, and not many other possessions besides clothes, bedding and kitchen wares. I've got no debt, and I managed to save up a few thousand dollars before moving out of my father's shit hole of a house (parents are dirt poor), but if it weren't for those meager savings, "one fender bender, one alternator failure, one radiator failure or one medical emergency" would put me in the dire straights you describe.
Yet apparently, I'm well above the government-defined poverty level (I make between $17K and $20K a year; poverty level is apparently around $10K/yr), and I appear to be better off than most of the people my age I know in person (though people I meet online seem remarkably more wealthy for some reason). The only reason I have any money saved up is because I worked a year or so without paying any rent before moving out on my own, and because my folks are poor enough that most of my education has been free; and because I work every waking hour I'm not in school and live within the limits of what I can make off of that. I don't have to live off ramen or cup-o-soup. But I'm still in with the "poorest of the poor" in your book - because I rent, I own an old car, and one big catastrophe could put me back at ground zero or worse, into debt.
I'll totally agree with you that people who make $50K+ a year and are drowning in debt just don't know how to live within their limits, but not everybody who makes less than that is "the poorest of the poor" - some people are a lot poorer. (And this is only considering within America; by comparison to most [though certainly not all] of the world, we're all stinking rich). I honestly don't know whether or not to consider myself poor anymore; in comparison to most of my friends I seem to be rich, but then the impression I get from people like you online is that I should be paying off my own home and investing in a retirement fund by now.
I guess the point I'm making is regarding your comment "But for this section...". Not everybody reading Slashdot is a successful engineer making big money in Silicon Valley; and the people besides that group aren't all "the poorest of the poor". We may be poor (I really don't know anymore), but there's a lot of us out here, and we're not some kind of marginalized minority fringe group with no representation on the Internet, so please don't talk about us in the third person and lump us in with the poor kids working the fry basket at McDonalds.
In short: refraining from helping someone do something is not equivalent to restricting someone from doing something. There can be unjustly excessive obligations just as well as there can be unjustly excessive restrictions. In the modal logic of this all, an obligation is just a restriction of a negation, or conversely, a restriction is just an obligation of a negation. That is, to say that you are restricted (properly speaking, "forbidden") from doing X, is to say you are obligated to not do X; and to say you are obligated to do Y, is to say you are forbidden from not doing Y. But liberty is freedom from obligation or restriction; liberty is permission. Liberty is saying "you are not forbidden from doing X" or "you are not obligated to do X", which are NOT equivalent to "you are obligated to do X" or "you are forbidden from doing X", respectively.
The GPL exchanges restrictions for obligations, which are really just another form of restriction. Liberty is freedom from restriction and obligation. Liberty is permission. And the GPL is NOT permissive; it is obliging.