Complexity's opposite, defined
I’ve posted and reposted this link a couple of times, but the text document Doctorow links makes for an interesting additions.
Microsoft Wins US Import Ban On Motorola's Android Devices
The more I hear stories like this, the more I turn against IP law. Which is a pity, because it has its uses…
The Plan for Greece
Wow. So not only is Greece in the shitter, but apparently there never was a plan for it to be anywhere else. Ouch.
Hacking the Non-Disposable Planet
I like a lot of the ideas here, but I hope for the sake of life itself that civilization’s absolute complexity doesn’t have an absolute threshold. I’m okay with relative thresholds, local thresholds, and (my personal hope) thresholds at or above the first derivative. But a world where the zeroth-order level of complexity is absolutely limited is going to eventually look very ugly.
Given a sufficiently long time-line, all possible events are not only possible, but certain. An absolutely hackstable system of the type Venkat describes is thus, by definition, not only unstable but absolutely doomed.
That said, I see no reason that the type of hackstability described here can’t be be locally true (or true for the velocity of complexification) while not actually limiting the absolute complexity of the system. (Think space travel, local decay and revolution, cycles of civilizations, etc.)
