Security will take care of your expenses when you retire or that what’s left over once you pay the bills is yours to spend freely. It’s your…

What a delightful concept! How else might we know? Has someone checked today’s entropy levels against yesterday’s, to make sure that we’re still moving forward in time and not hurtling backwards through time?

The Law of Gravity weighs in pretty heavily concerning whether I can float around at will. Real heavy. And?

It seems, Ymarsakar, you have mistaken two very different concepts. You seem to have mixed up the idea of traveling back in time with the concept of implementing and enforcing social or legal rules that were in force in the past but are no longer in force.

This is a little like mixing up the ideas of the law of conservation of mass with the concept of there being no free lunch. That is, the two could be mistaken if and only if your grasp on the English language were very tenuous, or you were very stupid, or if you only barely understood the conversation and the topics, as a child might confuse the conversation of parents, and you wanted desperately to sound like you knew what you were talking about. I’m going to guess that last one, but it’s just a guess. Maybe English is your third language?

The Universe is a closed system, Tom. Technically, there could be a Higher Power called God by mortals, that could be feeding stars energy so they won’t go supernova or reversing time and decay, but I don’t think that’s something mortals should count on in their dealings with time and entropy.

Entropy occurs everywhere, not just in isolated and closed systems. To make things short, the Second Law of Thermodynamics state that for any closed system that is isolated from other systems with energy, entropy is either increasing or staying constant. It’s a trick proposition if you think about what occurs to a system in which entropy is decreasing, in which the energy that is causing this decrease in entropy is being provided by another system. What happens to the entropy in that system if it is contributing energy to the first the system? You could end up with a situation in which you talk about two systems both with access to each other, with one system decreasing in entropy, and the other system decreasing in entropy as well by shunting off its heat from one region to System 1. This might be called a perpetual motion machine, which shouldn’t exist. Actually, it doesn’t exist, but should exist since it would be a nice thing to have.

In the end, the only way Tom could be why that I’m incorrect about my application the Second Law of Thermodynamics is if he says that God is able to turn back the clock, resurrect people from the dead, and so forth.

Obviously if you believe there’s some open source energy avaiable to do work, any application of the Second Law to state that we are operating under a closed system, would be disbelieved. But this becomes a religious debate. Not a discussion on the Laws of Thermodyanmics. That is an important point to make.

If people want to talk about God, they’re free to do so, Tom.

So why don’t the media also protect accused, in cases such as rape or child abuse, until such time as they’re convicted?

I think this has to do with that law people discussed about laws concerning whether a man should pay child support for a child he didn’t want, as opposed to a woman who could abort a child she didn’t want and therefore not pay any support. The law was definitely applied unfairly, and Neo made the point that it was to protect the child. But then again, there are other laws that specifically don’t protect the child, but protects the right for mothers to kill their future children. So it was an interesting argument.

However, if there’s a stigma attached to being the victim of rape, there’s a thousand times more attached to being a rapist. Even in cases where the accused aren’t tried in the media the way these have been, the mere accusation can get you ostracized for life, cause you problems finding a job, getting the trust of a girlfriend’s or fiancee’s family, and so on. (Particularly now. Google never forgets such an accusation.)

There will always be people who say “Well, he was acquitted but that doesn’t mean he didn’t do it.” People are saying such things now about the Duke 3, despite the fact that the NC Attorney General has declared their complete and proven innocence, in so many words. Even in this comment thread we have people calling them “loutish frat boys” with the implication that they did something wrong, or violent, or something. They’ll never be out from under this accusation, or the concurrent insinuations such as the one mentioned earlier, and the taint will do much more harm in their lives than is done to any woman by public knowledge of her rape.

So why don’t the media also protect accused, in cases such as rape or child abuse, until such time as they’re convicted? My cynical answer is that they’d sell less broadcast time and fewer papers. Certainly the lurid Newsweek cover story of last year – “Sex, Lies, and Duke” – made quite a bit of money. Likewise the TV pundits have benefited greatly – I speak of financial benefit.

But is there any principled reason to hold the name of an accuser confidential because of the damage revealing it might do, while feeling no inhibitions over doing far greater damage by trumpeting the name of the accused in conjunction with the word “rapist”?

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – The political movement of fiery Iraqi Shi’ite cleric and militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr said on Sunday it would withdraw from the government on Monday to press its demand for a timetable for a U.S. troop withdrawal.

But I suspect that you are idealizing, Ron, and that a little careful investigation of any of these past times that you think are better than today would make you change your mind. Note, I’m not saying that past times were uniformly worse than today, just that they weren’t, overall, better.