that we not get it all at once please.

When nearly all of your readers block ads, it's tough to make it as an ad-supported site.

(Yes, I have AdBlockPlus installed, too.)

Oh, so Denmark is going to pull a Putin and cut off whatever sections of Greenland it wants for itself?

Only half of Americans typically turn out to vote in binding presidential elections. 72% of Greenlanders turned out to vote in the *non-binding* referrendum on independence. I'd say that's some pretty serious interest. Even if every last Greenlander who didn't show up didn't want independence, they *still* wouldn't be in majority.

This is false. Greenland's GDP is 2,3 billion USD. The subsidy is under 700M USD. They would lose about a third of their GDP if the subsidy cut off. On the other hand, they would also stop *paying* about that much in taxes to Denmark.

People in Greenland voted overwhelmingly to terms that called for eliminating the subsidy, in exchange for Denmark butting the heck out of their land.

The terms of the vote made pretty clear what the people of Greenland want. It was to terminate Danish subsidy, remove Danish as an official language, take full control of Greenland and Greenlandic waters (even foreign policy), take control of the majority of the mineral royalties, etc. So even they don't end up with, say, a UN seat, it's still pretty hard to say that's not "independence".

And there are Danish politicians who have made clear that they don't think Greenland should be let loose.

Macroscopic analogies help people envision what one's talking about, though. Saying "an electron does its own thing" doesn't really help people conceive just what that "thing" is.

I think the basic macroscopic analogy for particle/wave duality is to just go with the pilot wave theory and have them picture a boat bobbing along on a frictionless lake, where its wake is so powerful and so fast-responding that it steers the boat, and it never dies out - the boat creates the wake but is governed by it. There's even an experiment to visualize it involving bouncing a silicone droplet on a vibrating fluid bath, where you can even roughly reproduce a (non-quantized) version of the double slit experiment - the wake goes through both slits, then steers the droplet on the other side.

Of course, the analogy fails when you add quantum effects like virtual particles, uncertainty, etc....

It wasn't Apple being totalitarian, it was the music industry in general. All Real had to do to make their stuff work on the iPod was to remove ALL DRM. However, had they done that, they'd have been the ones in the dock at the behest of the RIAA, et. al. Eventually Apple's power and market dominance gave them enough clout to tell the music industry where to stick their DRM. And yes, that sounds "totalitarian", but actually, it was the consumer who benefited.

Seems to me that people just like to use the existence of the meritless case to push and reinforce their own anti-Apple views. Such views may have some validity, but to use this particular case and the history behind it to push them is ridiculous. We consumers enjoy DRM-free music today because of Apple, make no mistake. Do you really think Real (or Amazon, or whoever) would have managed the same thing if Apple hadn't? Nope - we'd still have crappy DRM-encrusted music from the industry or would be using the hit-and-miss GNUTella method.

Remember that any industry-backed music download service had to compete with free (albeit free with strings attached, in the form of terrible rips, mislabelled files and malware). Apple pulled it off, and they deserved to win this.

That depends. For example many countries have laws regarding historical artifacts, you can own them but you can't take them out of the country. Or you can legally buy cryptography chips in the US that needs an export license. Just because Microsoft Ireland can legally possess the customer data in Ireland, doesn't mean they're free to ship it around the world or provide access to it in violation of Irish law.

They should issue the VR goggles to the cops an make white people look black.

So either you comply "voluntarily" or your lack of compliance is used as a reason do to if forcefully, either way the cops get to do whatever they want. Maybe they should start at home and repeal the 4th amendment first?

I hope the more rational part of you realizes that this wouldn't be good for anyone.