That is not quite true. Quantum mechanics technically still holds at the macroscopic level. However, Newtonian physics is an "approximation" that is incredibly good in intermediate scales (i.e. not relativistic or quantum).
Of course the universe isn't truly Newtonian. That said, Newtonian is how we perceive it in our day to day lives. Sure, there are electrons and atoms bouncing all around me, but the only thing I see is a flat desk with gravity pointed straight down.
I can guarantee you that the dog is not doing newtonian physics in his head; neither is he hardwired to do it that way. If you throw a ball at a puppy, he will not be able to catch it right away. Just like a little kid can't. We aren't hardwired to "think Newtonian." As it is, Newtonian physics are a representation of the world we live in, not the world itself.
Do you truly and honestly believe that in the millions of years of evolution in a world that looks like a teenagers physic books opening lessons that nothing has been hardwired to deal with a Newtonian outlook on the world?
Take a gazelle. Drop it out of its mothers womb, and watch as within an hour it is performing a balancing act in modern robots struggle to mimic. This stuff is hardwired in.
Take a baby. Try and teach it calculus. Spend every single day trying to teach it calculus, and see how successful you are. The baby is going to find this utterly impossible because calculus is something we have absolutely zero evolutionary adaptation for. When we learn calculus, we learn it through blood, sweat, and tears. Now take a baby and try and teach it English. Spend every single day talking to the baby and trying to teach it English. You will probably take the better part of year before you start to see any success. It will probably take the child until he is in high school before the child has mastered the language. Language comes quicker then math because we have entire centers of the brain that have been devoted to learning it. It is still a new evolutionary adaptation on the grand scheme of things, but there has been some time for it to get a foothold in our brains.
Now, try and teach a baby how a Newtonian world works. The baby is going to understand that something coming towards its face is going to hit, that objects are solid, and that things fall in parabolas long before it even has the beginnings of muscle control do anything about it. A baby will start making sense out of the photons bouncing around in a deeply intuitive way almost instantly.
A young child is significantly faster and more accurate then Ph.D. in physics can ever be without the aid of a computer when trying to predict a trajectory or what happens when an object is struck. This stuff is so hardwired into us that we don't even think about it. Hell, we CAN'T think about it because it is so hardwired into us. Acting in a Newtonian world comes easier then breathing.
However, if you have never experienced something (even Newtonian physics), then you have no intuition about it because it is not something hardwired. Examples: on this very site a while back, there was a heated discussion about what would happen if there were a a tunnel bored completely through the Earth and you fell it in. What would happen? People disagreed. Also, Total Internal Reflection.
Of course we don't have an intuitive understanding of what happens when gravity is doing anything other then pulling us down or any we are bouncing things through a fiber optic cable. Why in the hell would any species evolve to understand such things? When I say that we understand Newtonian physics, I don't mean every single rule and law that falls under "Newtonian physics". I mean that we perceive the world like the first few chapters of a high school physics book.
Further, the intuitive jump for understanding complex but still Newtonian things is a small jump compared to trying understand quantum mechanics or general relativity. After a
The human mind is the product of millions of years of evolution designed to think in a Newtonian way. You are hardwired to think Newtonian. This hardware does very deep and is a fundamental piece of your core persona. Consider for a moment that if you toss a ball, a dog can jump up in the air and snatch it. This gives you an idea of how hardwired we are to think in Newtonian terms. This is an an ancient way of thinking that goes back well before we were primates, much less full blown humans.
Anyone can tell you what happens when you hit one object against another or toss one object against gravity at a certain angle. Even small children know roughly where a baseball is going to end up the second you release it from a throw despite the fact that the real calculation would take someone a few minutes to make. With quantum mechanics, you are never going to have that child like grasp of what happens when two atoms start interacting.
While we do make visual models to understand quantum mechanics, they really are only a crude ways to give our poor mammalian brain some straws to grasp at. We can visualize orbitals to some extent, but anything deeper then that kicks human intuition which has been developed to deal with a Newtonian world in the balls. You really can only truly 'understand' quantum mechanics and general relativity with math. And not just simple math, but ugly math that kids go to college for years to understand.
Without the hardwired machinery to give us answers like what we have for Newtonian physics, there is no ability to develop and "intuition" for quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is ugly math combined with concepts that have no Newtonian world analogy. Let the kids know that this stuff exists, but keep them in their happy Newtonian world where their hardwired physics engines can pick up the slack. Save quantum mechanics for after they know calculus.
No, nothing has to be "containing" it. Think of it like walking on the surface of the Earth. If you look in either direction you can see pretty far and you might imagine that the Earth goes on forever. If you start walking, you will walk all the way around the Earth and end up exactly where you started. The Earth simply curves back on itself. You could walk around the Earth forever and never reach a boundary where Earth ends, but the Earth itself is still finite.
As to what this soccer ball universe could floating in, well, the question itself is probably the largest issue. We don't know the answer, but the it could very well be that there is no "outside of the soccer ball". The universe could be all that there is. There could be no "beyond" the universe or "outside" of the universe. It is hard concept to visualize, but that is pretty much true of any concept that outside of the traditional Newtonian world.
Once you leave the safe world of Newtonian physics you need to develop a superhuman ability to try and NOT visualize the universe on the grand scale of the quantum scale. Human intuition and visualizations is was built for Newtons world. Once you leave that world, it breaks down and fails to be much help.
The court system over rides the silliest and archaic laws for sure. The issue is that not all of these are archaic, and not all of them are unenforced. You really can't own a swastika in France of Germany. If you write a book arguing that the holocaust didn't happen in Germany, you WILL go to jail. The EU right now IS debating more stringent regulations on video game development and sales.
This silly zeal where video game offices get raided stem from an overall lack of protection from free speech. I am not saying that Europe is an anti-liberal non-free speech zone. I am saying that many places in Europe, Germany included, there is no higher overarching imperative to protect free speech against the whims of the masses and the politicians.
The US is has stupid ass politicians, old people terrified of youngsters, and parents who want the state to raise their kids for them. The difference is that nothing short of a political revolution can wipe away free speech due to fact that it takes an overwhelming super majority to strip away that right. So, when our stupid politicians try and pass laws censoring video games, the law is struck by the courts before it even goes into effect.
Free speech needs to be defended, even when it is unpopular to do so. Holocaust deniers are not magically converted into good citizens by the state threatening to jail them for their beliefs. If anything, it just feeds an atmosphere of cover up, repression, and alienation. History isn't an excuses for weakening free speech and letting it suffer at the whims of the fickle public and stupid politicizations. Europe isn't the only place with history. The US has suffered through multiple terrible Indian genocides that make the Jewish holocausts look like pocket change. The US has suffered a terrible civil war that perhaps while not reaching the same levels of European genocide, certainly managed to achieve the same level of social breakdown. Despite this, free speech and stood protected. Imprisoning a denier or a video game maker in the US is utterly unthinkable, not matter how badly they piss the public off.
Western European countries with hate speech laws are clearly different than religious theocracies with laws against blasphemy and ideology. These hate speech (or 'anti-free speech', doubleplusgood) laws you conflate with fascism aren't the only thing controlling crime, but they don't hurt. And yet you 'conclude' that they're ineffective! Guess I'll just have to take your word for it, right? Anti-hate speech laws don't make hate speeches magically disappear. The idea that you can ban an idea and some how make it disappear is insane. The Soviets tried and failed to do this for a solid 50 years with methods far more brutal and absolute then anything a European nation has tired, and they still had their ideology overthrown.
The only thing anti-hate speech laws manages to do is make debate illegal and drives any sort of discussion of the topic underground. Instead of being able to confront the racism head and exposing it is a crock of shit in the open, you pave the way for those ideas to go underground where they can't be confronted out in the open. People who are disposed to believe such racist non-sense are not magically converted to good citizens when they see police breaking down doors and throwing people in jail. When a government needs to use violence to suppress an idea, people are going to question what exactly it is about that idea that the government fears so much.
The holocaust deniers are a perfect example of this foolishness. Making it illegal to deny the holocaust just means that these ass holes can't stand up in public and take their licks. I would rather see this shit get sorted out in the open where people can respond, rather then have little underground groups that stew in their hate (rightfully) convinced that the government is out to get them.
Further, you keep trying to argue that you can some how have "free speech" while at the same time making "hate speech" illegal. Free speech means free speech. You are damn right that anti-hate speech laws are anti-free speech laws. If you can't express an idea, no matter how repugnant, then it isn't free speech. What exactly do you think the point of free speech is in the first place? To protect the common consensus as to what is and is not acceptable to talk about? The point of free speech is to protect all speech, even the speech that the vast majority loathes.
If you need a reason as to why free speech should be protected in its entirety, simply RTFA. A form of speech that is considered socially deviant by the majority of Germans just had a a few dozen police is riot gear get raided. If the majority consider this form of speech to be socially unacceptable. Does that mean that the raid was a-okay? This isn't an abstract slippery slope argument. Fucking police stormed a video game companies office.
The US might have a stupidly high incarceration rate due to our stupid prohibition laws, but you can bet your ass that we don't have police in SWAT gear kicking in the doors of video game companies for making games that might be considered too violent by the moral majority. Free speech needs uncompromising protection for this very reason.
"Liberal" as in a democrat has absolutely no meaning. It is a mish-mash of ideas with no coherent ideological basis. The same goes with "conservative" as in Republican. A "liberal" democrat can be in favor of censoring violent video games and still be called a "liberal". A "conservative" republican can advocate an expansionist military policy.
How about we stop mangling words? If you want to talk about democrats, call them democrats. If you want to talk about republicans, call them republicans. Use the word "liberal" and "conservative" where it actually makes sense. If someone is socially liberal, that has an absolutely meaning that isn't mangled into the mish-mash "liberal" as in democrat means. While the brain dead voting American public might have their heads explode when they hear the words "socially liberal", the dictionary doesn't get confused.
I swear, there has to be a Godwin's law joke in here somewhere. I mean come on. A fucking German riot squad raiding computer geeks busy making video games. How fascistic could you possibly get?
The EU has a problem. I know that the EU is all scared from World War II and what not, but they need to get over it. Violently repressing anything that might encourage violence really is not an effective method of keeping the fascist away. Further, this isn't just a problem with one little backward German providence. Many European nations have anti-free speech laws preventing various forms of 'blasphemy', racism, and ideology. This isn't an effective way to confront these forces.
The silly talk in Germany and the EU about more stringent rules against video games is going to accomplish only one thing; giving the US more German programmers and designers. Didn't Germany learn a lesson about the stupidity of driving perfectly intelligent people to the US during World War II? The Americans will happily take them in, make some product that can't be made in Germany due to fears of this Gestapo bull shit, and make a buck off of it.
This raid should be a cry for MORE free speech laws to prevent backwards providence from pulling this bullshit, not a cry to clamp down and regulate speech further. Is Germany, with its negative population growth, TRYING to drive out the few remaining young and technically minded people they have left?
People are mangling Republican and conservative, socially liberal and economically liberal, and "liberal" is in "democrats" and liberal is in classical sense of liberalism.
Letting the blind hunt, while a fucking stupid idea, would be a form of INCREASED social liberty. It would allow one more non-violent behavior (err, providing the blind guy doesn't shoot anyone) to be allowed in society. I am not saying that Texas is the most socially conservative state in the Union by any stretch, but that are nowhere near the worse offender. They sure a shit don't have fucking swat teams raiding the plentiful video game offices in Austin.
Uh, Texas is the hub of the video game industry in the US. Texas is pretty damn socially liberal. I think a better comparison is something more like Alabama.
The real tragedy is that German federal law doesn't offer up any support to such a blatant violation of free speech. Then again, German concept of 'free speech' is a lot shakier then the American version. World War II really left the poor bastards a little gun shy when it comes to anything that kinda-sorta-might imply violence.
I am totally serious. My blog was SUED BY MICRO$OFT because I made some software that was so much more awesome then theirs. I even have the letters they sent me to prove it!!11!!! Now, if the Slashdot editors will kindly accept my claim without any sort of validation and post me on a Slashdot front page...
Seriously. Show an ounce of journalistic integrity and don't give a podium to utterly baseless claims. He doesn't even say what company is suing him so we can't even bother to ask that company if this is real. Any idiot could have made this up for the singular purpose of driving up hits. I am not saying that the guy is liar (he very well could be telling the truth), just he shouldn't get a free stage to advertise until there is at least the semblance of a claim that can be fact checked.
Windows is not 'locked in' in the same way iTunes/iPod is. My windows computer wasn't made by Microsoft and most of the software on it is not made by Microsoft. An iPod on the other hand is incompatible with most other legal services outside of iTunes, and iTunes files are incompatible with everything outside of an iPod. There business models are entirely different from one another.
Vendor Lock: Why would Apple want to make it easy for you to use their product on another device?
Uh, of course they don't want to make it easy. I wasn't questioning the logic Apple is using. I was questioning if perhaps consumers are seeing the new piles of MP3 players coming out and wondering if they really want to be locked into a single vendor.
Pricing scheme: the failure of Napster 2.0 and the lacking business of Rhapsody show, subscription services are not the preferred method of getting music online.
I bet you think the fact that where there are more black people there is more crime proves that skin pigment makes you more likely to be a criminal too.
Rhapsody and Napster sales being less then iTunes has nothing to do with their pricing models. They offer the exact same pricing model as iTunes IN ADDITION TO alternative pricing models. I doubt many consumers are offended by being the given the option of both an iTunes pricing scheme and other pricing schemes. Far more likely, the lack-luster sales of Napster and Rhapsody have to do with the fact that Apple owns 80% of the MP3 market and those two vendors can't sell to Apple users.
No, I am not a real employee and yes I do like the subscription services.
Let me explain it real quickly why I like subscription services. Right now, I have 3488 tracks from my subscription service on my HD. That is 15.6 GB of music. That would cost me $3488 on iTunes. I have had the service for 10 months and have spent only $150.
As I said before, subscription isn't for everyone. I personally like to explore music. I don't care about the 'collecting' piece of it. I like to fire up Rhapsody, download a 3 or 4 albums on a whim because I heard one song or it was recommended, and then listen to them at my leisure. The Ramones example is a good one for me. One day I felt like listening to the Ramones, downloaded everything that I could, listened to it for a couple of weeks, then got bored and moved onto something new without looking back. I probably have not listened to any Ramones that I have downloaded in a few months and have been off merrily downloading like a nut jazz and old school Jamaican ska. That is how I prefer to explore music. I like to work on a whim, not bothering to waste time 'researching' a band beforehand, and simply listen and judge them based upon a first hand experience. I don't have any desire to "collect" music simply because, as with my Ramones collection, I am likely to not want to listen to it in a year. The stuff I listened to 5 years ago when I broke up with an ex makes me sick with disgust now. I still have those CDs somewhere, but what good do that do me if I don't listen to them?
I agree that a subscription style makes no sense for some people. If given unlimited downloads you still download less then $15 / month worth of music, of course you should not bother with a subscription service. If on the other hand you average the $300 a month that I do and you are not wed to a single style or taste in music that is consistent, the a subscription service makes perfect sense. Clearly, it isn't for everyone. On the other hand, it is pretty clear that it absolutely works great for some people.
I simply like the option to have a subscription service. No one is twisting your arm to use it. In Rhapsody you can pay the same price as iTunes and rip and backup just like iTunes. The difference is that with Rhapsody I at least have the option of a subscription service.
I wont speculate on iTunes sales as the method the data was collected was sketchy. I will say that there are three reasons I see why their sales might be dropping other then just seasonal variation.
Vendor Lock / DRM: Why on earth would I pay hard earned money for a music format that locks me into a single vendor? iPods are spiffy and all, but your music collection becomes junk if you change to a non-Apple MP3 player. Yes, there are ways around this, but none of them are simple and easy lossless conversions. People are starting to see new MP3 players come out to compete with the iPod. Perhaps they are taking a second look at their music collections and asking if they want to be tied at the hip to Apple?
Pricing Scheme: Other online music services offer alternative pricing schemes that might be eating into Apple's business. Rhapsody has an 'all you can eat' service for $15 / month. The music dies if you stop paying, but until then you get to pick from millions of song for the price of one over priced CD a month. For people who want to explore lots of music cheaply and don't feel an overwhelming urge to collect and horde music, this is a steal. iTunes offers nothing to 'explorers' who don't want to break the bank. Download every song written by the Ramones on a whim with Rhapsody and you pay the same subscription fee you always pay and think nothing of it. Do the same on iTunes and you are out $150 and just made a major purchase. iTune's pricing plan works for some, but not all. Their inflexibility to alternative pricing models might be costing them people that are looking for something other then a.AAC collection at 1$ a hit.
The Long Tail: I would be utterly not surprised to learn that online shoppers are go for back order items rather then Top 40 songs then 'normal' music consumers. If this is the case, then iTunes has a problem. Online shoppers are probably consuming back order items faster then new back order items (that people actually want) are created. If I decide that I just love 1990's Ska, at some point I am going to download all of the good 90's ska that there is. Top 40 is not going to make any new songs to replace this, so I will simply stop downloading. Consumers might be 'filling up' on the back order songs that they wanted and not finding anything new to continue consuming.
If a company cares about customer service, they will hire (for their United States customers) support staff that can properly service someone who speaks the US variety of English. It's hard enough convincing Time Warner representatives located just a few miles from here that the problem is on their end. I'd cancel their service if I had to deal with a language barrier too. I guess this customer cares.
While there is some danger is using an Indian call center, it isn't as bad as people make it out to be. It is like out sourcing anywhere. There are some shitty operations that literally pull people off the street and have them babble in thickly Indian accented English that is utterly incomprehensible to your average American. There are also plenty of institution that use people who speak perfectly good English and can tone down their accent to be perfectly understandable to your average American.
I just had experience with just such a call center. I had to call the same damn company three times, and each time got an Indian call center. They were polite, well spoken, and while I could detect a slight accent, it was no harder to understand then if it had been an Alabama call center. Not withstanding the constant fuck-ups of the company unrelated to the call center, their service was fine.
The point isn't to make you want a product. They just want you to recognize the product. The simple recognition of a product adds credibility. Take Esurance. I bet you have seen their irritating ads. I bet if you were looking for car insurance on the Internet you would be weary of a company you have never heard of. On the other hand, I bet you would at least believe that Esurance is not a sketchy fly by night operation. This is all the advertisers want out of you.
They want you to believe that their product is trust worthy, and this is accomplished by giving it name recognition. People will consider buying an iPod because they can't spit without running into one. They are less likely to buy a Creative Zen despite the fact that it might be a much better product for them simply because they have never heard the name. True, good consumer research can trump advertising, but not every consumer decision is well informed. Even the most ardent consumer researchers (and most people are not) make arbitrary decisions on what to consume all the time.
It takes a real force of will to always research your decisions or, in the absence of research, to simply work off of price. Most consumer don't do this; hence why we have advertising.
Good for you. No one is saying that there should be no technology, just that there should be some thought. What is burning all this coal doing? What is going to happen if we keep hunting Dodos? Should I drive to work, or walk to the bus and lose some weight? Also, I don't think humans were as weak in nature as you portray them.
It is easy to smugly say that we shouldn't ever burn coal... all the while you burn your merry amount of coal in electrical costs and enjoy the fruits of an industrial revolution that was powered by coal. If we had never used coal we sure as shit would have never developed any 'green' technologies to begin with. I am not saying we need to go out and burn down the rain forest to make a parking lot, but that we should realize that the path towards technological progress is messy. There was never a "clean" solution around the industrial revolution other then not having it. I don't know about you, but I am damn glad that my ancestors toiled through the industrial revolution when they did instead of pausing to really think it over.
Without the messy things we have done in the past and continue to do today we wouldn't even be having this conversation on computers. Hell, in all likelihood we wouldn't even be alive. Striving towards a greener society is a noble goal to strive for, but not at the expense of cowering in terror until we answer every unanswered question. I am damn glad that my ancestors toiled through the industrial revolution, and I imagine that my grandchildren will be thankful that I toiled through my generation in a world that they will undoubtedly look back as ugly and messy. This is human progress.
Yay to global warming, ice cap melting, deforestation, and enviromental pollution. Love that headlong rush.
This coming from a person who survive child birth and is busy slamming his fingers away on a computer hooked into a power grid and connected by a world wide communications system. Dude, this "head long rush" is the only reason why you are alive. Chances are that without that merry old industrial revolution you wouldn't have even existed because your ancestors would be dead. Even if you still managed to come into existence, you would face the grim challenge of getting past the first 5 years of your life - which for the non-industrialized is a rather grim prospect. To top it all of, even if you did manage to get as far as you have, you sure as shit would not be talking about it on the Internet.
With the "headlong rush" comes the world you have. Sure, this world has problems, but they are petty and small compared to the problems they solved. More humans are alive then ever before not because the world is a harsher place to live, but because it is a place that is easier to live.
I am not advocating burning down the rain forest or seeing how much CO2 we can dump into the air, but a 'headlong rush' towards whatever the hell it is we are rushing towards is what makes us human. If that isn't satisfactory enough, then at the very least this "headlong rush" is the reason the vast majority of us are even in existence. I personally am damn merry that I was squirted out into a world with a doctor armed with modern medicine to make sure I got to the ripe old age I am today.
You are right in that Saddam was holding back the ethnic violence with overwhelming brutality, but that is done and over with now. He is gone the Shiites will never let him come back. The obvious problem now is that the US is all that is holding back an all out civil war. Sure, things are ugly now, but what happens when there is no forces available to put a lid on out and out ethnic armies marching down the road taking their time to murder every *fill_in_your_favorite_ethnicity_here*?
Pulling out might be the right thing to do; hell it might be the only thing to do, but as Americans we need to realize what we are condemning these people to. We already set up the conditions for the horrific blood letting we see today, and we are about to open the doors to a Rwanda style genocide. How are we going to feel if Baghdad becomes an open battle ground? How are we going to feel when entire towns are wiped out by ethnic violence? What happens when Iraqi military regulars enter Sunni towns and proceed to kill every single male of military age?
We are about to make this blood bath a lot worse. Sure, we won't be in the middle of it anymore, but we will still be completely responsible for it. Further, no one else is going to pick up this mess. The UN won't touch Iraq with a 10,000 mile long pole. The Arab League is completely impotent. No one is coming to save these people from themselves. The violence is going to end someday, but only because there is a limit to how much killing you can accomplish before one side simply picks up what little the have left and flee.
I am not a fan of American laws, but realize that while Germans might have half the accidents, I would bet anything that Americans easily drive twice as much as Germans per capita. Not only do Americans have on average longer commutes, but they are also far less likely to use public transportation. Hence, I would not read too deeply into accident statistics unless they are done per mile traveled, NOT per capita.
Launching ANYTHING into space space is stupidly expensive. Launching something into fast enough to escape earths gravity is hard and very expensive fuel wise. Launching a payload is even harder and more expensive. Further, the 'pain bomb' method is hardly an exact science and sure as shit will not have city precision. Even if someone really felt like blowing the money it takes to launch something like that into space, it sure as hell would not be a stealthy maneuver. The nuclear armed nations of the world (with the exception of the new members to the club) have systems for detecting launches. Everyone would know if someone fired something out of Earth's orbit.
Seriously, if you want to wipe out a city at 1/100 of the cost and half the time, just do it the old fashion way and bomb it into dust.
If you want to destroy a city, just carpet bomb it. Blowing up cities is easy. The point is that any nation that has the ability to move an asteroid (read that as the US, the US, and the US) already has the ability to wipe out cities at will. At the stupidly insane cost of moving an asteroid, you might as well just build a few thousand cruise missiles and level the city that way. The only use moving asteroids has is for mining purposes and throwing at planets in an effort to drop some water on it (and even then, you probably want to use a comet).
Sure, it will make ethanol cheaper, but it will also make oil cheaper. Further, ethanol production will still rely on synthetic fertilizer that comes from (you guessed it!) oil. Cheap energy is as likely to help oil production as anything else. If "big oil" is going to flip its shit over anything, it wont be cheaper energy. It will be over cheap PORTABLE energy storage device. Unless you can stuff one of these fusion reactors into a car, big oil really doesn't care. If anything, they are rooting them on in the hopes that will drive down their production costs.
Oil is NOT in competition with fusion, fission, or any other method of making electricity. The VAST majority of oil goes to fueling cars or making oil products. Oil is only used as a backup power source. Oil's advantage is portability and energy density, not its cost or energy producing potential. You could magically make free energy and it would hardly dent oil profits. Battery technology that could allow a car to either store vastly more electrical energy or that could recharge in a timely manner would be a treat to oil. Cheaper and cleaner energy doesn't harm oil companies. PORTABLE energy is their competition. Even with portable energy alternatives they would still have a substantial market in petrol products.
If anything, cheaper energy might HELP oil companies. The oil refining process is fairly energy intensive. If energy was cheaper the cost to refine oil would be cheaper and they could squeeze a little more profit out of the oil they have.
Cheap energy isn't in competition with oil. We already have energy that is far cheaper then oil. The issue is portability. Oil companies fear better battery technology a hell of a lot more then they fear cheap and green energy.
Yes, the oil companies will use their corporate death squads to make this disappear. I would guess that someone has fucked up their energy balance and no evil corporate death squads will need to be deployed. If it is real, I imagine the 3v1L corporations will fight this off roughly as well as the horse buggy makers fought off the car.
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That is not quite true. Quantum mechanics technically still holds at the macroscopic level. However, Newtonian physics is an "approximation" that is incredibly good in intermediate scales (i.e. not relativistic or quantum).
Of course the universe isn't truly Newtonian. That said, Newtonian is how we perceive it in our day to day lives. Sure, there are electrons and atoms bouncing all around me, but the only thing I see is a flat desk with gravity pointed straight down.
I can guarantee you that the dog is not doing newtonian physics in his head; neither is he hardwired to do it that way. If you throw a ball at a puppy, he will not be able to catch it right away. Just like a little kid can't. We aren't hardwired to "think Newtonian." As it is, Newtonian physics are a representation of the world we live in, not the world itself.
Do you truly and honestly believe that in the millions of years of evolution in a world that looks like a teenagers physic books opening lessons that nothing has been hardwired to deal with a Newtonian outlook on the world?
Take a gazelle. Drop it out of its mothers womb, and watch as within an hour it is performing a balancing act in modern robots struggle to mimic. This stuff is hardwired in.
Take a baby. Try and teach it calculus. Spend every single day trying to teach it calculus, and see how successful you are. The baby is going to find this utterly impossible because calculus is something we have absolutely zero evolutionary adaptation for. When we learn calculus, we learn it through blood, sweat, and tears. Now take a baby and try and teach it English. Spend every single day talking to the baby and trying to teach it English. You will probably take the better part of year before you start to see any success. It will probably take the child until he is in high school before the child has mastered the language. Language comes quicker then math because we have entire centers of the brain that have been devoted to learning it. It is still a new evolutionary adaptation on the grand scheme of things, but there has been some time for it to get a foothold in our brains.
Now, try and teach a baby how a Newtonian world works. The baby is going to understand that something coming towards its face is going to hit, that objects are solid, and that things fall in parabolas long before it even has the beginnings of muscle control do anything about it. A baby will start making sense out of the photons bouncing around in a deeply intuitive way almost instantly.
A young child is significantly faster and more accurate then Ph.D. in physics can ever be without the aid of a computer when trying to predict a trajectory or what happens when an object is struck. This stuff is so hardwired into us that we don't even think about it. Hell, we CAN'T think about it because it is so hardwired into us. Acting in a Newtonian world comes easier then breathing.
However, if you have never experienced something (even Newtonian physics), then you have no intuition about it because it is not something hardwired. Examples: on this very site a while back, there was a heated discussion about what would happen if there were a a tunnel bored completely through the Earth and you fell it in. What would happen? People disagreed. Also, Total Internal Reflection.
Of course we don't have an intuitive understanding of what happens when gravity is doing anything other then pulling us down or any we are bouncing things through a fiber optic cable. Why in the hell would any species evolve to understand such things? When I say that we understand Newtonian physics, I don't mean every single rule and law that falls under "Newtonian physics". I mean that we perceive the world like the first few chapters of a high school physics book.
Further, the intuitive jump for understanding complex but still Newtonian things is a small jump compared to trying understand quantum mechanics or general relativity. After a
The human mind is the product of millions of years of evolution designed to think in a Newtonian way. You are hardwired to think Newtonian. This hardware does very deep and is a fundamental piece of your core persona. Consider for a moment that if you toss a ball, a dog can jump up in the air and snatch it. This gives you an idea of how hardwired we are to think in Newtonian terms. This is an an ancient way of thinking that goes back well before we were primates, much less full blown humans.
Anyone can tell you what happens when you hit one object against another or toss one object against gravity at a certain angle. Even small children know roughly where a baseball is going to end up the second you release it from a throw despite the fact that the real calculation would take someone a few minutes to make. With quantum mechanics, you are never going to have that child like grasp of what happens when two atoms start interacting.
While we do make visual models to understand quantum mechanics, they really are only a crude ways to give our poor mammalian brain some straws to grasp at. We can visualize orbitals to some extent, but anything deeper then that kicks human intuition which has been developed to deal with a Newtonian world in the balls. You really can only truly 'understand' quantum mechanics and general relativity with math. And not just simple math, but ugly math that kids go to college for years to understand.
Without the hardwired machinery to give us answers like what we have for Newtonian physics, there is no ability to develop and "intuition" for quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is ugly math combined with concepts that have no Newtonian world analogy. Let the kids know that this stuff exists, but keep them in their happy Newtonian world where their hardwired physics engines can pick up the slack. Save quantum mechanics for after they know calculus.
No, nothing has to be "containing" it. Think of it like walking on the surface of the Earth. If you look in either direction you can see pretty far and you might imagine that the Earth goes on forever. If you start walking, you will walk all the way around the Earth and end up exactly where you started. The Earth simply curves back on itself. You could walk around the Earth forever and never reach a boundary where Earth ends, but the Earth itself is still finite.
As to what this soccer ball universe could floating in, well, the question itself is probably the largest issue. We don't know the answer, but the it could very well be that there is no "outside of the soccer ball". The universe could be all that there is. There could be no "beyond" the universe or "outside" of the universe. It is hard concept to visualize, but that is pretty much true of any concept that outside of the traditional Newtonian world.
Once you leave the safe world of Newtonian physics you need to develop a superhuman ability to try and NOT visualize the universe on the grand scale of the quantum scale. Human intuition and visualizations is was built for Newtons world. Once you leave that world, it breaks down and fails to be much help.
The court system over rides the silliest and archaic laws for sure. The issue is that not all of these are archaic, and not all of them are unenforced. You really can't own a swastika in France of Germany. If you write a book arguing that the holocaust didn't happen in Germany, you WILL go to jail. The EU right now IS debating more stringent regulations on video game development and sales.
This silly zeal where video game offices get raided stem from an overall lack of protection from free speech. I am not saying that Europe is an anti-liberal non-free speech zone. I am saying that many places in Europe, Germany included, there is no higher overarching imperative to protect free speech against the whims of the masses and the politicians.
The US is has stupid ass politicians, old people terrified of youngsters, and parents who want the state to raise their kids for them. The difference is that nothing short of a political revolution can wipe away free speech due to fact that it takes an overwhelming super majority to strip away that right. So, when our stupid politicians try and pass laws censoring video games, the law is struck by the courts before it even goes into effect.
Free speech needs to be defended, even when it is unpopular to do so. Holocaust deniers are not magically converted into good citizens by the state threatening to jail them for their beliefs. If anything, it just feeds an atmosphere of cover up, repression, and alienation. History isn't an excuses for weakening free speech and letting it suffer at the whims of the fickle public and stupid politicizations. Europe isn't the only place with history. The US has suffered through multiple terrible Indian genocides that make the Jewish holocausts look like pocket change. The US has suffered a terrible civil war that perhaps while not reaching the same levels of European genocide, certainly managed to achieve the same level of social breakdown. Despite this, free speech and stood protected. Imprisoning a denier or a video game maker in the US is utterly unthinkable, not matter how badly they piss the public off.
The only thing anti-hate speech laws manages to do is make debate illegal and drives any sort of discussion of the topic underground. Instead of being able to confront the racism head and exposing it is a crock of shit in the open, you pave the way for those ideas to go underground where they can't be confronted out in the open. People who are disposed to believe such racist non-sense are not magically converted to good citizens when they see police breaking down doors and throwing people in jail. When a government needs to use violence to suppress an idea, people are going to question what exactly it is about that idea that the government fears so much.
The holocaust deniers are a perfect example of this foolishness. Making it illegal to deny the holocaust just means that these ass holes can't stand up in public and take their licks. I would rather see this shit get sorted out in the open where people can respond, rather then have little underground groups that stew in their hate (rightfully) convinced that the government is out to get them.
Further, you keep trying to argue that you can some how have "free speech" while at the same time making "hate speech" illegal. Free speech means free speech. You are damn right that anti-hate speech laws are anti-free speech laws. If you can't express an idea, no matter how repugnant, then it isn't free speech. What exactly do you think the point of free speech is in the first place? To protect the common consensus as to what is and is not acceptable to talk about? The point of free speech is to protect all speech, even the speech that the vast majority loathes.
If you need a reason as to why free speech should be protected in its entirety, simply RTFA. A form of speech that is considered socially deviant by the majority of Germans just had a a few dozen police is riot gear get raided. If the majority consider this form of speech to be socially unacceptable. Does that mean that the raid was a-okay? This isn't an abstract slippery slope argument. Fucking police stormed a video game companies office.
The US might have a stupidly high incarceration rate due to our stupid prohibition laws, but you can bet your ass that we don't have police in SWAT gear kicking in the doors of video game companies for making games that might be considered too violent by the moral majority. Free speech needs uncompromising protection for this very reason.
"Liberal" as in a democrat has absolutely no meaning. It is a mish-mash of ideas with no coherent ideological basis. The same goes with "conservative" as in Republican. A "liberal" democrat can be in favor of censoring violent video games and still be called a "liberal". A "conservative" republican can advocate an expansionist military policy.
How about we stop mangling words? If you want to talk about democrats, call them democrats. If you want to talk about republicans, call them republicans. Use the word "liberal" and "conservative" where it actually makes sense. If someone is socially liberal, that has an absolutely meaning that isn't mangled into the mish-mash "liberal" as in democrat means. While the brain dead voting American public might have their heads explode when they hear the words "socially liberal", the dictionary doesn't get confused.
I swear, there has to be a Godwin's law joke in here somewhere. I mean come on. A fucking German riot squad raiding computer geeks busy making video games. How fascistic could you possibly get?
The EU has a problem. I know that the EU is all scared from World War II and what not, but they need to get over it. Violently repressing anything that might encourage violence really is not an effective method of keeping the fascist away. Further, this isn't just a problem with one little backward German providence. Many European nations have anti-free speech laws preventing various forms of 'blasphemy', racism, and ideology. This isn't an effective way to confront these forces.
The silly talk in Germany and the EU about more stringent rules against video games is going to accomplish only one thing; giving the US more German programmers and designers. Didn't Germany learn a lesson about the stupidity of driving perfectly intelligent people to the US during World War II? The Americans will happily take them in, make some product that can't be made in Germany due to fears of this Gestapo bull shit, and make a buck off of it.
This raid should be a cry for MORE free speech laws to prevent backwards providence from pulling this bullshit, not a cry to clamp down and regulate speech further. Is Germany, with its negative population growth, TRYING to drive out the few remaining young and technically minded people they have left?
People are mangling Republican and conservative, socially liberal and economically liberal, and "liberal" is in "democrats" and liberal is in classical sense of liberalism.
Letting the blind hunt, while a fucking stupid idea, would be a form of INCREASED social liberty. It would allow one more non-violent behavior (err, providing the blind guy doesn't shoot anyone) to be allowed in society. I am not saying that Texas is the most socially conservative state in the Union by any stretch, but that are nowhere near the worse offender. They sure a shit don't have fucking swat teams raiding the plentiful video game offices in Austin.
Uh, Texas is the hub of the video game industry in the US. Texas is pretty damn socially liberal. I think a better comparison is something more like Alabama.
The real tragedy is that German federal law doesn't offer up any support to such a blatant violation of free speech. Then again, German concept of 'free speech' is a lot shakier then the American version. World War II really left the poor bastards a little gun shy when it comes to anything that kinda-sorta-might imply violence.
I am totally serious. My blog was SUED BY MICRO$OFT because I made some software that was so much more awesome then theirs. I even have the letters they sent me to prove it!!11!!! Now, if the Slashdot editors will kindly accept my claim without any sort of validation and post me on a Slashdot front page...
Seriously. Show an ounce of journalistic integrity and don't give a podium to utterly baseless claims. He doesn't even say what company is suing him so we can't even bother to ask that company if this is real. Any idiot could have made this up for the singular purpose of driving up hits. I am not saying that the guy is liar (he very well could be telling the truth), just he shouldn't get a free stage to advertise until there is at least the semblance of a claim that can be fact checked.
Windows is not 'locked in' in the same way iTunes/iPod is. My windows computer wasn't made by Microsoft and most of the software on it is not made by Microsoft. An iPod on the other hand is incompatible with most other legal services outside of iTunes, and iTunes files are incompatible with everything outside of an iPod. There business models are entirely different from one another.
Vendor Lock: Why would Apple want to make it easy for you to use their product on another device?
Uh, of course they don't want to make it easy. I wasn't questioning the logic Apple is using. I was questioning if perhaps consumers are seeing the new piles of MP3 players coming out and wondering if they really want to be locked into a single vendor.
Pricing scheme: the failure of Napster 2.0 and the lacking business of Rhapsody show, subscription services are not the preferred method of getting music online.
I bet you think the fact that where there are more black people there is more crime proves that skin pigment makes you more likely to be a criminal too.
Rhapsody and Napster sales being less then iTunes has nothing to do with their pricing models. They offer the exact same pricing model as iTunes IN ADDITION TO alternative pricing models. I doubt many consumers are offended by being the given the option of both an iTunes pricing scheme and other pricing schemes. Far more likely, the lack-luster sales of Napster and Rhapsody have to do with the fact that Apple owns 80% of the MP3 market and those two vendors can't sell to Apple users.
No, I am not a real employee and yes I do like the subscription services.
Let me explain it real quickly why I like subscription services. Right now, I have 3488 tracks from my subscription service on my HD. That is 15.6 GB of music. That would cost me $3488 on iTunes. I have had the service for 10 months and have spent only $150.
As I said before, subscription isn't for everyone. I personally like to explore music. I don't care about the 'collecting' piece of it. I like to fire up Rhapsody, download a 3 or 4 albums on a whim because I heard one song or it was recommended, and then listen to them at my leisure. The Ramones example is a good one for me. One day I felt like listening to the Ramones, downloaded everything that I could, listened to it for a couple of weeks, then got bored and moved onto something new without looking back. I probably have not listened to any Ramones that I have downloaded in a few months and have been off merrily downloading like a nut jazz and old school Jamaican ska. That is how I prefer to explore music. I like to work on a whim, not bothering to waste time 'researching' a band beforehand, and simply listen and judge them based upon a first hand experience. I don't have any desire to "collect" music simply because, as with my Ramones collection, I am likely to not want to listen to it in a year. The stuff I listened to 5 years ago when I broke up with an ex makes me sick with disgust now. I still have those CDs somewhere, but what good do that do me if I don't listen to them?
I agree that a subscription style makes no sense for some people. If given unlimited downloads you still download less then $15 / month worth of music, of course you should not bother with a subscription service. If on the other hand you average the $300 a month that I do and you are not wed to a single style or taste in music that is consistent, the a subscription service makes perfect sense. Clearly, it isn't for everyone. On the other hand, it is pretty clear that it absolutely works great for some people.
I simply like the option to have a subscription service. No one is twisting your arm to use it. In Rhapsody you can pay the same price as iTunes and rip and backup just like iTunes. The difference is that with Rhapsody I at least have the option of a subscription service.
I wont speculate on iTunes sales as the method the data was collected was sketchy. I will say that there are three reasons I see why their sales might be dropping other then just seasonal variation.
.AAC collection at 1$ a hit.
Vendor Lock / DRM:
Why on earth would I pay hard earned money for a music format that locks me into a single vendor? iPods are spiffy and all, but your music collection becomes junk if you change to a non-Apple MP3 player. Yes, there are ways around this, but none of them are simple and easy lossless conversions. People are starting to see new MP3 players come out to compete with the iPod. Perhaps they are taking a second look at their music collections and asking if they want to be tied at the hip to Apple?
Pricing Scheme:
Other online music services offer alternative pricing schemes that might be eating into Apple's business. Rhapsody has an 'all you can eat' service for $15 / month. The music dies if you stop paying, but until then you get to pick from millions of song for the price of one over priced CD a month. For people who want to explore lots of music cheaply and don't feel an overwhelming urge to collect and horde music, this is a steal. iTunes offers nothing to 'explorers' who don't want to break the bank. Download every song written by the Ramones on a whim with Rhapsody and you pay the same subscription fee you always pay and think nothing of it. Do the same on iTunes and you are out $150 and just made a major purchase. iTune's pricing plan works for some, but not all. Their inflexibility to alternative pricing models might be costing them people that are looking for something other then a
The Long Tail:
I would be utterly not surprised to learn that online shoppers are go for back order items rather then Top 40 songs then 'normal' music consumers. If this is the case, then iTunes has a problem. Online shoppers are probably consuming back order items faster then new back order items (that people actually want) are created. If I decide that I just love 1990's Ska, at some point I am going to download all of the good 90's ska that there is. Top 40 is not going to make any new songs to replace this, so I will simply stop downloading. Consumers might be 'filling up' on the back order songs that they wanted and not finding anything new to continue consuming.
If a company cares about customer service, they will hire (for their United States customers) support staff that can properly service someone who speaks the US variety of English. It's hard enough convincing Time Warner representatives located just a few miles from here that the problem is on their end. I'd cancel their service if I had to deal with a language barrier too. I guess this customer cares.
While there is some danger is using an Indian call center, it isn't as bad as people make it out to be. It is like out sourcing anywhere. There are some shitty operations that literally pull people off the street and have them babble in thickly Indian accented English that is utterly incomprehensible to your average American. There are also plenty of institution that use people who speak perfectly good English and can tone down their accent to be perfectly understandable to your average American.
I just had experience with just such a call center. I had to call the same damn company three times, and each time got an Indian call center. They were polite, well spoken, and while I could detect a slight accent, it was no harder to understand then if it had been an Alabama call center. Not withstanding the constant fuck-ups of the company unrelated to the call center, their service was fine.
The point isn't to make you want a product. They just want you to recognize the product. The simple recognition of a product adds credibility. Take Esurance. I bet you have seen their irritating ads. I bet if you were looking for car insurance on the Internet you would be weary of a company you have never heard of. On the other hand, I bet you would at least believe that Esurance is not a sketchy fly by night operation. This is all the advertisers want out of you.
They want you to believe that their product is trust worthy, and this is accomplished by giving it name recognition. People will consider buying an iPod because they can't spit without running into one. They are less likely to buy a Creative Zen despite the fact that it might be a much better product for them simply because they have never heard the name. True, good consumer research can trump advertising, but not every consumer decision is well informed. Even the most ardent consumer researchers (and most people are not) make arbitrary decisions on what to consume all the time.
It takes a real force of will to always research your decisions or, in the absence of research, to simply work off of price. Most consumer don't do this; hence why we have advertising.
Good for you. No one is saying that there should be no technology, just that there should be some thought. What is burning all this coal doing? What is going to happen if we keep hunting Dodos? Should I drive to work, or walk to the bus and lose some weight? Also, I don't think humans were as weak in nature as you portray them.
It is easy to smugly say that we shouldn't ever burn coal... all the while you burn your merry amount of coal in electrical costs and enjoy the fruits of an industrial revolution that was powered by coal. If we had never used coal we sure as shit would have never developed any 'green' technologies to begin with. I am not saying we need to go out and burn down the rain forest to make a parking lot, but that we should realize that the path towards technological progress is messy. There was never a "clean" solution around the industrial revolution other then not having it. I don't know about you, but I am damn glad that my ancestors toiled through the industrial revolution when they did instead of pausing to really think it over.
Without the messy things we have done in the past and continue to do today we wouldn't even be having this conversation on computers. Hell, in all likelihood we wouldn't even be alive. Striving towards a greener society is a noble goal to strive for, but not at the expense of cowering in terror until we answer every unanswered question. I am damn glad that my ancestors toiled through the industrial revolution, and I imagine that my grandchildren will be thankful that I toiled through my generation in a world that they will undoubtedly look back as ugly and messy. This is human progress.
Yay to global warming, ice cap melting, deforestation, and enviromental pollution. Love that headlong rush.
This coming from a person who survive child birth and is busy slamming his fingers away on a computer hooked into a power grid and connected by a world wide communications system. Dude, this "head long rush" is the only reason why you are alive. Chances are that without that merry old industrial revolution you wouldn't have even existed because your ancestors would be dead. Even if you still managed to come into existence, you would face the grim challenge of getting past the first 5 years of your life - which for the non-industrialized is a rather grim prospect. To top it all of, even if you did manage to get as far as you have, you sure as shit would not be talking about it on the Internet.
With the "headlong rush" comes the world you have. Sure, this world has problems, but they are petty and small compared to the problems they solved. More humans are alive then ever before not because the world is a harsher place to live, but because it is a place that is easier to live.
I am not advocating burning down the rain forest or seeing how much CO2 we can dump into the air, but a 'headlong rush' towards whatever the hell it is we are rushing towards is what makes us human. If that isn't satisfactory enough, then at the very least this "headlong rush" is the reason the vast majority of us are even in existence. I personally am damn merry that I was squirted out into a world with a doctor armed with modern medicine to make sure I got to the ripe old age I am today.
You are right in that Saddam was holding back the ethnic violence with overwhelming brutality, but that is done and over with now. He is gone the Shiites will never let him come back. The obvious problem now is that the US is all that is holding back an all out civil war. Sure, things are ugly now, but what happens when there is no forces available to put a lid on out and out ethnic armies marching down the road taking their time to murder every *fill_in_your_favorite_ethnicity_here*?
Pulling out might be the right thing to do; hell it might be the only thing to do, but as Americans we need to realize what we are condemning these people to. We already set up the conditions for the horrific blood letting we see today, and we are about to open the doors to a Rwanda style genocide. How are we going to feel if Baghdad becomes an open battle ground? How are we going to feel when entire towns are wiped out by ethnic violence? What happens when Iraqi military regulars enter Sunni towns and proceed to kill every single male of military age?
We are about to make this blood bath a lot worse. Sure, we won't be in the middle of it anymore, but we will still be completely responsible for it. Further, no one else is going to pick up this mess. The UN won't touch Iraq with a 10,000 mile long pole. The Arab League is completely impotent. No one is coming to save these people from themselves. The violence is going to end someday, but only because there is a limit to how much killing you can accomplish before one side simply picks up what little the have left and flee.
I am not a fan of American laws, but realize that while Germans might have half the accidents, I would bet anything that Americans easily drive twice as much as Germans per capita. Not only do Americans have on average longer commutes, but they are also far less likely to use public transportation. Hence, I would not read too deeply into accident statistics unless they are done per mile traveled, NOT per capita.
Launching ANYTHING into space space is stupidly expensive. Launching something into fast enough to escape earths gravity is hard and very expensive fuel wise. Launching a payload is even harder and more expensive. Further, the 'pain bomb' method is hardly an exact science and sure as shit will not have city precision. Even if someone really felt like blowing the money it takes to launch something like that into space, it sure as hell would not be a stealthy maneuver. The nuclear armed nations of the world (with the exception of the new members to the club) have systems for detecting launches. Everyone would know if someone fired something out of Earth's orbit.
Seriously, if you want to wipe out a city at 1/100 of the cost and half the time, just do it the old fashion way and bomb it into dust.
If you want to destroy a city, just carpet bomb it. Blowing up cities is easy. The point is that any nation that has the ability to move an asteroid (read that as the US, the US, and the US) already has the ability to wipe out cities at will. At the stupidly insane cost of moving an asteroid, you might as well just build a few thousand cruise missiles and level the city that way. The only use moving asteroids has is for mining purposes and throwing at planets in an effort to drop some water on it (and even then, you probably want to use a comet).
Sure, it will make ethanol cheaper, but it will also make oil cheaper. Further, ethanol production will still rely on synthetic fertilizer that comes from (you guessed it!) oil. Cheap energy is as likely to help oil production as anything else. If "big oil" is going to flip its shit over anything, it wont be cheaper energy. It will be over cheap PORTABLE energy storage device. Unless you can stuff one of these fusion reactors into a car, big oil really doesn't care. If anything, they are rooting them on in the hopes that will drive down their production costs.
Oil is NOT in competition with fusion, fission, or any other method of making electricity. The VAST majority of oil goes to fueling cars or making oil products. Oil is only used as a backup power source. Oil's advantage is portability and energy density, not its cost or energy producing potential. You could magically make free energy and it would hardly dent oil profits. Battery technology that could allow a car to either store vastly more electrical energy or that could recharge in a timely manner would be a treat to oil. Cheaper and cleaner energy doesn't harm oil companies. PORTABLE energy is their competition. Even with portable energy alternatives they would still have a substantial market in petrol products.
If anything, cheaper energy might HELP oil companies. The oil refining process is fairly energy intensive. If energy was cheaper the cost to refine oil would be cheaper and they could squeeze a little more profit out of the oil they have.
Cheap energy isn't in competition with oil. We already have energy that is far cheaper then oil. The issue is portability. Oil companies fear better battery technology a hell of a lot more then they fear cheap and green energy.
Yes, the oil companies will use their corporate death squads to make this disappear. I would guess that someone has fucked up their energy balance and no evil corporate death squads will need to be deployed. If it is real, I imagine the 3v1L corporations will fight this off roughly as well as the horse buggy makers fought off the car.