I honestly can't understand why it's so much harder to charge a phone and a watch every night than it is to charge a phone alone.

Would it be any easier to understand if I said that I don't generally ever take my watch off? Plus, half of the time, I will forget to charge my phone at night anyways... Although the battery will usually last long enough that I can recharge it when I get to work in the morning. Since I do not really need my cell phone to be portable while I am working at my desk, this is not an issue. It would be a royal pain in the ass to have to plug in my watch too, however.... because then I can't wear my watch during the day, when I actually *USE* it.... either that, or I have to spend the day being tethered by the wrist to a cable that is charging my phone.

If matters of a particular substance is important enough to a state that it wants to sue an adjacent one simply because it has looser restrictions on that substance, then it seems to me that the only alternative is to either tighten borders between those states, which would completely change what the United States actually is, as you pointed out, or else the substance needs to be regulated federally, and enforced against states that don't adhere to those regulations. As you said, however, that would remove a significant power of statehood. But threatening to sue an adjoining state simply because it has different practices which happen to spill over simply as a result of the people commuting or traveling between them is just as much of a threat against that same power of statehood as federal regulation would be.

Actually, what they need to do is mandate all substances at a federal level, rather than state level, because any difference in policies between adjoining states will always carry this problem, so there's nothing special about marijuana in this regard... unless, of course, they want to institute state border checks similar to what they already have in place between the US and Canada.

Well, it it makes any difference, I graduated from high school over 8 years before Georgia became independent of the USSR, so in retrospect, I don't think it's surprising that I wasn't taught about the country in school.

Anyways, I learned that it was a country upon hearing the aforementioned news of the athlete who died in the Olympics that year, and honestly, I was only able to tell it was a country from the context. Only the logical incongruity of mentioning a specific US state for an athlete was sufficient to make me recognize they must have been referring to a country that happened to have the same name as a US state that I *had* heard of.. My point being that I hadn't heard of it before then, I can empathize completely with someone else who might not have heard of it until some news article shows up which mentions it, and depending on the context in which the name is used, it may not be obvious what is being talked about. It is, of course, fairly clear here... and even if a person had not heard of the country before seeing this article, explicitly adding a clarification between it and the US state of the same name in the article is unnecessarily speaking down to the readers of the article, and does not belong there. At the most, it should be only a footnote.

The smart phone not only offers functionality not found in a regular cell phone, but it also offered capabilities not found anywhere else, while also still being in a pocket-sized form factor. The smart watch does nothing a smart phone cannot already do and with its battery life, unless you consider "it stays on your wrist" to be a significant advantage, and has a rather significant disadvantage over a modern digital watch when it comes to power consumption.

Why create new technologies that can replace old ones when all of the advantages of the new ones over the old are already offered by other existing technologies and the new technology offers a significant *DIS*advantage over what it would replace?

The entire point of having a battery in a watch is so that you don't have to worry about winding it every day,,, it's good for 3 years and then you replace the battery when it goes.

If I'm going to replace my watch, something that I've been using for years, and have only had to replace the battery twice since I got it, with something newer, then that newer thing should not create additional inconveniences that far outweigh anything it can do that a watch might not, particularly when there is nothing that it will do which a smart phone does not already do anyways.

Indeed... I had not considered that as a possibility. The USSR dissolved in late 1991, which was already more than 8 years after I had finished high school.

Can *YOU* name every country in the world, without looking at a map?

I do not consider myself to be US-centric nor uneducated, but prior to the incident at the Winter Olympics in 2010 where a luge athlete from Georgia was killed during a training run, and here in Vancouver, the host city for the Olympics that year, this incident was pretty major news. I had no idea previously that there was evidently a country that was also called Georgia, although I had certainly heard of the US state by the same name. I'm aware of the country now, obviously, and even learned where it was on a map, because I hadn't heard of it before then. My point being that based on my own personal experience, there can be some legitimate concern that not everyone who reads this may necessarily know immediately that the Georgia being referred to is a country, and not the state.

Although I'd still agree that talking down to your audience as if they may not already know this is probably bad form, because really, it's something that anyone can look up.

First some facts. I once looked this stuff up because when I was a kid, I was try8ing to figure out which nationality Santa Claus would be. It happens to be the case that the northernmost point on land in Greenland is 440 miles from the North Pole, the northernmost point on land in Canada is 472 miles from the North Pole, and the northernmost point on land in Russia is 493 miles from the North pole.

Canada and Russia are both independently sovereign, which I think gives their claims to the pole more credibility than Denmark's. However, Russia's claim over the territory is weaker, IMO, since the pole is actually on the North American continental shelf, not part of Eurasia at all. Also, for what it's worth, the northernmost populated settlement happens to be located in Canada.

However, national borders do not extend any further than about 14 miles into the ocean (basically, approximately the distance to the horizon as seen from a tall ship's crows nest) so in the end, I think none of the countries have any true claim over the territory in terms of their national jurisdiction.

Yes, it is all about copyright law.

But for what it's worth, the GPL doesn't even really relinquish any of the restrictions of copyright law either. Copyright law says that you need explicit permission from the copyright holder to copy a work or to create a derivative work of it. The GPL explicitly grants such permission to anyone who agrees to abide by the terms of the license. If you don't agree to abide by the terms (by failing to abide by them), then the terms of the license are simply not applicable to you, and you have not received permission to copy the work or create a derivative work in the first place.

Simple.

From the above post, to which I responded.... (emphasis mine)

English is the standard language of business because a huge majority of the businesses...

I do not disagree with this assertion... I was only trying to point out is no "official" language for anything that is practiced worldwide... although there can easily be a standard one. The very definition of the adjective official means that it must be designated as such by some recognized authority, and there is no single recognized authority that governs how the entire world communicates, even if there are extremely widely recognized standards that are followed. A company can have its own official language for doing business, because it can be an authority for everyone who works in that company, but it cannot be an authority for how any other company does business. Companies communicate with other companies for business purposes based on *standard* practice, not because anyone ever made the mechanisms "official", because nobody ever did, and I was merely suggesting that the poster to whom I had responded above was conflating those two terms.

In a nutshell, "standard" != "official".

Exactly... *standard*... Not "official", which suggests an official organization sch as a government designating it as such.

Worse, on the surface it would appear to even be opposed to driving your kids to school on your way to work instead of forcing them to take a taxi or at least public transit.

Think of the children!

Yeah. I went there. :)