As you say, the big advantage to having US citizenship is if they go into technology and want to work in Silicon Valley. No worries about green cards, H1B, etc., just move there and go to work.

The big disadvantage is taxes. But boy, what a disadvantage. It's like the US is trying to build a Berlin Wall around the USA to keep people in. Makes you wonder what our leaders know that we don't know about where our country is going.

Regarding renouncing citizenship, that isn't as difficult or expensive as described above, but if not done right you can be arrested for tax evasion if you ever set foot on US soil again -- even if just transiting to another country, such as flying from Paris to Toronto (which has a stopover in New York City). Ask Maher Arar about that one...

You seriously need to take off those rose-tinted glasses.

Or maybe just read a US news website once in a while. The US is a country where a) justice is applied very unequally, depending on your race (ref: the recent analysis of Ferguson, Missouri); b) where there are all sorts of political battles raging right now over the number of illegal immigrants living in the US (estimated in 2008 as 12 million people; more than the entire population of Sweden! The basis is often about how the President isn't doing enough to "protect the border"), and has the highest murder rate of any of the western, industrialized nations (by quite a bit -- you're nearly 7 times more likely to be murdered in the US than in Sweden, for example).

There are a lot of things to laud the United States over -- but the ones you specifically picked aren't them. Unless you were going for sarcasm, in which case "whoosh!" to me.

Yaz

You may have noticed I don't care how it got there, only why they are acting now the way they are.

Many companies have this immune system response that if something happens that shouldn't have, they will at the same time punish someone internally, and defend themselves externally claiming everything is proper.

If you don't sign before the child reaches 18, the child is not considered an American citizen.

So I read this as meaning you have 18 years for such a decision to be made? In that case, don't do it now, but let them make their own minds up when they're (hopefully) intelligent teenagers who can understand the implications and how they might want to live their adult lives (such as if this might include moving to the US). Unless you plan on returning to the US or splitting up with the mother and want custody, there are zero benefits for them to be US citizens now so either let them decide or make the decision at a time when it makes sense.

That's not what I'm talking about, because it lacks the "distribution" part. What I'm talking about is what level of detachment is necessary to say that these bits of software depend on each other, but they're not derivative of each other. And thus the GPL wouldn't apply, even if you distribute them together.

Haven't you heard that NFC is now the hip, cool thing? That is so last year.

Headline says one (Antarctic) while the summary says the other (Arctic). It's like swapping the Tropic of Cancer with the Tropic of Capricorn....

Yep: You can be certain the NSA already has a copy of one of these.

The Democratic nutjobs are minor back-benchers. The Republican nutjobs chair committees. Both the House and Senate environmental committees are chaired by people who have publicly said that climate change is a hoax by scientists (Bridenstine and Inhofe).

Somewhere else, maybe... at the border crossing they have near infinite power to mess with you by insisting on an extended identity, security and luggage check and usually to detain you for a short while too for almost no pretext at all. In fact your "defective phone" is now a possible terrorist bomb, let's just put you in a holding cell until we can determine it's not.

Actually the ugliest part of the GPL which is clear as ink in law is what - if anything - makes inter-module communication derivative. The theory of derivative works mainly involve sections or elements reappearing in the derivative, like a composite made from a photo. It doesn't cover interfaces where independently developed code calls each other at all. If I wrap a GPL library into a web service, is calling it derivative? If the answer is yes, the GPL is extremely viral. If the answer is no, the GPL is in big trouble. Which is why you never get a straight answer.

This directly links in with the "mere aggregation" clause, if you can for example distribute a distro that has an application that sends mail and a mail server without those being derivative, can you also distribute proprietary software and this web service? Your software needs it, this software happens to provide it but it could in theory be provided by a different implementation. I'm sure Stallman says no, but it's entirely unclear to me if a judge would agree.

the GPL is largely untested in court.

No it isn't. It's been tested at the federal level.

Daniel Wallace tried to get the GPL declared invalid through stretching of legal concepts, and was thusly shown how stupid /that/ is.

Wallace v. International Business Machines Corp.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Wallace v. International Business Machines Corp. et al., 467 F.3d 1104 (7th Cir. 2006), was a significant case in the development of free software. The case decided, at the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, that in United States law the GNU General Public License (GPL) did not contravene federal antitrust laws. Daniel Wallace, a United States citizen, sued the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for price fixing. In a later lawsuit, he unsuccessfully sued IBM, Novell, and Red Hat. Wallace claimed that free Linux prevented him from making a profit from selling his own operating system.[1]

And this quote from the decision shows that the courts completely understand the values behind the GPL and copyleft.

From the 7'th Circuit decision of the Wallace vs. IBM appeal:

http://www.internetlibrary.com...
  People may make and distribute derivative works if and only if they come under the same license terms as the original work. Thus the GPL propagates from user to user and revision to revision: neither the original author, nor any creator of a revised or improved version, may charge for the software or allow any successor to charge. Copyright law, usually the basis of limiting reproduction in order to collect a fee, ensures that open-source software remains free: any attempt to sell a derivative work will violate the copyright laws, even if the improver has not accepted the GPL. The Free Software Foundation calls the result âoecopyleft.â

And notice the subsequent utter silence from Darl and the lawyers at SCO, who were jumping up and down about the so-called unconstitutionality of the GPL. Among other things.

The validity of the GPL is now settled law.

but any element of it that is reasonably subject to interpretation can be interpreted any way you like

This is why you aren't a lawyer.

--
BMO - not a lawyer, but someone who doesn't agree with people who think that lawyers perform magic. They don't.

And it's silly. You can give an 18yo (around here) that just got his license a Ferrari, that's legal. You can give him a 3500 kg van + 750 kg trailer, that's legal. Of course you shouldn't drive a car you can't handle, but learning it on your own would be no worse than a lot of the other "self-learning" on the road.

They are taking a calculated risk knowing that very few GPL lawsuits actually went to court. They know it takes money to fight a legal battle and hope the opposing side doesn't have it, or will run out of it before reaching a final verdict. And finally, from the fact that they've been at this since 2012 - they probably think that it's a fairly cost-efficient way to buy more time and make business.