See other reply to grandparent.

Actually, the legal pretext is that the company that produced the copy in country A is not licensed to produce copies in country B, and due to this, person P cannot legally buy a copy in country A and bring it into country B.

Since companies are legal fictions and trivially formed, it's easy to limit what's legal to just the countries you want, by just producing companies and sublicensing.

My opinion is that anything that's legally duplicated and sold in a country that follows some reasonable international law (maybe the Berne convention) should be possible to import into any other country afterward, with no additional restrictions by location allowed. Alas, that's not the case today.

That's the same thing. Evolution is just inherited adaption, leading over major amounts of time to creation of major features. Each single step is very small, and every single step has to be adaptive

That's evolution of a major feature - as far as I know, nobody serious thinks that that happen over so few generations.

Natural selection and reproduction is the same thing as evolution. It's been that way since the term evolution was introduced for this concept by Charles Darwin in "The Origin of the Species".

If sunglasses reproduced and the children of sunglasses that were in the bright environment where dark, then yes. However, since they don't reproduce, it doesn't fit.

Actually, if the new fish were either unable or unwilling to breed with the fish without the adaptation then it would be speciation in progress.

Evolution is different from speciation. Speciation happen due to evolution, but evolution don't require speciation - any change of allele frequency due to natural selection (ie, any adaption) is an example of evolution. Speciation is certainly a fantastic facet of evolution, though.

France has 65 million inhabitants, New Jersey has 8 million. Then, even compared to size, France is culturally much more important than New Jersey.

It's a fairly uninteresting comparison. (Oh, and I can point out New Jersey on a map, and I'm not from the US.)

You're clearly classifying me as "obviously stupid", since my first thought was that "Hulu has finally managed to strike some kind of international deal" when I read "Hulu [something I've never heard of] now available to all". For somebody that's not particularly into what the details of Hulu/Hulu Plus/whatever (as Hulu hasn't been available where I've been located), this is a fairly obvious interpretation.

Eivind.

And if you step outside the small world that is comp.sci, and into the wider world that is actual use of computers, you'll find that it's not as clear in practice as in theory. If you step into linguistics, you'll find that "correct" is whatever will result in better communication.

Or if you step into the full world of comp sci instead of a corner of it, you'll find that even there it isn't quite clear.

"Operating system" is the full stack of stuff that's commonly between programs and the hardware. This includes the libraries and other executables used as APIs. This is not clearly defined, as what is an API is not clearly defined (especially not when dealing with Unix systems.)

"Kernel" is the part of the operating system that talks directly to the hardware. This is fairly clearly defined.

A bunch of people want to make "operating system" and "kernel" be the same thing. However, both in comp.sci and in practical use they're not the same.

The common definition is that what Linux users call a "distribution" is an operating system. The kernel is but a small part of an operating system, and you can swap that (as long as you keep the same syscall interface or similar) and still consider it the same operating system.

The FreeBSD userland with a Linux kernel would feel like FreeBSD, not like a GNU/Linux system.

Debian running with a FreeBSD kernel is still Debian, not FreeBSD.

Overall, the Linux ecosystem is fairly muddled WRT these definitions, though, because that family of operating systems are so similar and the core parts of them (gnu coreutils, libc, etc) are maintained separately from the distributions.

Eivind.

The ones I've watched have all been done using polarization technology.

'cause you're in the US.

In Ireland, where I live, it costs about $2.50 extra for a ticket for a 3D movie (assuming you've not bought the "all movies you can watch for a year" ticket), and you have to buy 3D glasses once at a cost of about $3, but can bring them later.

Eivind.

A bunch of us happen to like it. I preferentially select watching a movie in the theater when it's in 3D; otherwise, I'll more often wait until it is available on DVD.

Eivind.

I was attempting to make a linguistic joke, nothing more. I don't know enough US law to be sure about the limits; it seems like a treaty to me, but so does many of the other things treated as "executive agreement". And the overall process seems horribly corrupt :-(

BTW, saw your Firefly signature line - I also miss it. Nathan Fillion is doing a very good job in Castle, if you want to see one of the actors again.

Eivind.

"It" is clearly one word, not many, which by your own dichotomy means that it must be honest.

Eivind.

A friend of mine has a US citizenship by virtue of being born there, but he was born of Norwegian parents (sailors) and more or less immediately returned to Norway. The US has not participated in his education in any way. Now, he does speak English (because learning that is mandatory here), but if his parents had been from another country, he could easily have avoided learning it.

Also, this guy, who has no particular ties to the US (I don't think he's ever visited) gets to vote and could run for president. Another friend who's lived in the US for 20 years can't vote for anything. This seems an unfortunate inconsistency.

Eivind.

So, your argument summarizes to "this feels bad, and other somewhat analogous things feels bad, and this feels bad, so no"?

Let me also give a few examples of what reasonable arguments in the same direction could look like:

• The people in question are generally not competent to vote. It takes a long while to get familiar enough with the nuances of the political system for a vote to meaningfully represent the person; the non-citizens are more likely to just be influenced by TV ads and other money driven political advertising, and giving money the ability to buy votes (directly or indirectly) is bad for the electoral system.
• The interests of foreigners living here are less aligned with the overall country than citizens. They're more likely to vote against the interests of the US and in favor of their original country, and the election is to take care of the US.
• The foreigners are likely to leave again, so they're unlikely to vote for what's right in the long term, taking just the short term view.
• Having foreigners vote will have US citizens devalue their citizenship, and be less interested in working for the benefit of the nation.
• Most foreigners can absentee vote in their own countries, having the power to vote in two places gives them double power compared to citizens, and this seems a violation of democratic principles.

Now, I"ll say that I'm overall in favor of having legal alien residents (and possibly illegal alien residents) able to vote, especially in local elections. I feel the benefit of the increased feeling of being part of the community from being allowed to vote and therefore caring more for it is enough to offset the disadvantages. The increased gov't legitimacy from "No taxation without representation" is a bonus. However, I see that it is not a clear cut is issue and a reasonable person can disagree with me - if you're going to do so, please use rational arguments.