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Comment by VWWHFSfQ | Hacker News Reader

What absolute nonsense.

This is a list of countries just off the top of my head that has sued Google in the last decade:

    United States
    European Union (which consists of multiple member states)
    Australia
    France
    Germany
    Italy
    Spain
    Russia
    India
    Brazil
    South Korea
    Turkey
    Canada

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It's not only past incidents. At some point you've had enough trouble that you shift your stance from "we don't know about any issues in that region" to "we haven't gone through our approval process with legal for that region".

My current country isn't on that list. Obviously, you're missing well over a hundred countries on that list.

Goal posts: moved

In today’s episode of “people from countries that create nothing whining about not having access to other countries’ technologies”…

I suspect you like watching DVDs and using your Bluetooth headphones while connected to your WiFi?

The members of the EU are countries, not states (& the EU itself is a political/economic alliance, not a country).

"State" in this context is the same as the state in "head of state," AKA "a nation or territory considered as an organized political community under one government." Other examples of this usage are "nation-state" and "city-state."

It is common to refer to the members of the EU as "member states."

So then why not just refer to the whole list as states rather than countries ? IMO it be weird to do so, but at least consistent.

I'm curious what state you're from where it's normal to refer to EU members as "member states" ? USA perhaps ?

Of course they know that. How dumb would one have to be to not know France, Italy, Germany are countries? :-)

So then why not refer to them as countries - that's how they would refer to themselves (I'm ex-UK myself). Doesn't make any sense to say "I know they're countries but I'm just gonna call them states instead". The EU context doesn't make any difference.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union

> The European Union (EU) is a supranational political and economic union of 27 member states that are located primarily in Europe.

"State" made perfect sense in context of the post.

"State" refers to "any sovereign polity". The US is weird here in that it pretends it's internal political divisions are sovereigns and refers to them as states, but that doesn't make every other country in the world not a state.

Definition from wikitionary (but nothing is special about this choice of dictionary, you should find a similar definition in any dictionary): https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/state#Noun

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