[NoMoreNicksLeft]

I regularly speak to people who do not seem capable of understanding fine distinctions. It's not difficult for me to believe that a people/tribe that has little use for numbers might not have the concept of large numbers at all, other than as a catchall word with no exact quantity.

Just yesterday on reddit, I was arguing with someone who claimed to speak English as their first language who could not understand what I meant when I pointed out that the idea of "illegal content" was nonsense. I explained how it might be illegal to get content by certain methods, but that didn't make the content itself illegal and that the crime was in the action. He seemed to think that the computer file itself was illegal, even though he admitted that an identical file on another computer might not be illegal.

A tribe that's never needed a scout to be able to tell a leader that it was 5 Roman legions and not 6 that were on the march... why would they have a word for 5 or 6? It's not as if they care about whether one has 5 or 6 bananas, the distinction is pointless on that level.

Likewise, a person who has never needed to make a distinction between the exact circumstances that might get them in trouble with the authorities might never understand the difference between "illegal download" and "illegal file".

[hawkice]

Sounds like that person was actually confused, but there is illegal content in America, in that possession and not transmission or receiving it is the crime (notably, child pornography), and substantially more content that is illegal in other countries (pornography and dissent leap to mind). Whether they can find the files is beside the point, in the same way that whether you can trace a download is beside the question of whether it is legal.

[EC1]

Wasting time arguing with the lowest common denominator, not knowing anything about them, their age, their credibility, is so utter useless. I've given up reading any comments about anything whatsoever besides HN.