Option 6: Submitted papers really aren't that good.

Especially in subjects with a lot of politicisation in the popular press, it is a common tactic for third-rate or worse researchers to go crying about the establishment suppressing their papers; a closer look often turns out that these papers are in fact very shoddy work.

You can't grant mineral rights without assuming ownership of whatever you're granting the rights on.

"Can't?" Ok, I'll bite: what happens when you try? (Did you get an error message? What did it say?)

> Lower Courts:You're like a cable company.

Not exactly. Every lower court agreed entirely with Aero. It was only the Supreme Court that said "You look like a cable company, so the copyright that was written just for cable companies applies to you."

Oops, didn't realize we were talking about something like that.

That plugin is a kind of neat idea (I approve) but it's very poorly named and doesn't seem to have anything in common with a real "web of trust." I'd probably be madder about the atrocious name if I didn't happen to like the plugin.

That gives me an idea: I should make a program for X11 users, where the five hundredth and ninth time someone opens a new window, it generates a PDF containing an extravagant statement of the accomplishment. Then I could call the program "X.509 Certificate Authority" just to fuck with everyone.

I also have an idea for an internet communications protocol which provides the social verification (the "proof" I think he called it) of Metcalf's Internet Teranodes Metric, but I'm trying to think of a concise way to explain that to people.

What's interesting about my MITM-proof thing is that it was computer-generated. I just had to provide the right seed (the "key" according to the software's docs) to the Pseudorandom Generated Proof engine. If you don't want me to explain how the MITM-proof works, I can just give you the PGP key and you can study the output yourself, in your own Virtual Information Monitor window, or Enhanced Markup Automatic Correlation Searcher if you prefer that approach.

If you think that might work, then keep learning. The botnets' "vote" only gets counted if someone decides to trust all of them. And if you can arrange that, then you don't need a botnet, you just need one node.

All that matters is how your fake node (or web of fake nodes) is connected to the victim.

The Constitution and the Laws of the United States say it isn't money.

Wrong tool for the job. If you want to know what money is, look for dictionaries, not laws.

I suggest when you evaluate your "what is money?" answerering-tool, that you at least test it with some easy cases. Try running "Are Euros money?" through it, for example. Try giving it some story problems and see what happens:

A US citizen in El Paso Texas has as US five dollar bill and a Canadian five dollar bill in his possession, and he briefly presses them both against consecrated ground at a protestant church there, and then puts them in his wallet. He drives to Mexico City, where he meets a Japanese citizen and hands her both fivers in exchange for sexual services which are described in more detail in a different story problem. The Japanese citizen touches the Canadian five (but not the US one) to consecrated ground at a Catholic church in Mexico City, then flies to Montreal Quebec, where she pulls out the Canadian bill and offers it as a bribe to a Mounty where it is seen by this government representative but politely refused and never touched by this government worker. (Actually it only appears to be a polite refusal from her PoV. The mounty refused the bribe because she spoke in English but he was pretending to only understand French. He was attempting a rude refusal and from his PoV he succeeded.) She takes a bus through the State of New York for a while and then ends up at the Lincoln Memorial in DC. She folds the US five dollar bill into an airplane and throws it, and it glides for 2.3 seconds before landing on the ground, making contact with the earth for the first time since it left El Paso. The Canadian bill remains in her wallet, still having last touched ground in Mexico City. At any point during this course of events, did either bill's state of 'moneyness' change?

At least shake the trivial bugs out and see if your system gets confused by irrelevancies.

fewer lines of code

I'm sorry? Have you ever seen the huge amounts of boilerplate Java requires?

Does he follow a checklist? Is there anything vague or undefined on the checklist? Is he regularly expected to have his judgements second guessed? Was he trained by a professional organization of inspectors, or was he just told one day to create the inspection industry?

But it also wouldn't be balanced anymore, would it? Because, as you may or may not know, the federal budget is not balanced.

You don't know it wouldn't be balanced. If it's important to you to balance your budget (as is the case if you're a state legislator but not the case if you're a US congresscritter) then you'll get it done. You'd have to confront the difficulties that are currently denied and instead turned into costs elsewhere.

But of course a state government also has overhead; better dissolve it as well.

I am not advocating dissolving anything, not even the feds. (Though yes, some of their powers should be re-dispersed.) I'm merely saying that it's not like the states are getting some kind of magic windfall that makes their balanced budgets unrealistically achievable. All that "free money" ultimate came from themselves. It's not pixie dust.

That's true for hosting content, but not the DNS issue. There's nothing in DMCA about registrars being required to fuck with domain names in response to someone complaining that the domain references a host that might be hosting alleged infringing material. Registrar coercion isn't in the league of legality (whoa, that's acatchy phrase) as host coercion.

The problem with that is, is if was sent to your email address, you are the intended recipient.

This is incorrect, and yet, the error does not matter.

Intent is known only by the sender. From the recipient's point of view, it does make sense to assume that an email addressed to you, is intended for you. That asumption is sometimes wrong, but it's a rare occurance. And whenever you're wrong, you won't know until you've already read some of the email. This really is the best any recipient can be reasonably expected to do.

The sender has all the power here (they get to decide whether or not to encrypt, for example, and which key to use (typically looked up by intended-recipient's name!!)) so I think they should have all the responsibility.