I think it's impossible for a government to do anything without at least some real threat of violence behind it. How do you enforce a nonviolent sentence?

Government: "Pay me a $1000 fine."

Offender: "No."

Government: "You're a poo-head."

Offender: [sobs pathetically] "Ok, ok, I'll pay! Just please, please don't hurt my feelings again."

The vast, vast majority of tech engineers that I talked to who are from the United States are very supportive of bringing in people from other countries

That's easy to believe. I feel the same way.

Yet sometimes I hear people bitching about immigrants in other contexts. If they're agricultural workers instead of tech workers, somehow they're undesirable. That doesn't make any sense to me at all. It makes so little sense to me, that I think it's just plain stupid.

But that's just, like, my opinion, man. We don't open the borders. Every election we nearly unanimously scream that we want highly restricted immigration consisting of very few people, and the thought of making any moves toward meritocracy makes us so incredibly angry and resentful, that we go out of our minds with blind rage.

So, tech workers and tech industry customers (i.e. most of America), if this is how you really feel, then you need to live with the consequences. You can't say justice, fairness, and efficiency are important, yet also things you totally don't care about. Make up your fucking mind. If you speak about programmers from India in a fundamentally different way than farmers from Chihuahua, maybe you are the problem, psycho.

there is no point in abusing the power to brick someone's phone

How does someone get as far in life as being able to write sentences, yet still has not encountered their first senselessly-destructive anonymous unaccountable vandal?

I normally don't recommend vandalism, but I actually think you would learn a lot, if someone were to go break one of your car windows or take a baseball bat to your mailbox. I don't really wish you ill, but just letting you experience your first sudden stupid loss at the hands of some asshole who doesn't give a fuck about other people (or who enjoys seeing others suffer) would probably help to correct this amazing misconception of yours.

The only question is how cheaply the lesson can be learned. We can do this without totally abandoning compassion. I suggest this AC's teachers start small, and then just gradually move up. Long before we have a Nazi prison guard callously and flippantly shoot his wife, we need to try merely throwing his $200 phone into the toilet, or maybe even just splashing some grape juice on his $5 T-shirt. Geez, someone, just throw a piece of chewing gum on the sidewalk near this guy's office. Let's not go "full asshole" right at the start. I think this person's naivety can be overcome with a gentle touch of douchebaggery.

Just enough, so that he learns of the existence of currently-unsuspected asshats. That's as far as we need to go, before he shifts his position to "of course I see the point in abusing the power to brick someone's phone, and it doesn't require any paranoia at all."

Also, for it to be a DCMA, doesn't the requested takedown have to have something to do with DRM?

No. DMCA is a "big" law with several parts. Part of it is to outlaw DRM compatibility and another part is about takedown notices. There's even a part specific to boat hull designs, though I don't know if it's as controversial as the crazier stuff.

The reason it's so confusing is that when someone makes something that works with DRM, whoever's interests are negatively impacted by people buying the DRMed item (e.g. Disney fears that if you have a way to play "The Little Mermaid" DVD then you might buy one instead of just downloading the mp4), they'll have their lawyer write a nastygram. People sometimes confuse this nastygram with a DMCA takedown notice, but it's a different thing. Same named laws being referenced, possibly even the same lawyer, but a totally different part of the law.

DMCA is about balance. The anti-circumvention part was written with a pro-piracy agenda and the notice part was written with anti-piracy agenda. The idea is that unless you just completely abstain, they'll have you breaking some law, so most people should be extortable.

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?)

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.

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.