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.

Every state gets money from the federal government for things like roads and law enforcement grants. No state has to maintain a military. If states run balanced budgets only because the federal government is handing them money and giving them services for free, is balancing the state budget really that much of an accomplishment?

All that "free" money was collected from the taxpayers, and they all live (or exist on paper) in some state. They could have just as easily paid their taxes to their state capitols instead of Washington DC.

Sure, if your state stopped getting highway money from the feds, the resulting consequences would look bad on the state's books. ("All these roads and no money to repair them! All these assets and we can't afford a military to guard them!") But if your state stopped receiving that money and its residents stopped paying the federal taxes for those uses, and instead those taxes were paid directly to the state, then it doesn't really look all that bad on the books, does it? ("All these roads and look at all this state income tax to pay for them! All these assets and look at all the money this state's residents have paid to hire guards!")

(On average. I realize that on a state-by-state basis there is variance, but add up all 50 and the fed's contribution is less than zero, or exactly zero if they just happen to magically have no overhead at all.)

I agree with the stringent requirements London has for taxi drivers. I think this should be a requirement. You should be able to tell me at least three ways to get to any one place -- without a map, without GPS, without tech aids. Can't? Then you have no experience as a driver and I should, by default, not trust you. Uber drivers don't know the cities like taxi drivers do. Some shortcuts will get you killed.

Would you favor a more general raising-of-the-bar for drivers licenses for all drivers? The stuff you're talking about sounds pretty important and I can't think of any reasons that only people who do it for pay would be affected by it. And plenty of them do have passengers (or other cars' drivers and passengers!) in their hands. I doubt anyone would be able to make a connection between money and the safety issues that you bring up.

BTW, I loved your bit about how anyone who wants to save a few bucks on cabs, is now an "Ayn Rand capitalist." I know a whole bunch of drunks who are going to be very amused to learn that about themselves. Half of them probably mistakenly think they're on the left end of the political spectrum.

A good way for the government to circumvent the law, would be to change the wording at the top of the list from "these people are banned" to "we have concerns about these people."

If an undesirable (hippie, NRA member, unflattering editorialist, Planned Parenthood employee, Planned Parenthood protester, Defcon presenter) wishes to board a plane, the government could ask or recommend the airline to refuse service, without saying why. The airline, since they would be easily subject to various forms of unprovable harassment, would "voluntarily" comply.

Then nobody is banned; the government is merely making suggestions.