George Orwell (http://www.booksatoz.com/witsend/tea/orwell.htm) advocates MIL, while Douglas Adams (http://h2g2.com/approved_entry/A61345) gently suggests MIF. Make of this what you will.

"Government mandates raise the stakes because they don't allow for that distancing. They force moral dissenters to choose between personally engaging in the activity in which they lost the political fight, or to defy the government and break the law by violating the mandate." Or, you know, just pay the "I don't want to purchase health care" tax, like the bill says.

My old Beagle was a master escape artist. He got quite adept at manipulating things with his snout, including nudging open the latch on the wrought iron gate in our yard to get out and popping the louvers off our ground floor windows to break into the house. He also figured out how to open our sliding glass door if we didn't lock it. We observed him doing each of those multiple times. Once, he not only broke into the house, he also opened the freezer and pulled out a carton of ice cream, which we discovered him eating under the bed when we got home. And then, when we later got a second dog, a black Lab, he'd break out and take the Lab with him, then intentionally get the Lab lost and run back home. Somehow, the poor Lab never figured this out or ever managed to learn his own way back home.

The trend of ignorant apologists contorting reality into crazy shapes to avoid calling a racially-motivated murder what it is continues apace.

How is this any different at all from Dr. Laura's racist tirade? And yet Peretz didn't say the magic n-word, so of course he won't lose his job or any of his Village prestige. F**k every single one of these media sociopaths.

Have sanctions ever actually worked to discourage a rogue state from pursuing an action of which the sanctioning group disapproved? Because so far sanctions haven't stopped Iran or North Korea or Hamas, nor did they stop Milosevic's Serbia. The best I can think of is Iraq, but the sanctions were put in place in the wake of an invasion that completely decapitating the Iraqi military complex and took place alongside regular international inspections of potential weapons sites. Those conditions are not met in any other sanction situation I know of. But, Hell, I don't know everything, so that's a serious question. If there's a situation where sanctions worked, I'd love to hear about it.

Well, except that I think it's clear that the GOP does actually consider those aspects of the originally-drafted Constitution to be perfect as written.

My take is that the ruling as regards to what DMCA says is almost certainly correct. It's just that DMCA was a terrible, blatantly anti-consumer law. It's not even a matter of it being outdated so much as being geared to shut down fair use and gut consumer rights from the very start. It's not a bug, it's a feature.