Will Sony buy him?

It's more complicated — those who practice civil disobedience are actually appealing to the higher instance: the social contract. If the state is not willing to walk along their part of the contract, citizens can proclaim yourself free from the law as well.

It does not correlate well with the deaths by texting behind the wheel: these lucky people are obviously getting a lot of calls and messages - and by definition they can't ignore any of them, because, well, it could harm their social network as well as reduce degree of both optimism and easygoingness. But sure, they could always use their sense of humor and have a good laugh on poor bastard trying to call them instead of picking up the phone.

The modern Russia seems like a legit Soviet Union after some changes (like some Warsaw Pact countries *before* their velvet revolutions in 1990). They reused practically single-party parliamentary system (United Russia in place of the CPSU), a major presence of former elites in power circles, the General Secretary directly swapped with the President (even with the strange and embarrasing duality of the President and Premier Minister as in General Secretary and the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of old times), socially oriented economy with a huge amount of government presence, etc, etc, even leave many of major regalia in place or cosmetically modernized (like the state anthem and a body of Lenin). The old Soviet Union had a big troubles with the planned economy, which required constant manual fine tuning in almost every transaction inside economy. The amount of this kind of tuning grows with the complexity of production - so you can make some basic stuff like a bread, steel, coal, simple clothes, vodka, AK-47s very cheap and quick, but a hi-tech requires such a huge army of managers, they dwarfed the actual 'productive' workforce. A 'consumer-grade' goods were deemed not important enough and lacked oversight, therefore suffering from a bad quality, slow life cycle and shortages. The latter problem was solved in some Eastern-bloc countries with the elements of private property, allowed in a small-scale production, agriculture, construction, maintenance and so on. In the Soviet Union a similar measures were introduced with the Kosygin-Lieberman reforms of late 1960s, but they were stopped in their tracks as early as in 1971-1972, mainly due to a growing expenditures to a military and a fear of imminent political changes following the economical ones (cough.. Prague 1968 cough...) So, my idea is - you should count the modern days Russia not as a failed attempt to rebuild itself from scratch as a normal democratic country (played with a liberal values but rejected them), but rather as a core of the Soviet Union, slowly changing itself by the means of pre-1990 scenario of some Eastern-bloc countries and waiting for the own political velvet revolution.