Possession is 99% of ownership, and with digital goods there are couple more nines there. Repairing the file (DRM can be considered a design fault) may be illegal, but then it just becomes an issue of not getting caught.

Why didn't you ask a friend to buy it for you, or bought it on ebay or over the internet, or even built it yourself?

Collective punishment. And that's exactly why such laws should be ignored. Everybody can do even just as little as looking another way; if enough people realize it is just a geopolitical dick-size comparing and that the rank-and-file people on the "enemy side" are more similar to them than the members of their own government, despite being demonized by said government, the world will become a notch better. Even just as little as a plausibly deniable "not paying attention" is often enough.

Maybe it's the experience of being behind the Iron Curtain (and the subsequent change of geopolitical alliances and the friend-foe labels) that leads me to this opinion, but I strongly disagree that sanctions should hurt students and farmers. I don't care the least about government will, on either side, I just support the free and open market, and free access to consumer technology for everybody, even if it includes technology smuggling and violating of laws. Especially if said technology is common off-the-shelf stuff.

Some philosophers consider obeying a bad law to be unethical. This is one of the more clear-cut cases of such.

Coding (and sysadminning) and alcohol aren't mutually exclusive; the dose is the key here. When the technician is too afraid to make a bug, or to screw up, a small dose of alcohol can relax him enough to be willing to perform the task (it must be low enough to not significantly impair his job performance; slowly(!) drinking something tasty until one feels the courage for the task does the job well).

In the age of global computer networks, transnational corporations, and culture that ignores borders, can the stubborn clinging to market partitioning by the outdated concept of nation-states still be considered "legitimate"?

Why should someone do without something that can be easily available just because some asshole in a suit'n'tie keeps thinking in terms of countries? (This applies to everything from said music market partitioning to export/import restrictions on technology.)

The ones with money can buy laws, can shuttle the production and hosting around the world as they please. Why shouldn't the consumers do the same, even if it means (oh horror!) breaking a law or three?

At least the geolocation crap can be worked around in quite many cases, using VPNs, proxies, and friends. Don't piss off geeks!

What about less-direct legal order circumventions, the ones that aren't about specific addresses but provide workarounds for entire enforcement methods (e.g. the Mozilla anti-DNS-block add-on)?

Something tells me we will see more and more of these. While whack-a-mole is certainly fun, a class-break that is done once and handles every case of the given class is more efficient.

Could such groups be approached, by force if necessary, by the protesters, their face masks removed, their faces photographed and published, and then their identities crowdsourced?

Do it a couple times and the police runs out of willing unknown provocateurs.

On Facebook you can block people.
In real life, you can Glock people.

The shooting rampages are Darwin's answer to bullies.

A standard thermal imager will do a good job here. Common smokes do not contain particles large enough to absorb/scatter 4-12 um infrared. (There are special obscurant smoke compositions against thermal imagers, but these are pretty difficult to keep in the air.) But the imagers are (so far) costly.

Do not use visible lasers; they are too easy to track to the house they shoot from.

For blinding the drones (and not blinding live pilots) an infrared laser could be good.

Taken to higher power, a CO2 laser for a laser engraver can reach couple dozen watts fairly easily. With good focus and dwell time, perhaps could even cause structural failure of some plastic parts on the drone.

Yet another possibility is in the realm of microwaves. A sufficiently focused (perhaps from several houses, networked in an aerial defense grid) microwave beam could confuse the drone's electronics or perhaps even force internal overheat.

A guided model rocket with a suitable payload (or even just as a dumb kinetic projectile) could also do a good job. Such devices can even be unmanned and placed out as "mines", ready to be triggered by an overpassing drone. Suitable sizing of the rocket can ensure that only light, non-fatal damage will be inflicted to large manned aircraft (if hit by a mistake) while the damage to a lightweight drone will be much more extensive.

If the service gets shut down, there could be an alternative. There are smartphones in every other pocket, or so. An app that dials a number and plays a sound file, networked with other such phones in a botnet-style way (opt-in, and users able to decide what calls they approve of), without any central authority, fits into this scheme. The politicos in question then can not even block the calls based on incoming number, as each number will belong to a real person, and no number will be calling more than once per a fairly long period, which is not sufficient for harassment charges.

Using this on politicos' personal phone numbers at 6 AM would be the real fair game. If only one of ten people woken up by a robocall participate in this, it has a chance of quite decent success.

If they annoy us, let's annoy them! We can do it, we have the technology.

Isn't this a kind of a fuel cell?

Oh, the tired "logic" of nuclear waste longevity. The root cause of that is the content of actinides, with very long half-lives. However, these are fissionable, therefore can be burned - with significant energy release. It is not "waste" - it is a fuel for 4th-generation reactors.

Unless the sheeple with their panties in the twist will continue running around scared that nuclear power is baaaaad. It's these people because of whom the old plants are still in operation instead of being replaced with newer, safer ones.

Illogical.

You forgot the possibility to reprocess the spent fuel. You also forgot about fast reactors able to use the secondary raw material currently improperly called "nuclear waste". And what about thorium-cycle reactors? And breeder reactors in general? There is a plentiful supply of nuclear fuels for thousands of years if you don't insist on not seeing it.

Every energy source has its costs. Being it coal mining accidents, CO2 production, cost of dependency on fossil fuels located in politically inconvenient locations, cost of wars needed to maintain access to these resources, displacement of people because of building hydropower dams, food prices influenced by biofuels, cost of manufacture of solar arrays (and the limited amount of gallium and indium available), name it and there are associated issues.

Compare the number of people displaced because of nuclear energy accidents with the number of people displaced by hydro dam constructions, number of people killed by coal and oil mining accidents with number of people killed by reactor mishaps, and we don't even need to start including wars in the cost comparisons to see that nuclear power with all its risks and drawbacks is still way ahead of the competitors in cost, safety and reliability.

Sorry...

That way you can turn even mining the metal and refining it into services. Even finding where in the ground the ore is is a sort of a service.

What is *not* a service?