Um, yeah. Of course, back then, a tight sweater would have been a hell of a lot more distracting than a laptop screen saver.

If you easily lose focus, that's your issue. Learn to concentrate. Banning laptops won't take care of your problem anyway. Lectures don't all take place in dark, windowless rooms -- something distracting will always happen.

And the telephone sanitizers.

Freddie and Fannie were laggers in the subprime market. The regulation that I think you're referring to said that banks could not use different loan criteria based on where the customer lives -- so if you made the business decision to offer NINJA loans in the suburbs, you had to offer them in the inner city as well. Nobody forced any bank to issue any NINJA loan.

I'd be more likely to believe the fiction that the poor financial institutions were helpless in the face of big government if it weren't for the loan derivatives that were the real cause of the crisis. Wall Street gambled, abetted by the ratings agencies, and left taxpayers on the hook when the scheme ran out of steam.

If you think that the lesson of the housing crash is that the government should have left private industry to its own devices, there's absolutely no hope for you whatsoever.

I still don't understand how saying "you can't discriminate" is the same as a government takeover. Under that logic, every damn lunch counter in the southern U.S. must be the property of the feds.

I don't want to go straight up and come right back down again. Can't they sub-orbit my ass to Sydney or something useful?

These are damages that are available to the plaintiff according to the statute. They are statutory damages. They're available because the alternative is to make the plaintiff go through the time and expense of figuring out what the "real" damages were, when they were the wronged party in the first place. Think about a guy in a van selling fake Disney t-shirts. In order to figure out the real damages, Disney needs to know how many shirts the guy sold. They could do so by relying on the guy's immaculate double-entry bookkeeping, I suppose. Luckily, under U.S. copyright law, they don't have to.

That scenario is probably closer to what the framers had in mind, since digital file sharing wasn't a concern back then. The law needs to be updated to address non-commercial digital infringements. But statutory damages aren't the problem here, and have their place.

That's what SHE said. Seriously, it's great to see broadband being pondered as a national infrastructure priority somewhere -- 'cause it sure as hell isn't in the states.

Forget mimicry. I want either Peter Weller (in a Robocop voice) or Patrick Warburton (in a Tick voice) to say "Step aside, citizen."

Didn't David Gray record White Ladder in his bathroom or something?

The truth, like "discovering" a place where people already lived?

The 2009 deficit of about 1.4 trillion was Bush's last budget. The CBO projection for 2009, released two weeks before Obama was inaugurated, was for a deficit of 1.2 trillion. So if you want to blame Obama for 200 billion in spending, that's fine.

I think you forgot about the Bobs (Bob Bennett in Utah and Bob Inglis in South Carolina) the party-switchers (Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania and Parker Griffith in Alabama), but otherwise spot on.