Lawsuits and the threat of lawsuits can have a significant positive effect. First there are the obvious ones like Brown v. Board of Education. Then there are the not so obvious ones.

Let's say you're a businessman in a company that makes widgets. There is a change you can make to the widget process that saves money, but is dangerous to the consumer. Without the threat of a class action lawsuit that would be tempting. With the threat, there's a very real chance someone's going to sue the pants off of your company for that decision.

Nike?

/me is from Portland, Oregon

I'm just waiting for all of the stories of "unschooling" kids either (a) being highly intelligent/successful/nice or (b) being poorly educated, completely lacking social skills, sheltered, and closed minded. Personally, I've heard and seen stories of both from general homeschooling. Neither has given me a good picture of what's happening.

...419 Eater. My favorite is the Harry Potter handwriting scambait (search in the page for "after the call").

In this case, one of the threatening letters explicitly said:

I take this to mean that the documents are legit.

Personally, I prefer the simplicity and elegance of the MacBook Wheel. No keyboard, just a scroll wheel and a mouse.

"We passed onerous environmental and labor laws encouraging companies to abandon the US."

Those 'onerous' environmental laws are keeping us quite a bit cleaner than China. In Beijing a bright sunny day can look like a dark foggy evening. The US has serious issues but at least the worst we get is a bit of haziness.

I sometimes do a bit of gaming with a group of Thai students at my university. Thai is, of course, the dominate language, though they switch randomly between Thai and English. One amusing thing that I've noticed is how strongly English has influenced gamer culture in other languages. There's just something funny about hearing a stream of incomprehensible Thai with the occasional 'noob' or 'rematch!'

Incidentally, I love fish fillets (French), have to fix glitches in my code (Yiddish), use wikis (Hawaiian), love quesadillas with salsa (Spanish), have family in Seattle (name of Native American chief), live near the Willamette River (Chinook), use Ubuntu Linux (Bantu), and regularly drink tea (Chinese).