You once wrote that "Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion". I originally resisted this notion, but I've come to think that you are correct. Where did you first hear about this idea? (I've since noticed that there are whole books on the subject, say by Robert Nelson.) Does this help explain why skepticism is such a heresy? After all, one of the biggest religious sins is the sin of disbelief.

While it's rather funny that a marker could be considered a circumvention device under the DMCA, I believe the logic is completely flawed. The pen is just a *tool* to create a particular *type* of circumvention device (in
this case a mark on the CD). For example, with DeCSS, your text editor (where you edit the C code)
or compiler are not circumvention devices, they are tools which allow you to create the device (
source code or executable code -- these both seem to be considered circumvention devices.)

An illustration: one could imagine a product which consisted of a mostly clear, CD-sized sleeve with a small
sliver of black on it which would do the same thing as this mark on the pen. It would be this sleeve -- which
one inserts the CD in -- that would be illegal, and not the materials that it was made out of. To conclude,
the resultant ink mark is the actual circumvention device, not the marker.