…worries Brian Tamanaha, too:

How many battles of this sort can the legal system absorb before everyone simply takes for granted that the judge’s ideology is everything—that the law doesn’t matter? Or have we already passed that point?

Lessig seems to have passed that point after the Eldred decision:

I have spent more than a decade of my life teaching constitutional law—and teaching it in a particularly unfashionable way. As any of my students will attest, my aim is always to say that we should try to understand what the court does in a consistently principled way. We should learn to read what the court does, not as the actions of politicians, but as people who are applying the law as principle, in as principled a manner as they can.

[…]

These five justices have all the right in the world to have their own principled way of interpreting the constitution. Long before this case, I had written many many pages trying to explain the principle I thought inherent in the decisions of these five justices. I have spent many hours insisting on the same to ever-skeptical students. But by what right do these 5 get to pick and choose the parts of the constitution to which their principles will apply?

Unfortunately, I don’t have any ideas on how to put the judicial-ideological genie back in the bottle.

Here are some things that are not just okay, but great, transgressive, brilliant, amazing, and should be entirely legal:

And, here is something that is awful, horrible, embarassing, exploitative, and should be illegal:

Anyone want to step up and explain the difference to me?

Given:

Godwin’s law: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.

and:

Moore’s law: At our rate of technological development, the complexity of an integrated circuit, with respect to minimum component cost, will double about every 24 months.

clearly:

At our rate of technological development, the speed at which an online discussion races towards a comparison to Hitler or the Nazis doubles every 24 months.

Just for the record:

People making guesses about Apple’s Intel strategy have focused on two possibilities for OS X on Intel:

One, that third-party application vendors would have to re-compile their code for the new architecture. Two, that Apple has developed or will develop a reasonably fast PPC emulation layer.

I think there’s a third possibility: that Apple has developed a layer which will, upon the first attempt to execute an incompatible application bundle, dis-assemble, roughly translate, re-assemble, and save the binary for the new architecture. Admittedly, I’m not really qualified to assess how impossible a task this is. Since we’re looking at a pretty constrained set of binaries, compiled for known APIs, and with known toolchains, it seems like writing a really smart disassembler wouldn’t be quite as difficult as writing a really fast emulator.

A fourth possibility: some kind of internet-based distribution mechanism for binaries. Vendors supply Apple with new binaries, or Apple builds new binaries itself, somehow. Since the binary itself makes up such a small chunk of the application bundle, why not a mechanism which checks for a simple hash in an online database, downloads, and updates the relevant bundle?

Just throwing it out there.

Mark A. R. Kleiman: A nuclear option for the Democrats

Here’s a modest proposal: instead of just whining about the Republicans’ unprincipled power grabs, the Democrats should retaliate.

Fortunately, we have an excellent opportunity: change the California Constitution to elect the entire California Congressional Delegation as a bloc.

Yes, yes, yes! A thousand times yes!