I'm tired of being considered some kind of criminal or dangerous throwback for no other reason than that I value, exercise, and defend my rights unde… - L. Neil Smith

We're all a bunch of badminton birdies who just got batted from the Republican side of the court to the Democrat side. We'll eventually get batted back again, of course, unless libertarians can manage to do something about it. If your principal concern, like mine, is freedom, there's absolutely no discernable difference between the two 'majors,' and for all practical purposes, they're one big party — the Boot On Your Neck party — pretending to be two.

I suspect that our ancestors adapted to bipedalism for the view above the level of the grass, as much as for anything else. Later, they discovered that they could carry things if they remained upright. Change of posture brought other changes. Notice, for example, that human beings court face-to-face. Then they marry and see each other mostly in profile for the rest of their lives. But see each other they do, while animals, at least judging from my cats, hardly ever look one another in the face. Ultimately, I believe that eye contact changed everything.

The quintessential exercise of free speech in a culture supposedly built on that concept and dedicated to it, the Internet's development is as historically important to humanity — perhaps even more so — as Gutenberg's invention of the printing press.