Another solution is to just host your images at Flickr to start with. Then, who cares if someone hotlinks - you’re not serving them. Cuts down on bandwidth, too.
And if those MySpace biters took the time to Coralize the links, you wouldn’t have been hit with the bandwidth. http://www.coralcdn.org/
How hard is it to change the link to
http://www.codinghorror.com.nyud.net:8080/images/block.gif
