Yeah, and neither does the word 'impeach'. Or 'Department of the Interior'. Or 'Hydrogen'.
Here is the enumerated right of Congress, you numbnut:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
We call these rights copyrights and patents respectively. Those rights are spelled out in the constitution.
What people name those rights is not spelled out, but I never said it was. The rights themselves are specifically listed as something Congress can do.
Well, the entire idea of software patents is retarded anyway. For multiple reasons.
I once wrote a rant about the stupidity software patents. Not about how software was essentially describing a process, which is a good enough reason not to have them. No, I wanted to make the point that on top of all that, software patents don't actually work like normal patents. Let me recap for people who don't feel like reading:
No one decides whether not to use the software patent based on a time/money analysis, like other patents. Normal patents, people sit down and decide to use them or not. And they will use them if it costs less to license them then it does to not use them.
No one does software patents like that. This is because running software does not, functionally, 'cost' anything. So any existing patents that people know about they just write around, and that part of the code takes 100 instructions instead of 25. Oooh, scary.
Those are a) the ineffectual software patents. Patents like the XORing the cursor with the background, which makes the X people write some extra code. They're dumb, but people tend not to care about them that much.
But there are two other kinds, b) overly broad and cover things patents really shouldn't, like Amazon's one-click patent, which isn't a problem with software patents per se, but the patent office's retardation. Those could be fixed with better patent office behavior.
The specific problem with 'legitimate' software patents is c), patents to handle specific data formats that exist everywhere and programs must be able to write to.
This patent, for example, is a way to create an audio fingerprint where it can be looked up in Shazam's library. There are plenty of ways to do audio fingerprinting, but you must use the patented process if you want to use Shazam's giant library of already indexed music.
Which, to be fair to Shazam, actually is one of the more reasonable 'format lock in'. I mean, they did make the library. It's certainly more ethical than getting a format made into a standard and then showing up to start charging people to create mp3s or gifs.
I would suggest a saner method of controlling and charging for access to it would be some sort of fee for access to the library, but whatever. Shazam's patent seems to one of the more 'reasonable' software patents in my mind....there's still plenty (and better!) ways to do audio fingerprinting, the only reason to do their way is to use their library.
Of course, their suit is totally idiotic. Source code is not a patent violation, and describing a patent and how to use it is not only legal, but required. By Shazam. Asserting that this source code means that people 'can' recreate the patented device should trigger a fucking patent office inquiry about the completeness of their patent application, because you should be able to recreate the patented device from that.
No one's ever managed to win a case by claiming that source code has violated a patent, but I don't know of any name where that was shot down offhand. I'm not sure any case has made it before a court without being immediately shot down, it's such an obviously wrong interpretation of the law.
If the source code did count as a machine implementing the process, a hell of a lot of patents would be in trouble, as they included that source code...and thus, apparently, handed out infinite copies of their patented machines, which anyone can now use without paying license fees. (If a patent holder gives you a device that can do a patented thing, they are implicitly giving you a license to use that patent when using that device.)
Just as importantly, as this article points out, you run into some very weird issues if source code violates the patent.
In other words, if the courts ever try to make source code count as a device under patent law, they'd actually blow up software patent law itself.
I don't know why you're trying to argue against a hallucination about what I said.
I know source code isn't a patent violation. Like I SAID:...because the courts have consistently ruled that source code is the equivalent of a diagram of a patented device, and is perfectly legal to distribute. (As opposed to the device itself, aka, compiled code.)
Perhaps you should actually read posts before deciding that they say things. Distributing code, even complete, compilable code, is not a patent violation any more than distributing schematics is. Code==schematics used to make programs
If you want to correct me about how much code he distributed, fine, whatever, but distributing less code would hardly change the point I made.
So the distinction between "source code" and "the patent document" is not a difference. The patent violates itself.
There is no difference between the text of a patent, and someone restating how the patent works, in source code or otherwise. Neither of those are a patent violation.
The First Amendment was put in place following the patent clause. Which means, by standard rules of construction, that where a conflict occurs the First Amendment trumps the patent clause, not the other way around.
That's the problem with thinking of the issue like a computer programmer.;)
The first amendment is not really a problem with patents, (Except in stupid cases like this where it will be shot down) because patents are public information...but the same clause has copyright, which is a straight-out violation of the 1st amendment. It's restricting people from expressing themselves in certain ways. That is, in fact, the entire point.
The courts have consistently held, however, that the 1st amendment does not override the copyright clause.
They were, after all, written and passed by the same people, at essentially the same time, and the bill of rights was essentially considered a codification of rights that already existed.
If you, under the constitution, without the bill of rights, were considered to have 'free speech', then obviously the people who signed the constitution didn't have a problem with copyright. That's how other parts of bill of rights are interpreted...what were the standards for 'reasonable' search and seizure under the founding fathers, for example.
Or, if you want, think about it this way: The first amendment simply says that congress can't 'pass a law'. Well, the basis of copyright isn't the ability of congress to pass laws in general...the basis of copyright is the constitution itself. Copyright is not a 'law' that congress passed...the specific rules of copyright are passed by them, but 'copyright' already exists as a government function, which means it isn't technically a 'law congress passed'. (Anymore than, for example, confirming judges isn't making a law.)
But, yes, there is some conflict between the patent/copyright clause, and freedom of expression, but the 1st amendment doesn't override it. (Or we'd have no copyrights at all.)
However, this doesn't apply to patents at all, as the entire basis of patents is to distribute the information, from the very start. If there's a conflict between patent law and 1st amendment, it's that patent law requires speech. (Which is also technically a 1st amendment violation.) There is no need, or even the slightest want, for patent law to restrict any information at all for existing patents.
Generally, the courts have held that source code is akin to a 'diagram', not the device itself.
It's perfectly legal to distribute diagrams of devices that implement patented methods. The patent holder can demand you make a note that it uses such a method, and is illegal to operate without a license, but can't actually stop you from distributing the diagrams.
Yes, it's weird a normal person can spend five minutes turning a diagram into a device.
OTOH, plenty of patents use already existing devices in novel ways, like 'entertain a cat with a laser pointer', which, now that I've described it, a good fraction of the people out there can implement with even less work then compiling. That's a silly, but real example, but there are real, serious patents on the use of medicines, for example, in novel ways, or adding tiny impurities to a well known process to make it better. Those are just as easy to implement.
Describing ways for people to make devices that implement patented methods, no matter how simple it is to turn it from 'diagram' to 'device', is legal. And source code has consistently been held to be 'diagram'.
As an aside, I wonder if an argument could be made to invalidate their patents on the grounds that their fear of useful teaching of their own invention being made public is an indication that they themselves do not believe that the patents represent sufficient information to teach one of ordinary skill in the art.
Yeah, that occurred to me too. A patent holder stating (without this third-party information) that people don't have enough information to replicate the patented method should at least trigger some sort of review to see if the patent application was actually complete enough.
Um...his code is an implementation of the patent. His code describes how to do their fingerprinting patent. That is the point of the code, to generate the same fingerprint as Shazam.
Now, I don't like software patents either, and this one is rather obvious, but it's not like he sat down to come up with some audio fingerprinting method and accidentally infringed a patent. He sat down with a patent and wrote code to implement it.
OTOH, half of Shazam's complaint is idiotic...everyone is supposed to have enough information to infringe a patent. That's how the system works, that you get a patent in return for telling everyone how to do it. The idea that, without this code, no one can implement the patent should trigger a patent review by the patent office, because Shazam just admitted their patent application was incomplete and didn't give as much information as it needed to give.
And the other half is on horrible legal footing, because the courts have consistently ruled that source code is the equivalent of a diagram of a patented device, and is perfectly legal to distribute. (As opposed to the device itself, aka, compiled code.) So Shazam really doesn't have any rights there beyond demanding that he put a warning on the code that the method is patented and cannot actually be used without licensing the patent.
In a sane court system, the courts would bitchslap patent holders who showed up to sue someone who looked at their patent and designed a functioning blueprint from it so that others could use it. That's the point of patents, that other people get the knowledge. Patent holders should restrict their suits to people who build such a device and don't license the patent.
but profiting from the idea is patent infringement
No it is not. At all. There is absolutely no manner in what you just said is true. If I, as an example of 'making money off a patent', pick a patent and charge people money to have me explain exactly how the patented process works, step by step, and sell them photocopies of the patent, it's entirely legal.
In fact, industry engineering books, books telling you how to, for example, design a printing press, will often do just that. They'll explain all the processes to do something, including patented ones, and then will tell you 'this is covered by patent #num until this date, so contact Blah Blah Inc to get a license if you want to do it that way.'.
Patents are public information. It is entirely legal to get paid to do anything with that information. Anything.
The only thing that is patent infringement is a) using the methods described in patents, or b) building a device that uses those methods and giving it to other people for them to use. (And using the device yourself is, duh, (a). Technically, you can build a device, keep it, and never use it, though.)
Anything else WRT to the patent is legal. Like I said, you can even make copies and sell them, as patent descriptions can't be copyrighted.
The question is whether or not this source code is a device, which makes it illegal to give away, or if it's more akin to a diagram of that device, which is entirely legal to give away. Sadly for Shazam, the courts have always sided with the 'diagram' analogy of source code.
Patents do override free speech, you twit. Patent protection is in the constitution. In fact, patents and copyrights are the only exceptions to free speech actually spelled out in the constitution.
However, the courts have consistently held that 'source code that implements a patent is not a patent infringement', as it is akin to a diagram of a patented device.
Prior art requires people other than you to know about it, which excludes trade secrets.
If I invent a clever device for squeezing orange juice, but keep it as a secret, either as a 'trade secret', or even if I just have it in my house and use it there and no one ever sees how it works, it does not count as prior art, no matter how well i can prove I was using exactly the patented process it before the patent.
Now, if I was selling that device years ago, with no thought to patents, and someone comes along and patents it, the devices I sold to others are prior art. Or, heck, if I was just selling blueprints.
But at that point, of course, it isn't a 'trade secret' and doesn't count as such under the law.
Basically, prior art requires that someone invented it beforehand and told others either directly, or indirectly by giving people the ability to reverse engineer their stuff and replicate it. Just having invented it and having sat on it doesn't help at all when fighting a patent.
When people use exactly the same term to describe what they want to do, yes, it does make it logical. Or at least, knowable.
If someone asks 'How do I change the color of text in Word 2007?' (That is the version is the one that introduced the dumb toolbars), I have no idea...but duh, looking at the screen, I select the toolbar tabs one after another until I see something that fucking says 'Color', and click it.
Same with my 'attachment' example. People know the term 'attachment' but they don't know how to look around the screen for something saying that. Like the computer is just going to magically read your mind and prompt you for it.
And if you don't know terms, that just puts that 50% into the 'type it into google' category. 'send file with hotmail'.
I have no idea what your experience is, but in my universe, there are only two types of computer users: The first group, when they can't figure something out, gives up, and the second group, when they can't figure something out, pokes around, or searches, until they do figure it out.
Being a member of the later group requires almost no skill or knowledge at all. Basically, people just need to know what 'programs' and 'documents' are and what common programs do what. A computer 101 class at some point, so anyone under 35 and anyone who's ever worked in an office. (And people who don't know that much are not the sort of people I've ever tried to solve problems for. They tend to not have computers at all.) This group can solve 95% of the problems they run into.
Sadly people are taught, and internalize, the idea that computers are easy to 'break'.
Wrong. Air, for example, is functionally not limited, and we've operated with air in a communist faction for the entirety of human history.
Same with public walkways. The state owns the sidewalk, and everyone uses it, because almost no one needs more sidewalk than can easily be accessed. (And when they do, we have permits and whatnot that work fine.)
Under capitalism, the most productive user would, ie, the user that creates the most value, would be able to pay more for their need than less productive users.
You've confused about three different things here. But the most important is that in a free market the people generating the most wealth do not have the most power.
The people with the most money have the most power. Plenty of things can move money, in large amounts, to people, without generating any wealth at all. Ask the people on Wall Street about that one.
Under communism, the user with the most political clout would get decide who uses the resources regardless of productivity.
Uh-huh, and under a free market system, the user with the most economic clout gets to decide who uses the resources regardless of productivity.
You're trying to claim the alternative to communism is some sort of economic meritocracy, and that doesn't even exist as a hypothetical economic system, much less an actual one.
And it gets even worse when the common ownership of the resource inevitably leads to the Tragedy of the commons.
All economic systems with the concept of a commons can fall victim to the tragedy of the commons, and all economic systems that have ever existed have had commons. It would be damn hard to operate a free market if there wasn't some way for people to actually move around to exchange goods, for example.
You're trying to assert that communism has more 'commons' than other forms of economic systems, but this isn't actually true, nor is there any particular reason why it should be.
And, if anything, communism is less suspect to tragedy of the commons because, as, with most property use directed by the state, they really don't have a problem with controlling 'public property', whereas there is resistance to that in a free market. And, in a free market, tragedy of the commons happens when people attempt to use public property to produce wealth for personal gain, a concept that makes less sense under communism.
Thus you have a less productive, less wealthy and more slowly advancing society.
The fact communism is less productive and less wealth generating (Which does not make it 'less wealthy'.) does not back up your argument, which is a claim it 'doesn't work'. An incandescent light-bulb is less productive at generating light than a halogen light, but it does, indeed, work.
And you're asserting that the only judge of a society is how 'productive' it is, which is a bit silly. Most people would place 'stability' before productivity, for a random example.
And that's before the inevitable corruption of the communist committee.
All governments inevitable corrupt. Communism just appears more susceptible to it, although, as I pointed out, all current and recent-past communism government has been the result of military revolution/coups, which are not historically that stable anyway.
Fast changes in government, new forms of government, result in corruption, and people seizing too much power, simply because no one understands how to stop it.
While I don't think communism is a very useful form of government, I was simply pointing out that dismissing it because it hadn't worked yet is akin to dismissing non-monarchical western democracy because it didn't have a good track record in 1865...England's civil war had failed 200 years ago, the US was in a war with itself too, and France had had about three wars flipping back and forth to monarchy. Nowadays, no one sees anything odd about it, but back then, it was hi
I think a saner solution is a) allow people to buy tickets in the name of other people, and b) allow people to return tickets minus, say, a two dollar fee, and c) allow people to change the name on their ticket online. (Which let friends transfer tickets, or a club of some sort purchase, say, 30 tickets in advance, and then transfer the tickets to people who want to go, and then return the rest.)
Yes, in theory this allows scalping, but it requires scalpers to log into the system, and actually transfer the tickets.
This almost completely stops street-corner scalping, unless people are walking around with computers, and it makes any large levels of scalping easily detectable.
What would then be interesting is to have a 'scalping fee' that the venue can retroactively apply if you've been scalping tickets, and, when someone buys a large bunch of tickets and transfers them to a bunch of unrelated people, the venue interviews some of those people on the way about how much they paid for their ticket and what their relationship to the seller is and if this is a group of people who show up together or unrelated strangers who bought tickets online. (While making it clear that nothing bad will happen to the ticketholder and they get to see the show if they cooperate.)
Then charge the credit card (Which, after all, they still have) a scalping fee. And not sell to them anymore.
There would probably still be scalping, but it would be in the guise of 'groups' that have to be coached and had to get there near each other, etc. And, of course that doesn't stop them from ratting the scalpers out anyway.
In fact, there you go. Forget having to interview anyone. Everyone, on the way in, gets a form to report that they had to buy their damn ticket from scalpers. Which they will because having to buy marked up tickets from scalpers pisses people off. Enough complaints, and, hey, that guy's credit card number is still on file...
That's actually most of the problem. Ticketmaster is, for some reason, allowed to exclusive rights to many venues, or at least exclusive except for sports, and exclusive rights to many acts.
If you're a ticketmaster venue, you have to use them all acts (Minus some sport exceptions), or they stop letting their acts play at your venue, so you give up 80% of possible acts, including all the big name ones.
If you're an act who wants to play at any large venue, likewise, you have to let ticketmaster handle all your shows, or you can't play at any ticketmaster venue, which are like 80% of the big ones.
And let's not get into the fact that ticketmaster is the same company as clear channel, which determines which bands get played on the radio. There's no explicit statement that not using them won't get you less airtime...but is that really a safe bet to make?
Saying 'they don't have to use Ticketmaster' is stupid. Plenty of people want out of that system, but can't get out. Ask Pearl Jam about that one, and how successful their non-Ticketmaster 1995 tour was.
Ticketmaster should have been charged with antitrust violations by now. I don't understand why they aren't. This is almost exactly how the railroad trusts operated. Exclusivity agreements everywhere.
Well, Marx said that communism would sorta happen by itself. It's possible he just hasn't been right yet, and if that happens, it will work.
All communism so far has been imposed at gunpoint by the government, not at 'strikepoint' by workers who refuse to work solely for the benefit of others. In fact, the closest to what Marx proposed has been the social democracies of Europe, and those seem to work pretty well.
I find it amazing that you can see fricking Broadway shows, at full price, less than most concerts! Seriously, full price Broadway tickets, like $70, and you can actually find them for half that.
And the concerts get held at venues with horrible acoustics like stadiums!
Heh, I didn't know you could just add random words after directory names like that. Funny. 'C: Spot Run. Run Spot Run.'
The ability to launch a subdirectory of C:/WINDOWS by typing it into Run has always seemed a bit of a misfeature to me anyway. I'm not sure under what circumstances that actually is useful, and it's so obscure that almost no one knows it anyway. A full directory path, sure, but relative paths are a bit unlikely when no knows where the relative path is starting from!
You do *NOT* get Toyota phoning up, even if your car is part of a recall, without other things following it that WILL verify the authenticity. Letters. You contacting them and verifying they ARE Toyota, etc.
Perhaps more importantly, if Toyota calls you up about a recall, they tell you to go to the Toyota dealer to have your car fixed. You don't pay them for anything over the phone. (And hopefully don't pay anything there, either.) If it's a 'scam', it's a spectacularly useless one. You really only need to turn on your BS detector if they want something from you, and don't need to worry that people are inexplicably calling you up to just make you waste gas driving to the dealer, which has no idea what's going on.
But, yes. It's a basic rule to, under no circumstances, give any money to people who called you. I just find the concept of doing that incomprehensible.
I mean, forget 'scams'. Even 'legit' things where people call up and identify themselves, and try to sell you something, are stupid to do over the phone.
You don't do business with unknown people for good or services you can't immediately see! You want to buy something remotely, you find a reputable company and contact them. The only stuff you should buy from 'strangers' is stuff you can inspect beforehand.
And even then I still wouldn't buy from someone who contacted me, as that's how 90% of RL conmen work. (And by 'contacted me', read 'happened to have something I wanted and they needed cash desperately so I, who was standing nearby, offered to buy it cheaply from them', because that's how the conmen do it. Beware 'lucky breaks'. But anyway.)
Charging people for tech support on a product you've already charged them for.
No shit
In my universe, if I've paid for a product, I've paid for, at the very least, installation tech support. Maybe not free support about each and every feature of the product, if I'm trying to set up some weird margins in Word that don't seem to be operating exactly like the help says, I don't get to call support for free, I get that.
But, I've sure as fuck paid for it to actually get to the point where it is installed, and runs, and appears to open and save files, etc.
It's called damn 'fitness for purpose'. Either the software does the very basic of what people expect software to do (And people expect software to, ya know, 'run'.), the seller makes it do that, or the seller gives me my damn money back.
Symantec's just one of the many companies that's started charging for installation support recently, really pissing me off. Although, to be fair to them, 90% of the time, when their stuff doesn't install, it's because there's a virus stopping it...but all that means is that there either should be some changing domain (Viruses block Symantec's sites), changing code (So viruses can't stop it.) program people can download to remove all the damn viruses before they install, or Symantec should just be upfront and state they don't support using their software on already infected systems, and refund the purchase price if the software won't install.
It's the big secret of people who are 'knowledgeable' about computer.
50% of the time when 'help' someone do something, like send email...we don't know anything any more than they do. we're just reading the damn screen and doing what the logical thing would be, and we're not scared of doing the wrong thing. I mean, people ask me to help them send an attachment using a webmail system I'd never seen before: Why don't you click on the 'Attach file' link there and select the file? Okay, where'd you save the file? Okay, select it, and then type something in the body, and press send. There you go. Yes, that's me, a computer genius, reading the screen like that and having the ability to use common dialog boxes.(1)
And another 25% of the time we're solving problems by applying basic computer knowledge. Like, very basic. Like 'able to learn in 10 hours' basic. Stuff like 'The World Wide Web works by your computer talking to another computer through even more computers.' and 'Video files tend to about 10 times as big as mp3s per minute.' and 'Wireless signals are often encrypted'.
And another 20% of the time it's stuff we've either run into before, and thus know what to do, or we fricking google it. Lacking the basic computer knowledge above just turns that 25% into this also. (I'm often like this on a Mac.)
There is almost no 'skill' involved at all. Half of it is just a willingness to say 'Okay, this looks right, let's try that'.
Only about 5% of the stuff people who are 'knowledgeable' about computers do for others as 'tech support', mainly stuff like buying/building computers, and programming, and other 'creative' stuff where you aren't fixing something that's broken, actually require any skill.
I mean, I have a younger brother who doesn't have any formal computer training outside of high school and an Office class for his associate degree. He's an auto mechanic.
But he grew up with a nerd and a half-nerd, so he knows how to operate his computer, and any questions from him are things like 'Should I go with AGP or should I pay more for PCI-E?' and 'This game is giving some sort of Direct X error on startup, and all I can find are suggestions to reinstall it and Direct X...which I've done. Ideas?'. This is because he learned 'the secret' to solve computer problems: Do the obvious thing, and if you don't know what that is, google what's wrong. And backup your computer so if it blows up, you can just reinstall.
1) Yes, yes, we've all fallen prey to the stupid inability to see things right in front of us, and someone else points it out instantly, but I'm not talking about that here.
As I have said before, it should be a hard and fast rule that you don't give information, and certainly don't give money, to people who contact you. Ever. Period.
It's truly mind-boggling that this isn't taught in high school.
Indeed. I think a lot of people are taking the complaint letter seriously, when political campaigns have demonstrated they often know less about the internet than most people and some horses.
If you copy a site entirely, you are, obviously, going to get the form submission pages. If the site uses a mailto: form submission and/or Javascript to submit the form, you can get a form submission button that appeared to actually work (Or even does work, submitting to the original person's email!), and even directing the site to a thank you page.
Until there's some evidence that anyone is actually collecting those addresses, I think we should just assume this just someone running wget -r and getting the entire thing, including, duh, forms.
But, seriously, is this what we're worried about? I think we should applaud someone who quotes the entirety of their opponent. Unmodified in any way. (Although I would presume, on his site, he has links to specific pages.)
Incidentally, this is not, as some people say, parody or satire, and almost certainly an illegal copyright violation. But it shouldn't be, and maybe the courts will agree.
Even the Streisand Effect can't change how anti-incumbent the voters are,
I'm confused by this. The 'anti-incumbent' nonsense the media is spreading is a bald-faced lie.
It's one with a small amount of polling evidence, but when it comes to actual elections, it failed horribly. People are not voting incumbents out.
Granted, you didn't say there was any, you just said the Streisand Effect couldn't 'change' it, but, if you meant it couldn't add an anti-incumbency effect, that was a confusing way to say it.
I don't see how 'amateur' vs. 'professional' is a type of threat. I guess you might imagine I mean 'we shouldn't spend time trying to track terrorists not connected to terrorist organizations', except that's not what I said at all...I specifically mentioned the US military as a source of terrorists.
And, actually, I'm encouraging not planning for threats at all.
Instead, we might consider not taking people, training them to kill a bunch of other people, having them go out and do it, and then bringing them back here, which a) results in a bunch of trained killers running around, and b) results in a bunch of other people pissed that you've been having trained killers run around their country kill them, so they in turn train their own killers and send them over here.
Obviously, the less people who have been in the military self-evidently results in less successful 'homegrown' terrorists. (From pure statistics alone, although it's even better when the force is unneeded enough that you can afford to let go the fraction that show they are probably crazy.) But the other fact is less obvious.
There will always be crazy disgruntled people, but that's not the issue, the issue is how trained they are, because untrained terrorists are, as we've seem, a rather sad joke.
Military organizations, whether actual militaries or ad-hoc groups, have limited resources. Period. They only train people if it makes sense for them. It only makes sense for them to commit terrorism, or help it, if there's some PR benefit. (Because that literally all terrorism is.)
There's only a PR benefit if, as I said, the US has been running around fucking things up, at least from the POV of some people. If we'd stop doing that, poof, no more successful terrorism from the outside.
If we had a much smaller force, we'd stop accepting social malcontents, so have less terrorists from there, and if we stop traipsing all around the world, we'd have less opposing organizations train and aim people at us.
That's how you stop terrorism. You don't stop it by trying to figure out someone's plan in advance. Only incompetent boobs can even possibly be stopped that way.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, and neither does the word 'impeach'. Or 'Department of the Interior'. Or 'Hydrogen'.
Here is the enumerated right of Congress, you numbnut:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
We call these rights copyrights and patents respectively. Those rights are spelled out in the constitution.
What people name those rights is not spelled out, but I never said it was. The rights themselves are specifically listed as something Congress can do.
Well, the entire idea of software patents is retarded anyway. For multiple reasons.
I once wrote a rant about the stupidity software patents. Not about how software was essentially describing a process, which is a good enough reason not to have them. No, I wanted to make the point that on top of all that, software patents don't actually work like normal patents. Let me recap for people who don't feel like reading:
No one decides whether not to use the software patent based on a time/money analysis, like other patents. Normal patents, people sit down and decide to use them or not. And they will use them if it costs less to license them then it does to not use them.
No one does software patents like that. This is because running software does not, functionally, 'cost' anything. So any existing patents that people know about they just write around, and that part of the code takes 100 instructions instead of 25. Oooh, scary.
Those are a) the ineffectual software patents. Patents like the XORing the cursor with the background, which makes the X people write some extra code. They're dumb, but people tend not to care about them that much.
But there are two other kinds, b) overly broad and cover things patents really shouldn't, like Amazon's one-click patent, which isn't a problem with software patents per se, but the patent office's retardation. Those could be fixed with better patent office behavior.
The specific problem with 'legitimate' software patents is c), patents to handle specific data formats that exist everywhere and programs must be able to write to.
This patent, for example, is a way to create an audio fingerprint where it can be looked up in Shazam's library. There are plenty of ways to do audio fingerprinting, but you must use the patented process if you want to use Shazam's giant library of already indexed music.
Which, to be fair to Shazam, actually is one of the more reasonable 'format lock in'. I mean, they did make the library. It's certainly more ethical than getting a format made into a standard and then showing up to start charging people to create mp3s or gifs.
I would suggest a saner method of controlling and charging for access to it would be some sort of fee for access to the library, but whatever. Shazam's patent seems to one of the more 'reasonable' software patents in my mind....there's still plenty (and better!) ways to do audio fingerprinting, the only reason to do their way is to use their library.
Of course, their suit is totally idiotic. Source code is not a patent violation, and describing a patent and how to use it is not only legal, but required. By Shazam. Asserting that this source code means that people 'can' recreate the patented device should trigger a fucking patent office inquiry about the completeness of their patent application, because you should be able to recreate the patented device from that.
No one's ever managed to win a case by claiming that source code has violated a patent, but I don't know of any name where that was shot down offhand. I'm not sure any case has made it before a court without being immediately shot down, it's such an obviously wrong interpretation of the law.
If the source code did count as a machine implementing the process, a hell of a lot of patents would be in trouble, as they included that source code...and thus, apparently, handed out infinite copies of their patented machines, which anyone can now use without paying license fees. (If a patent holder gives you a device that can do a patented thing, they are implicitly giving you a license to use that patent when using that device.)
Just as importantly, as this article points out, you run into some very weird issues if source code violates the patent.
In other words, if the courts ever try to make source code count as a device under patent law, they'd actually blow up software patent law itself.
I don't know why you're trying to argue against a hallucination about what I said.
I know source code isn't a patent violation. Like I SAID: ...because the courts have consistently ruled that source code is the equivalent of a diagram of a patented device, and is perfectly legal to distribute. (As opposed to the device itself, aka, compiled code.)
Perhaps you should actually read posts before deciding that they say things. Distributing code, even complete, compilable code, is not a patent violation any more than distributing schematics is. Code==schematics used to make programs
If you want to correct me about how much code he distributed, fine, whatever, but distributing less code would hardly change the point I made.
So the distinction between "source code" and "the patent document" is not a difference. The patent violates itself.
There is no difference between the text of a patent, and someone restating how the patent works, in source code or otherwise. Neither of those are a patent violation.
The First Amendment was put in place following the patent clause. Which means, by standard rules of construction, that where a conflict occurs the First Amendment trumps the patent clause, not the other way around.
That's the problem with thinking of the issue like a computer programmer. ;)
The first amendment is not really a problem with patents, (Except in stupid cases like this where it will be shot down) because patents are public information...but the same clause has copyright, which is a straight-out violation of the 1st amendment. It's restricting people from expressing themselves in certain ways. That is, in fact, the entire point.
The courts have consistently held, however, that the 1st amendment does not override the copyright clause.
They were, after all, written and passed by the same people, at essentially the same time, and the bill of rights was essentially considered a codification of rights that already existed.
If you, under the constitution, without the bill of rights, were considered to have 'free speech', then obviously the people who signed the constitution didn't have a problem with copyright. That's how other parts of bill of rights are interpreted...what were the standards for 'reasonable' search and seizure under the founding fathers, for example.
Or, if you want, think about it this way: The first amendment simply says that congress can't 'pass a law'. Well, the basis of copyright isn't the ability of congress to pass laws in general...the basis of copyright is the constitution itself. Copyright is not a 'law' that congress passed...the specific rules of copyright are passed by them, but 'copyright' already exists as a government function, which means it isn't technically a 'law congress passed'. (Anymore than, for example, confirming judges isn't making a law.)
But, yes, there is some conflict between the patent/copyright clause, and freedom of expression, but the 1st amendment doesn't override it. (Or we'd have no copyrights at all.)
However, this doesn't apply to patents at all, as the entire basis of patents is to distribute the information, from the very start. If there's a conflict between patent law and 1st amendment, it's that patent law requires speech. (Which is also technically a 1st amendment violation.) There is no need, or even the slightest want, for patent law to restrict any information at all for existing patents.
Generally, the courts have held that source code is akin to a 'diagram', not the device itself.
It's perfectly legal to distribute diagrams of devices that implement patented methods. The patent holder can demand you make a note that it uses such a method, and is illegal to operate without a license, but can't actually stop you from distributing the diagrams.
Yes, it's weird a normal person can spend five minutes turning a diagram into a device.
OTOH, plenty of patents use already existing devices in novel ways, like 'entertain a cat with a laser pointer', which, now that I've described it, a good fraction of the people out there can implement with even less work then compiling. That's a silly, but real example, but there are real, serious patents on the use of medicines, for example, in novel ways, or adding tiny impurities to a well known process to make it better. Those are just as easy to implement.
Describing ways for people to make devices that implement patented methods, no matter how simple it is to turn it from 'diagram' to 'device', is legal. And source code has consistently been held to be 'diagram'.
As an aside, I wonder if an argument could be made to invalidate their patents on the grounds that their fear of useful teaching of their own invention being made public is an indication that they themselves do not believe that the patents represent sufficient information to teach one of ordinary skill in the art.
Yeah, that occurred to me too. A patent holder stating (without this third-party information) that people don't have enough information to replicate the patented method should at least trigger some sort of review to see if the patent application was actually complete enough.
Um...his code is an implementation of the patent. His code describes how to do their fingerprinting patent. That is the point of the code, to generate the same fingerprint as Shazam.
Now, I don't like software patents either, and this one is rather obvious, but it's not like he sat down to come up with some audio fingerprinting method and accidentally infringed a patent. He sat down with a patent and wrote code to implement it.
OTOH, half of Shazam's complaint is idiotic...everyone is supposed to have enough information to infringe a patent. That's how the system works, that you get a patent in return for telling everyone how to do it. The idea that, without this code, no one can implement the patent should trigger a patent review by the patent office, because Shazam just admitted their patent application was incomplete and didn't give as much information as it needed to give.
And the other half is on horrible legal footing, because the courts have consistently ruled that source code is the equivalent of a diagram of a patented device, and is perfectly legal to distribute. (As opposed to the device itself, aka, compiled code.) So Shazam really doesn't have any rights there beyond demanding that he put a warning on the code that the method is patented and cannot actually be used without licensing the patent.
In a sane court system, the courts would bitchslap patent holders who showed up to sue someone who looked at their patent and designed a functioning blueprint from it so that others could use it. That's the point of patents, that other people get the knowledge. Patent holders should restrict their suits to people who build such a device and don't license the patent.
but profiting from the idea is patent infringement
No it is not. At all. There is absolutely no manner in what you just said is true. If I, as an example of 'making money off a patent', pick a patent and charge people money to have me explain exactly how the patented process works, step by step, and sell them photocopies of the patent, it's entirely legal.
In fact, industry engineering books, books telling you how to, for example, design a printing press, will often do just that. They'll explain all the processes to do something, including patented ones, and then will tell you 'this is covered by patent #num until this date, so contact Blah Blah Inc to get a license if you want to do it that way.'.
Patents are public information. It is entirely legal to get paid to do anything with that information. Anything.
The only thing that is patent infringement is a) using the methods described in patents, or b) building a device that uses those methods and giving it to other people for them to use. (And using the device yourself is, duh, (a). Technically, you can build a device, keep it, and never use it, though.)
Anything else WRT to the patent is legal. Like I said, you can even make copies and sell them, as patent descriptions can't be copyrighted.
The question is whether or not this source code is a device, which makes it illegal to give away, or if it's more akin to a diagram of that device, which is entirely legal to give away. Sadly for Shazam, the courts have always sided with the 'diagram' analogy of source code.
Patents do override free speech, you twit. Patent protection is in the constitution. In fact, patents and copyrights are the only exceptions to free speech actually spelled out in the constitution.
However, the courts have consistently held that 'source code that implements a patent is not a patent infringement', as it is akin to a diagram of a patented device.
Prior art requires people other than you to know about it, which excludes trade secrets.
If I invent a clever device for squeezing orange juice, but keep it as a secret, either as a 'trade secret', or even if I just have it in my house and use it there and no one ever sees how it works, it does not count as prior art, no matter how well i can prove I was using exactly the patented process it before the patent.
Now, if I was selling that device years ago, with no thought to patents, and someone comes along and patents it, the devices I sold to others are prior art. Or, heck, if I was just selling blueprints.
But at that point, of course, it isn't a 'trade secret' and doesn't count as such under the law.
Basically, prior art requires that someone invented it beforehand and told others either directly, or indirectly by giving people the ability to reverse engineer their stuff and replicate it. Just having invented it and having sat on it doesn't help at all when fighting a patent.
When people use exactly the same term to describe what they want to do, yes, it does make it logical. Or at least, knowable.
If someone asks 'How do I change the color of text in Word 2007?' (That is the version is the one that introduced the dumb toolbars), I have no idea...but duh, looking at the screen, I select the toolbar tabs one after another until I see something that fucking says 'Color', and click it.
Same with my 'attachment' example. People know the term 'attachment' but they don't know how to look around the screen for something saying that. Like the computer is just going to magically read your mind and prompt you for it.
And if you don't know terms, that just puts that 50% into the 'type it into google' category. 'send file with hotmail'.
I have no idea what your experience is, but in my universe, there are only two types of computer users: The first group, when they can't figure something out, gives up, and the second group, when they can't figure something out, pokes around, or searches, until they do figure it out.
Being a member of the later group requires almost no skill or knowledge at all. Basically, people just need to know what 'programs' and 'documents' are and what common programs do what. A computer 101 class at some point, so anyone under 35 and anyone who's ever worked in an office. (And people who don't know that much are not the sort of people I've ever tried to solve problems for. They tend to not have computers at all.) This group can solve 95% of the problems they run into.
Sadly people are taught, and internalize, the idea that computers are easy to 'break'.
all resources are limited.
Wrong. Air, for example, is functionally not limited, and we've operated with air in a communist faction for the entirety of human history.
Same with public walkways. The state owns the sidewalk, and everyone uses it, because almost no one needs more sidewalk than can easily be accessed. (And when they do, we have permits and whatnot that work fine.)
Under capitalism, the most productive user would, ie, the user that creates the most value, would be able to pay more for their need than less productive users.
You've confused about three different things here. But the most important is that in a free market the people generating the most wealth do not have the most power.
The people with the most money have the most power. Plenty of things can move money, in large amounts, to people, without generating any wealth at all. Ask the people on Wall Street about that one.
Under communism, the user with the most political clout would get decide who uses the resources regardless of productivity.
Uh-huh, and under a free market system, the user with the most economic clout gets to decide who uses the resources regardless of productivity.
You're trying to claim the alternative to communism is some sort of economic meritocracy, and that doesn't even exist as a hypothetical economic system, much less an actual one.
And it gets even worse when the common ownership of the resource inevitably leads to the Tragedy of the commons.
All economic systems with the concept of a commons can fall victim to the tragedy of the commons, and all economic systems that have ever existed have had commons. It would be damn hard to operate a free market if there wasn't some way for people to actually move around to exchange goods, for example.
You're trying to assert that communism has more 'commons' than other forms of economic systems, but this isn't actually true, nor is there any particular reason why it should be.
And, if anything, communism is less suspect to tragedy of the commons because, as, with most property use directed by the state, they really don't have a problem with controlling 'public property', whereas there is resistance to that in a free market. And, in a free market, tragedy of the commons happens when people attempt to use public property to produce wealth for personal gain, a concept that makes less sense under communism.
Thus you have a less productive, less wealthy and more slowly advancing society.
The fact communism is less productive and less wealth generating (Which does not make it 'less wealthy'.) does not back up your argument, which is a claim it 'doesn't work'. An incandescent light-bulb is less productive at generating light than a halogen light, but it does, indeed, work.
And you're asserting that the only judge of a society is how 'productive' it is, which is a bit silly. Most people would place 'stability' before productivity, for a random example.
And that's before the inevitable corruption of the communist committee.
All governments inevitable corrupt. Communism just appears more susceptible to it, although, as I pointed out, all current and recent-past communism government has been the result of military revolution/coups, which are not historically that stable anyway.
Fast changes in government, new forms of government, result in corruption, and people seizing too much power, simply because no one understands how to stop it.
While I don't think communism is a very useful form of government, I was simply pointing out that dismissing it because it hadn't worked yet is akin to dismissing non-monarchical western democracy because it didn't have a good track record in 1865...England's civil war had failed 200 years ago, the US was in a war with itself too, and France had had about three wars flipping back and forth to monarchy. Nowadays, no one sees anything odd about it, but back then, it was hi
I think a saner solution is a) allow people to buy tickets in the name of other people, and b) allow people to return tickets minus, say, a two dollar fee, and c) allow people to change the name on their ticket online. (Which let friends transfer tickets, or a club of some sort purchase, say, 30 tickets in advance, and then transfer the tickets to people who want to go, and then return the rest.)
Yes, in theory this allows scalping, but it requires scalpers to log into the system, and actually transfer the tickets.
This almost completely stops street-corner scalping, unless people are walking around with computers, and it makes any large levels of scalping easily detectable.
What would then be interesting is to have a 'scalping fee' that the venue can retroactively apply if you've been scalping tickets, and, when someone buys a large bunch of tickets and transfers them to a bunch of unrelated people, the venue interviews some of those people on the way about how much they paid for their ticket and what their relationship to the seller is and if this is a group of people who show up together or unrelated strangers who bought tickets online. (While making it clear that nothing bad will happen to the ticketholder and they get to see the show if they cooperate.)
Then charge the credit card (Which, after all, they still have) a scalping fee. And not sell to them anymore.
There would probably still be scalping, but it would be in the guise of 'groups' that have to be coached and had to get there near each other, etc. And, of course that doesn't stop them from ratting the scalpers out anyway.
In fact, there you go. Forget having to interview anyone. Everyone, on the way in, gets a form to report that they had to buy their damn ticket from scalpers. Which they will because having to buy marked up tickets from scalpers pisses people off. Enough complaints, and, hey, that guy's credit card number is still on file...
They are not obligated to use ticketmaster.
That's actually most of the problem. Ticketmaster is, for some reason, allowed to exclusive rights to many venues, or at least exclusive except for sports, and exclusive rights to many acts.
If you're a ticketmaster venue, you have to use them all acts (Minus some sport exceptions), or they stop letting their acts play at your venue, so you give up 80% of possible acts, including all the big name ones.
If you're an act who wants to play at any large venue, likewise, you have to let ticketmaster handle all your shows, or you can't play at any ticketmaster venue, which are like 80% of the big ones.
And let's not get into the fact that ticketmaster is the same company as clear channel, which determines which bands get played on the radio. There's no explicit statement that not using them won't get you less airtime...but is that really a safe bet to make?
Saying 'they don't have to use Ticketmaster' is stupid. Plenty of people want out of that system, but can't get out. Ask Pearl Jam about that one, and how successful their non-Ticketmaster 1995 tour was.
Ticketmaster should have been charged with antitrust violations by now. I don't understand why they aren't. This is almost exactly how the railroad trusts operated. Exclusivity agreements everywhere.
Well, Marx said that communism would sorta happen by itself. It's possible he just hasn't been right yet, and if that happens, it will work.
All communism so far has been imposed at gunpoint by the government, not at 'strikepoint' by workers who refuse to work solely for the benefit of others. In fact, the closest to what Marx proposed has been the social democracies of Europe, and those seem to work pretty well.
I find it amazing that you can see fricking Broadway shows, at full price, less than most concerts! Seriously, full price Broadway tickets, like $70, and you can actually find them for half that.
And the concerts get held at venues with horrible acoustics like stadiums!
What the hell is going on with music?
Heh, I didn't know you could just add random words after directory names like that. Funny. 'C: Spot Run. Run Spot Run.'
The ability to launch a subdirectory of C:/WINDOWS by typing it into Run has always seemed a bit of a misfeature to me anyway. I'm not sure under what circumstances that actually is useful, and it's so obscure that almost no one knows it anyway. A full directory path, sure, but relative paths are a bit unlikely when no knows where the relative path is starting from!
You do *NOT* get Toyota phoning up, even if your car is part of a recall, without other things following it that WILL verify the authenticity. Letters. You contacting them and verifying they ARE Toyota, etc.
Perhaps more importantly, if Toyota calls you up about a recall, they tell you to go to the Toyota dealer to have your car fixed. You don't pay them for anything over the phone. (And hopefully don't pay anything there, either.) If it's a 'scam', it's a spectacularly useless one. You really only need to turn on your BS detector if they want something from you, and don't need to worry that people are inexplicably calling you up to just make you waste gas driving to the dealer, which has no idea what's going on.
But, yes. It's a basic rule to, under no circumstances, give any money to people who called you. I just find the concept of doing that incomprehensible.
I mean, forget 'scams'. Even 'legit' things where people call up and identify themselves, and try to sell you something, are stupid to do over the phone.
You don't do business with unknown people for good or services you can't immediately see! You want to buy something remotely, you find a reputable company and contact them. The only stuff you should buy from 'strangers' is stuff you can inspect beforehand.
And even then I still wouldn't buy from someone who contacted me, as that's how 90% of RL conmen work. (And by 'contacted me', read 'happened to have something I wanted and they needed cash desperately so I, who was standing nearby, offered to buy it cheaply from them', because that's how the conmen do it. Beware 'lucky breaks'. But anyway.)
Charging people for tech support on a product you've already charged them for.
No shit
In my universe, if I've paid for a product, I've paid for, at the very least, installation tech support. Maybe not free support about each and every feature of the product, if I'm trying to set up some weird margins in Word that don't seem to be operating exactly like the help says, I don't get to call support for free, I get that.
But, I've sure as fuck paid for it to actually get to the point where it is installed, and runs, and appears to open and save files, etc.
It's called damn 'fitness for purpose'. Either the software does the very basic of what people expect software to do (And people expect software to, ya know, 'run'.), the seller makes it do that, or the seller gives me my damn money back.
Symantec's just one of the many companies that's started charging for installation support recently, really pissing me off. Although, to be fair to them, 90% of the time, when their stuff doesn't install, it's because there's a virus stopping it...but all that means is that there either should be some changing domain (Viruses block Symantec's sites), changing code (So viruses can't stop it.) program people can download to remove all the damn viruses before they install, or Symantec should just be upfront and state they don't support using their software on already infected systems, and refund the purchase price if the software won't install.
It's the big secret of people who are 'knowledgeable' about computer.
50% of the time when 'help' someone do something, like send email...we don't know anything any more than they do. we're just reading the damn screen and doing what the logical thing would be, and we're not scared of doing the wrong thing. I mean, people ask me to help them send an attachment using a webmail system I'd never seen before:
Why don't you click on the 'Attach file' link there and select the file? Okay, where'd you save the file? Okay, select it, and then type something in the body, and press send. There you go. Yes, that's me, a computer genius, reading the screen like that and having the ability to use common dialog boxes.(1)
And another 25% of the time we're solving problems by applying basic computer knowledge. Like, very basic. Like 'able to learn in 10 hours' basic. Stuff like 'The World Wide Web works by your computer talking to another computer through even more computers.' and 'Video files tend to about 10 times as big as mp3s per minute.' and 'Wireless signals are often encrypted'.
And another 20% of the time it's stuff we've either run into before, and thus know what to do, or we fricking google it. Lacking the basic computer knowledge above just turns that 25% into this also. (I'm often like this on a Mac.)
There is almost no 'skill' involved at all. Half of it is just a willingness to say 'Okay, this looks right, let's try that'.
Only about 5% of the stuff people who are 'knowledgeable' about computers do for others as 'tech support', mainly stuff like buying/building computers, and programming, and other 'creative' stuff where you aren't fixing something that's broken, actually require any skill.
I mean, I have a younger brother who doesn't have any formal computer training outside of high school and an Office class for his associate degree. He's an auto mechanic.
But he grew up with a nerd and a half-nerd, so he knows how to operate his computer, and any questions from him are things like 'Should I go with AGP or should I pay more for PCI-E?' and 'This game is giving some sort of Direct X error on startup, and all I can find are suggestions to reinstall it and Direct X...which I've done. Ideas?'. This is because he learned 'the secret' to solve computer problems: Do the obvious thing, and if you don't know what that is, google what's wrong. And backup your computer so if it blows up, you can just reinstall.
1) Yes, yes, we've all fallen prey to the stupid inability to see things right in front of us, and someone else points it out instantly, but I'm not talking about that here.
As I have said before, it should be a hard and fast rule that you don't give information, and certainly don't give money, to people who contact you. Ever. Period.
It's truly mind-boggling that this isn't taught in high school.
Indeed. I think a lot of people are taking the complaint letter seriously, when political campaigns have demonstrated they often know less about the internet than most people and some horses.
If you copy a site entirely, you are, obviously, going to get the form submission pages. If the site uses a mailto: form submission and/or Javascript to submit the form, you can get a form submission button that appeared to actually work (Or even does work, submitting to the original person's email!), and even directing the site to a thank you page.
Until there's some evidence that anyone is actually collecting those addresses, I think we should just assume this just someone running wget -r and getting the entire thing, including, duh, forms.
But, seriously, is this what we're worried about? I think we should applaud someone who quotes the entirety of their opponent. Unmodified in any way. (Although I would presume, on his site, he has links to specific pages.)
Incidentally, this is not, as some people say, parody or satire, and almost certainly an illegal copyright violation. But it shouldn't be, and maybe the courts will agree.
Even the Streisand Effect can't change how anti-incumbent the voters are,
I'm confused by this. The 'anti-incumbent' nonsense the media is spreading is a bald-faced lie.
It's one with a small amount of polling evidence, but when it comes to actual elections, it failed horribly. People are not voting incumbents out.
Granted, you didn't say there was any, you just said the Streisand Effect couldn't 'change' it, but, if you meant it couldn't add an anti-incumbency effect, that was a confusing way to say it.
I don't see how 'amateur' vs. 'professional' is a type of threat. I guess you might imagine I mean 'we shouldn't spend time trying to track terrorists not connected to terrorist organizations', except that's not what I said at all...I specifically mentioned the US military as a source of terrorists.
And, actually, I'm encouraging not planning for threats at all.
Instead, we might consider not taking people, training them to kill a bunch of other people, having them go out and do it, and then bringing them back here, which a) results in a bunch of trained killers running around, and b) results in a bunch of other people pissed that you've been having trained killers run around their country kill them, so they in turn train their own killers and send them over here.
Obviously, the less people who have been in the military self-evidently results in less successful 'homegrown' terrorists. (From pure statistics alone, although it's even better when the force is unneeded enough that you can afford to let go the fraction that show they are probably crazy.) But the other fact is less obvious.
There will always be crazy disgruntled people, but that's not the issue, the issue is how trained they are, because untrained terrorists are, as we've seem, a rather sad joke.
Military organizations, whether actual militaries or ad-hoc groups, have limited resources. Period. They only train people if it makes sense for them. It only makes sense for them to commit terrorism, or help it, if there's some PR benefit. (Because that literally all terrorism is.)
There's only a PR benefit if, as I said, the US has been running around fucking things up, at least from the POV of some people. If we'd stop doing that, poof, no more successful terrorism from the outside.
If we had a much smaller force, we'd stop accepting social malcontents, so have less terrorists from there, and if we stop traipsing all around the world, we'd have less opposing organizations train and aim people at us.
That's how you stop terrorism. You don't stop it by trying to figure out someone's plan in advance. Only incompetent boobs can even possibly be stopped that way.