The regular OEM copies (i.e. that anyone can buy) are similar in price to the retail upgrades. Also, an OEM copy is tied to the computer on which it is sold (especially with the way recovery disks work, since they autoinstall the drivers with the rest of the OS); a retail copy can be moved freely from computer to computer (legally only one at a time, but that is hard to check). Further, selling retail opens them up to various consumer laws that OEM selling does not.
It is very much to Microsoft's advantage to sell through OEMs: that's why they give OEMs such discounts.
There is no need to get patents. Just publish. Then you have prior art, and the patent is invalid. This is just as useful in defending against a patent as a patent. Further, it saves the patent application fees (and is thus possible for free beer projects). Also, one doesn't need to claim that something is patentable to publish. It is at least disingenuous to apply for a patent that you do not believe should be valid.
"One way to think about it is that patents cover ideas and designs"
But that's not what a patent is designed to do. A patent exists to protect *implementation* not ideas. Ideas are not IP. Both patents and copyrights regard implementations, just for different kind of things (copyright protects written work; patents traditionally protected physical items).
There is no reason to protect brilliant ideas, as brilliant ideas do not require work to create. IP protection is needed for the conversion of those ideas into working products. I.e. don't patent producing light from electricity (lightning has prior art anyway); patent the particular combination which Edison found through experimentation.
Your use of patents is akin to someone patenting the plot "Boy meets girl. ???. They fall in love." That plot is not IP, but any of the movies or books made with it are. Copyright is heavily dependent on derivativeness. Simply rearranging or adding some minor steps is not enough to escape copyright infringement.
That's a straw man though. The final decision is still up to a judge/jury. This is just another step in the process. In particular, this step allows the patent office to express a second opinion on a patent once it knows the patent matters (most patents expire unenforced). For valid patents, this would simply be part of the discovery phase of the lawsuit. For invalid patents, it puts the burden on the filer to convince a judge that the patent has merit. Ideally, the court case would then proceed with the patent office defending its decision to invalidate the patent. This would avoid the problem of deep pockets overwhelming a smaller defendant.
Not preclude bringing a lawsuit, simply predate. I.e. before bringing the lawsuit, the patent office engages in a new review. If the results of the review are disputed, either party can still go to court. The problem with the current system is that a big party may threaten a lawsuit based on dubious patents. Under this system, the patent office would invalidate the patent prior to the lawsuit. Thus, the burden would be on the plaintiff to demonstrate that the patent office was wrong. Under the current system, that burden is on the defendant.
This also offers the possibility of the patent office being the defendant when they invalidate the patent. This could help protect against patent abuse by deep pocketed plaintiffs. The government isn't going to be spent into bankruptcy: not even by an IBM. Small companies can easily be overwhelmed by legal action.
The basic point is to shift an overburdened patent office's focus from an initial review where they must finish within a fixed amount of time to a later review where they can spend as much time as necessary. Further, these reviews would be adversarial: one side for the patent and one side against. Currently, only the patent office is checking the against side, and they have no real incentive to decide against the patent.
No, that's not what it means. The 11th amendment exists to overturn a Supreme Court decision allowing a citizen of one state to to sue another state in federal court. "One of the United States" means a member state of the US (currently there are 50; at the time there were closer to the original 13). "Another State" refers to another member state of the US; "any Foreign State" refers to foreign countries--that's why it says both.
Note: the 11th amendment does not say that states can't be sued; just that they must be sued in their *own* courts, not federal courts. Further, it doesn't say that the feds can't be sued. It explicitly addresses the question of whose courts have jurisdiction when someone sues a state (the state would generally find its own courts more amenable than federal courts). It was in direct response to a Supreme Court decision that was unpopular.
The 11th amendment is largely disregarded by the legal fiction of suing an officer of that state in federal court (with the state paying damages in the case of a loss). This of course was the the original poster's point, that suing an officer of the government is different than suing the government itself.
Yes, because SCO has done so well with its Caldera Linux distribution. Owning a Linux distro is not all happiness and light.
I'm not convinvced that Sun is dead (with or without Suse), but they do have a couple hurdles:
1. They are being forced to abandon their proprietary hardware base (which allows them to sell ATI Radeons for three times their market price) in the face of commoditized hardware with similar capabilities.
2. Their OS investment is almost worthless now that IBM is pumping up Linux. If Linux isn't equal to Solaris now, it will be in a few years (and is already superior in some respects).
3. Their service and support contracts are heavily associated with their hardware and software.
Sun might be able to make the transition to a service company (they already have a presence there), but moves like this won't help (except marginally with 3, but other companies would be more valuable there). The primary advantage of working with open source code is the ability to leverage other people's work. As such, buying the work is redundant (and impermanent -- what if the people leave and form a new distro). Further, IBM is not going to allow itself to become dependent on one OS vendor anytime soon. That's why they support Linux in the first place, to avoid vendor lock in.
More likely is the scenario between HP and Dell. Dell used to sell HP printers. Since the HP/Compaq merger, they don't. If IBM's competitor buys Suse, that will probably give a boost to *Red Hat* rather than Sun.
I think that you're missing the point. The worry is not that the company *selling* the software might lose a patent infringement case; it's that with open source, one could argue that the *user* should have found the patent infringing code. No one can make that argument with closed source code, as the user can't tell. With open source, the user could look. Since open source users can have deeper pockets than sellers necessarily do, they are a more natural target.
This is what that insurance company (Bruce Perens and the lady from Groklaw were involved IIRC) was selling. They would audit open source software and undertake any necessary patent defense. Further, they would pay things like switching costs (up to their indemnity limit) if they lost. This is actually better than what closed source offers (Microsoft would make you pay to switch to the non-infringing code, as it would be an upgrade).
Athletes work year round. Not actually playing the sport, but working out, etc. Not to mention that their in season time is unusually intense (for example, football players work six or seven days a week in season).
Not to argue with the main point. I agree that they should build their own stadiums.
Automobile companies do not pay extra to support roads, but fuel companies do. Nationwide, more money is collected from fuel taxes than is spent on roads. Fuel tax costs *are* included in the costs passed on to consumers. It would be different if taxes on rail travel were used to subisdize rail transport, but in fact, some of the excess from fuel taxes (from cars and trucks!) is used to subsidize rail companies.
Including the stadium? Or just equipment and transportation? I suspect that you will find out that if you fully count all the relevant costs of the system (stadium, weight room, coach's day job, etc.), that athletics are still pretty subsidized. It's just that most of the costs are put under phys ed somewhere. At least that's been how its been at programs with which I am familiar.
Please replace "often" with "occasionally" in your post. Many college football and basketball players limp through college, barely maintaining grades enough to play (even with the team paying for extra tutoring). Even though many of these will never play in the pros, they still think they might and concentrate on sports. The only reason that this doesn't happen with baseball and hockey players is that they have real minor league systems. This pulls out those more interested in sports than education. In football and basketball, athletes who want to be serious about their sport must go to college.
Yes, it is possible for people to use athletic scholarships to get a college education in a rigorous pursuit (law, medicine, engineering, etc.). However, many do not take full advantage of this and walk away without an education or with only an undergraduate degree in in phys ed (education usually requires post post grad work to get a teaching certificate).
Not to mention that schools below division I will look for smarter athletes to whom they can justify an academic scholarship, bypassing academically superior candidates.
Btw, I supported myself through college while working a near minimum wage job with nothing more than Stafford loans. It is by no means impossible to do so. The time management is certainly no more difficult than participating in athletics. People who are truly needy have options that were not available to me: Perkins Loans, government grants, college support. Athletic scholarships are never required -- just helpful.
"Linux actually has journaling filesystems so you don't lose files in a crash"
That's not what journalling does. It does not make you any less likely to lose files (actually, the increased complexity can make it *more* likely to lose files, since there are more things to go wrong). All journalling does is allow you to boot *faster* after a crash by skipping the fsck step.
In Vietnam, the US was taking on China (as a potential entrant if the US moved into North Vietnam) as well as Vietnam. It would be more analagous to Yahoo and Google facing off with the support of Microsoft and IBM respectively than it is to a Microsoft/Google competition.
I think that it is a bit early to credit Iraq with a successful resistance. Overall casualties remain overwhielmingly in the favor of the US. OPEC oil production has returned to pre-war levels. The US has twice demonstrated that it can overcome the Iraqi military. An inability to eliminate *all* resistance is no more relevant than IE's inability to get 100% of the market. 90+% is enough to force web developers to code to IE standards.
Microsoft's shared source program allows governments to look at their code so they can run security audits and stuff. One of those governments is China's (India and Russia are probably on the list as well). Thus, even if the people working on the code don't have access to the full source (also true of many American coders as well; the whole point of OOP is that it allows black box programming where you don't know what produces your input or where your output goes), others do. It would be quite possible for a government official to get access to the source and pass that info to someone working on part of the source so that that person could add a back door.
The web browser and suite are named Navigator and Communicator respectively, not Netscape. They could have named the browser Mozilla Navigator and the suite Mozilla Communicator...which would have fixed the Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox issue. Note that donating Netscape would not have. It just would have changed from Mozilla to Netscape Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox.
Kingston memory comes with a lifetime warranty where it's the lifetime of production. I.e. they stop making the product, they won't replace it for you (ignoring exceptions). Since they end of life products regularly, this means that most of their lifetime warranties are shorter than five years.
I used to read a lot of warranties in computer parts, and at the time, that kind of lifetime warranty was common. Kingston is just the company that I remember offering it. To understand what a company means by lifetime, you always have to read the fine print.
"b) To not have their trademark examined (and posssibly anulled) by the court"...in that case. Microsoft bought their way out of that particular mess, but they set a precedent that they will buy people out without fully testing the legal issues. I'm still waiting for SCO to release SCO Windows.
"My point is, if OSS wants to become a desktop alternative, rather than a good solution in specific niches, it needs to be innovative rather than mearly redo existing feature sets."
Yes, because proprietary software is so innovative.
MS Windows does the exact same thing for which you castigate open source. They find an area where someone is doing something and copy it. MS DOS was copied from CP/M. MS Windows was copied from MacOS. IE was copied from Netscape. IIS was copied from Netscape Server.
It's not so easy to come up with an idea that is truly innovative. Notice how both Newton and Leibniz arrived at Calculus at roughly the same time (a couple millenia after Archimedes' Method of Exhaustion). How innovative could calculus really have been? Further, if someone does do something innovative, it doesn't necessarily mean that they will see success in any reasonable time frame.
It's not that long since a Van Gogh sold as the most expensive painting ever. However, during his lifetime, his innovative paintings didn't sell a single copy. OpenOffice has an innovative XML based file format...which I almost never use in favor of the more interchangeable MS formats.
By its very nature, *innovative* is the niche filler. Once it appears in the niche, it can be generalized out to the populace. Take VCRs for example. I remember when they were for afficianados only, a niche. Now, almost everyone owns a VCR. Further, notice how the innovative (and technically superior) Betamax was beaten by the easily copied VHS. Dell copied the IBM PC and is huge. Apple went its own way and is a niche player.
Re:Youwant dual mode transportation?
on
By Road and Rail?
·
· Score: 1
In the US, they just put the trailer on the train, not the whole truck (may be what you meant, but I read your post as saying that they put the cab of the truck on the train as well).
Also happens if you use something that logs console I/O so that you can remember what you did later (e.g. what configure options you used when installing a program). Instead of showing the final result, it shows with the mistake, the control characters, and the correction, just like your teh^H^Hhe example.
Put the notifiers in the cars and give each the speed that it needs to go to hit the light just as it turns green. Since there are still lights, it still works for old vehicles (without the notifiers). However, it still puts more info in the hands of the traffic light to control when the light is on/off. Note that to really work properly, the cars need to advertise which direction they're going, so it needs GPS functionality with routing as well.
Something like this might eliminate the idiocy of pulling up to a light at an empty road, stopping, waiting for the sensor to register your presence, wait for the light to actually change, and finally proceeding. Not the full automation shown here, but it opens the possibility of adding it on certain roads in another twenty years or so. The technology would help emergency vehicles immediately (i.e. if the road signals are opened for emergency vehicles before they pass).
The cars following magnets idea might work (for a demo) with places that have bus bypasses. The magnet enabled cars could be allowed to run on the bus lanes.
"If it had been a launder of money for an orginized crime outfit"
ObNitPick: The whole point of money laundering schemes is to turn illegitimate income into legitimate income. This leaves them with illegitimate money (because it is from the sale of child porn). Whatever this was, it wasn't money laundering. Anyway, murder is easier to investigate than an internet crime (more physical evidence). I applaud the poster for taking the risk.
Btw, I wouldn't consider what this poster did to be vigilantism. Alerting site managers to objectionable content on their servers is just good citizenship. Vigilantism is cracking their web server and scrapping the hard drive with low level read/writes.
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The regular OEM copies (i.e. that anyone can buy) are similar in price to the retail upgrades. Also, an OEM copy is tied to the computer on which it is sold (especially with the way recovery disks work, since they autoinstall the drivers with the rest of the OS); a retail copy can be moved freely from computer to computer (legally only one at a time, but that is hard to check). Further, selling retail opens them up to various consumer laws that OEM selling does not.
It is very much to Microsoft's advantage to sell through OEMs: that's why they give OEMs such discounts.
There is no need to get patents. Just publish. Then you have prior art, and the patent is invalid. This is just as useful in defending against a patent as a patent. Further, it saves the patent application fees (and is thus possible for free beer projects). Also, one doesn't need to claim that something is patentable to publish. It is at least disingenuous to apply for a patent that you do not believe should be valid.
"One way to think about it is that patents cover ideas and designs"
But that's not what a patent is designed to do. A patent exists to protect *implementation* not ideas. Ideas are not IP. Both patents and copyrights regard implementations, just for different kind of things (copyright protects written work; patents traditionally protected physical items).
There is no reason to protect brilliant ideas, as brilliant ideas do not require work to create. IP protection is needed for the conversion of those ideas into working products. I.e. don't patent producing light from electricity (lightning has prior art anyway); patent the particular combination which Edison found through experimentation.
Your use of patents is akin to someone patenting the plot "Boy meets girl. ???. They fall in love." That plot is not IP, but any of the movies or books made with it are. Copyright is heavily dependent on derivativeness. Simply rearranging or adding some minor steps is not enough to escape copyright infringement.
That's a straw man though. The final decision is still up to a judge/jury. This is just another step in the process. In particular, this step allows the patent office to express a second opinion on a patent once it knows the patent matters (most patents expire unenforced). For valid patents, this would simply be part of the discovery phase of the lawsuit. For invalid patents, it puts the burden on the filer to convince a judge that the patent has merit. Ideally, the court case would then proceed with the patent office defending its decision to invalidate the patent. This would avoid the problem of deep pockets overwhelming a smaller defendant.
Not preclude bringing a lawsuit, simply predate. I.e. before bringing the lawsuit, the patent office engages in a new review. If the results of the review are disputed, either party can still go to court. The problem with the current system is that a big party may threaten a lawsuit based on dubious patents. Under this system, the patent office would invalidate the patent prior to the lawsuit. Thus, the burden would be on the plaintiff to demonstrate that the patent office was wrong. Under the current system, that burden is on the defendant.
This also offers the possibility of the patent office being the defendant when they invalidate the patent. This could help protect against patent abuse by deep pocketed plaintiffs. The government isn't going to be spent into bankruptcy: not even by an IBM. Small companies can easily be overwhelmed by legal action.
The basic point is to shift an overburdened patent office's focus from an initial review where they must finish within a fixed amount of time to a later review where they can spend as much time as necessary. Further, these reviews would be adversarial: one side for the patent and one side against. Currently, only the patent office is checking the against side, and they have no real incentive to decide against the patent.
No, that's not what it means. The 11th amendment exists to overturn a Supreme Court decision allowing a citizen of one state to to sue another state in federal court. "One of the United States" means a member state of the US (currently there are 50; at the time there were closer to the original 13). "Another State" refers to another member state of the US; "any Foreign State" refers to foreign countries--that's why it says both.
Note: the 11th amendment does not say that states can't be sued; just that they must be sued in their *own* courts, not federal courts. Further, it doesn't say that the feds can't be sued. It explicitly addresses the question of whose courts have jurisdiction when someone sues a state (the state would generally find its own courts more amenable than federal courts). It was in direct response to a Supreme Court decision that was unpopular.
The 11th amendment is largely disregarded by the legal fiction of suing an officer of that state in federal court (with the state paying damages in the case of a loss). This of course was the the original poster's point, that suing an officer of the government is different than suing the government itself.
Yes, because SCO has done so well with its Caldera Linux distribution. Owning a Linux distro is not all happiness and light.
I'm not convinvced that Sun is dead (with or without Suse), but they do have a couple hurdles:
1. They are being forced to abandon their proprietary hardware base (which allows them to sell ATI Radeons for three times their market price) in the face of commoditized hardware with similar capabilities.
2. Their OS investment is almost worthless now that IBM is pumping up Linux. If Linux isn't equal to Solaris now, it will be in a few years (and is already superior in some respects).
3. Their service and support contracts are heavily associated with their hardware and software.
Sun might be able to make the transition to a service company (they already have a presence there), but moves like this won't help (except marginally with 3, but other companies would be more valuable there). The primary advantage of working with open source code is the ability to leverage other people's work. As such, buying the work is redundant (and impermanent -- what if the people leave and form a new distro). Further, IBM is not going to allow itself to become dependent on one OS vendor anytime soon. That's why they support Linux in the first place, to avoid vendor lock in.
More likely is the scenario between HP and Dell. Dell used to sell HP printers. Since the HP/Compaq merger, they don't. If IBM's competitor buys Suse, that will probably give a boost to *Red Hat* rather than Sun.
I think that you're missing the point. The worry is not that the company *selling* the software might lose a patent infringement case; it's that with open source, one could argue that the *user* should have found the patent infringing code. No one can make that argument with closed source code, as the user can't tell. With open source, the user could look. Since open source users can have deeper pockets than sellers necessarily do, they are a more natural target.
This is what that insurance company (Bruce Perens and the lady from Groklaw were involved IIRC) was selling. They would audit open source software and undertake any necessary patent defense. Further, they would pay things like switching costs (up to their indemnity limit) if they lost. This is actually better than what closed source offers (Microsoft would make you pay to switch to the non-infringing code, as it would be an upgrade).
Agreed that software patents are a bad idea.
Athletes work year round. Not actually playing the sport, but working out, etc. Not to mention that their in season time is unusually intense (for example, football players work six or seven days a week in season).
Not to argue with the main point. I agree that they should build their own stadiums.
Automobile companies do not pay extra to support roads, but fuel companies do. Nationwide, more money is collected from fuel taxes than is spent on roads. Fuel tax costs *are* included in the costs passed on to consumers. It would be different if taxes on rail travel were used to subisdize rail transport, but in fact, some of the excess from fuel taxes (from cars and trucks!) is used to subsidize rail companies.
Including the stadium? Or just equipment and transportation? I suspect that you will find out that if you fully count all the relevant costs of the system (stadium, weight room, coach's day job, etc.), that athletics are still pretty subsidized. It's just that most of the costs are put under phys ed somewhere. At least that's been how its been at programs with which I am familiar.
Please replace "often" with "occasionally" in your post. Many college football and basketball players limp through college, barely maintaining grades enough to play (even with the team paying for extra tutoring). Even though many of these will never play in the pros, they still think they might and concentrate on sports. The only reason that this doesn't happen with baseball and hockey players is that they have real minor league systems. This pulls out those more interested in sports than education. In football and basketball, athletes who want to be serious about their sport must go to college.
Yes, it is possible for people to use athletic scholarships to get a college education in a rigorous pursuit (law, medicine, engineering, etc.). However, many do not take full advantage of this and walk away without an education or with only an undergraduate degree in in phys ed (education usually requires post post grad work to get a teaching certificate).
Not to mention that schools below division I will look for smarter athletes to whom they can justify an academic scholarship, bypassing academically superior candidates.
Btw, I supported myself through college while working a near minimum wage job with nothing more than Stafford loans. It is by no means impossible to do so. The time management is certainly no more difficult than participating in athletics. People who are truly needy have options that were not available to me: Perkins Loans, government grants, college support. Athletic scholarships are never required -- just helpful.
"Linux actually has journaling filesystems so you don't lose files in a crash"
That's not what journalling does. It does not make you any less likely to lose files (actually, the increased complexity can make it *more* likely to lose files, since there are more things to go wrong). All journalling does is allow you to boot *faster* after a crash by skipping the fsck step.
In IE, type google and then hit Ctrl+Enter and it will send you to http://www.google.com
I really miss being able to do that when I use Mozilla, Firefox, or Opera. Keywords is not quite the same fuctionality.
In Vietnam, the US was taking on China (as a potential entrant if the US moved into North Vietnam) as well as Vietnam. It would be more analagous to Yahoo and Google facing off with the support of Microsoft and IBM respectively than it is to a Microsoft/Google competition.
I think that it is a bit early to credit Iraq with a successful resistance. Overall casualties remain overwhielmingly in the favor of the US. OPEC oil production has returned to pre-war levels. The US has twice demonstrated that it can overcome the Iraqi military. An inability to eliminate *all* resistance is no more relevant than IE's inability to get 100% of the market. 90+% is enough to force web developers to code to IE standards.
Microsoft's shared source program allows governments to look at their code so they can run security audits and stuff. One of those governments is China's (India and Russia are probably on the list as well). Thus, even if the people working on the code don't have access to the full source (also true of many American coders as well; the whole point of OOP is that it allows black box programming where you don't know what produces your input or where your output goes), others do. It would be quite possible for a government official to get access to the source and pass that info to someone working on part of the source so that that person could add a back door.
The web browser and suite are named Navigator and Communicator respectively, not Netscape. They could have named the browser Mozilla Navigator and the suite Mozilla Communicator...which would have fixed the Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox issue. Note that donating Netscape would not have. It just would have changed from Mozilla to Netscape Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox.
Kingston memory comes with a lifetime warranty where it's the lifetime of production. I.e. they stop making the product, they won't replace it for you (ignoring exceptions). Since they end of life products regularly, this means that most of their lifetime warranties are shorter than five years.
I used to read a lot of warranties in computer parts, and at the time, that kind of lifetime warranty was common. Kingston is just the company that I remember offering it. To understand what a company means by lifetime, you always have to read the fine print.
"b) To not have their trademark examined (and posssibly anulled) by the court" ...in that case. Microsoft bought their way out of that particular mess, but they set a precedent that they will buy people out without fully testing the legal issues. I'm still waiting for SCO to release SCO Windows.
"My point is, if OSS wants to become a desktop alternative, rather than a good solution in specific niches, it needs to be innovative rather than mearly redo existing feature sets."
Yes, because proprietary software is so innovative.
MS Windows does the exact same thing for which you castigate open source. They find an area where someone is doing something and copy it. MS DOS was copied from CP/M. MS Windows was copied from MacOS. IE was copied from Netscape. IIS was copied from Netscape Server.
It's not so easy to come up with an idea that is truly innovative. Notice how both Newton and Leibniz arrived at Calculus at roughly the same time (a couple millenia after Archimedes' Method of Exhaustion). How innovative could calculus really have been? Further, if someone does do something innovative, it doesn't necessarily mean that they will see success in any reasonable time frame.
It's not that long since a Van Gogh sold as the most expensive painting ever. However, during his lifetime, his innovative paintings didn't sell a single copy. OpenOffice has an innovative XML based file format...which I almost never use in favor of the more interchangeable MS formats.
By its very nature, *innovative* is the niche filler. Once it appears in the niche, it can be generalized out to the populace. Take VCRs for example. I remember when they were for afficianados only, a niche. Now, almost everyone owns a VCR. Further, notice how the innovative (and technically superior) Betamax was beaten by the easily copied VHS. Dell copied the IBM PC and is huge. Apple went its own way and is a niche player.
"like emails that are encrypted"
http://www.hushmail.com/ already provides this.
In the US, they just put the trailer on the train, not the whole truck (may be what you meant, but I read your post as saying that they put the cab of the truck on the train as well).
Also happens if you use something that logs console I/O so that you can remember what you did later (e.g. what configure options you used when installing a program). Instead of showing the final result, it shows with the mistake, the control characters, and the correction, just like your teh^H^Hhe example.
Put the notifiers in the cars and give each the speed that it needs to go to hit the light just as it turns green. Since there are still lights, it still works for old vehicles (without the notifiers). However, it still puts more info in the hands of the traffic light to control when the light is on/off. Note that to really work properly, the cars need to advertise which direction they're going, so it needs GPS functionality with routing as well.
Something like this might eliminate the idiocy of pulling up to a light at an empty road, stopping, waiting for the sensor to register your presence, wait for the light to actually change, and finally proceeding. Not the full automation shown here, but it opens the possibility of adding it on certain roads in another twenty years or so. The technology would help emergency vehicles immediately (i.e. if the road signals are opened for emergency vehicles before they pass).
The cars following magnets idea might work (for a demo) with places that have bus bypasses. The magnet enabled cars could be allowed to run on the bus lanes.
"If it had been a launder of money for an orginized crime outfit"
ObNitPick: The whole point of money laundering schemes is to turn illegitimate income into legitimate income. This leaves them with illegitimate money (because it is from the sale of child porn). Whatever this was, it wasn't money laundering. Anyway, murder is easier to investigate than an internet crime (more physical evidence). I applaud the poster for taking the risk.
Btw, I wouldn't consider what this poster did to be vigilantism. Alerting site managers to objectionable content on their servers is just good citizenship. Vigilantism is cracking their web server and scrapping the hard drive with low level read/writes.