As Disreali once noted, nobody can say where night ends and day begins, but it doesn't mean there isn't a difference between them.
Day and night aren't such clearly defined concepts, that is the problem there. It is however relatively easy to draw a very clear line:
The moment the bit of sun climbs over the horizon is where the day starts and the night ends.
For practical purposes, we defined 2 inbetween states, morning and evening.
So sorry, despite Disreali and the in itself interesting subject, it holds no relevance to the situation because it is substantially different. Even when you want to argue that this difference is irrelevant, it is still not a good analogy for making your case because for the purpose of clarity one can very easily define such a line on a point that completely relates to the differences between day and night.
The law ends up having to draw a sharp line between night and day, which by implication necessarily involves making all kinds of absurd distinctions between situations that are very close to each other, but happen to be on either side of that line.
As shown above, no absurd distinctions have to be made for drawing such a line when it comes to day and night. You sure it still applies?
The problem here is much simpler however:
In order to obtain a patent, novelty and non-obviousness should have to be proven beyond any such doubts. In case of doubt the patent should be denied, not awarded. The fact that it is awarded puts unreasonable strain and cost on society without achieving anything valuable (other then potential proffit for a specific company, but that is really ot the purpose of the patent system).
Is this what current patent law says? maybe not.. It is clearly what the founding fathers and writers of the constitution had in mind however (read their discussion regarding patents as well as the actual text in the constitution for reference)
The problem of this patent with regards to current law seems simple:
All parts that make up such a system are pre-existing (prior art) and the reason for combining them is well known. This wualifies for obviousness I'd say.
In the mid 90s, I went to a big store near where I live to buy a TV. Another nearby store was sellig the same TV for approx 10% less, but their service sucks.
I made the store where I bought it an offer of 7.5% below their price, and they accepted. THey asked why I did that, but noone looked funny at me, rather, the clerk had to check with his boss and then made the deal..
Oh, and if you ever get to places in South East Asia, people won't look funny at you at all for sucha thing, rather, they laugh their ass off behind your back for not doing it (you often end up paying twice or more of what you should)
At any rate, that such concepts can be patented is one of the best signs I've seen so far that the USPTO approves things that it really really shouldn't, and again makes me doubt the level of understanding and intelligence of those who approved this patent.
Prior art + prior well known motivation == obvious in the legal sense. Both clearly exist in this case (not to mention the concept is obvious in the common sense of the word as well)
Making use of a patented invention, regardless if it is for selling or for your own private use, infringes on that patent, unless you have the appropriate licence.
You see, as long as you do this development in secret, you can come to market with your product before your competition has the slightest clue about your invention.
Obtaining a patent however means publishing your invention, and enables those with much bigger pockets to ignore or fight your patent untill it becomes irrelevant.
I think those who desire a privilege have to show they are worthy of the privilege, not the other way around.
You may have failed to notice that Switserland has quite a name in development of drugs and such, and at least till recently had a rather weak patent system.
After all, the patent system was created to reduce trade secrecy and and encourage invention, and it certainly does that, however imperfectly.
Not at all.
The patent system in its original incarnation predates the USA by many centuries and was created to give the king control over inventions and their use.
The idea was reused for other purposes (promoting invention), but that is from a much more recent time, and one can seriously debate how well this works (I'm not suggesting it never works, but I am saying that it has caused substantial delays in introduction of usefull inventions in quite a few cases, including the steam engine, television, and even something as old as a sawmill)
You do realize that before a patent is awarded (and a short time thereafter), there is no property for other people to lament the restrictions applied to?
I'm sure that a competing inventor being an hour late at the patent office will agree with your argument...
Also, as someone else mentioned already, my brain, hands and tools aremine, that property already exists. Patents limit what I can do with those.
So you believe an inventor should invest their time/money/talent into something and just sit and hope they can make money off of it before some well-monied schmoe takes it and pumps the crap out of it, forcing our poorer inventor(s) to get next to nothing for their efforts?
Lets see...
The 'poor' inventors in the current situation will have to fight those trying to hijack their patents in court. Being poor is going to be a big obstacle for that. Also, they have to deal with others being able to prevent them from making use of their invention due to existing patents.
If you want to see how well a real inventor did, what it took to actually get the recognition he deserved, and how good this works for society, I suggest you look at the invention of television. The slashdot blurb had a pointer to an easy to read and understand article about this.
There are many more examples of this.
Arguing that patents protect the poor inventor is simply utter bullshit, they protect big corporations which have the money to defend them, and which have in many cases the money to hijack inventions from small inventors and get away with it because of having much bigger legal funds.
There are some very specific cases where patents make a lot of sense, but there is also a strong correlation between weak patents and a high rate of inventions.
There is no correlation between strong patents and an increase in inventions.
People have been inventing things for a long long time. Patents have been around for quite some time, and definitely longer then the last 100 years. Arguing that introducing patents encouraged inventions is nice, but there is simply no historical proof for this whatsoever. There are however many historical cases where patents prevented an invention from being used for decades. Thos examples go back to at least the early 1600s in Europe. Some references:
The non obvious test doesn't work because of the legal definition of 'obvious'. It is considered to be a combination of prior art and documented motivation for combining that prior art. The part about it being obvious to someone knowledgable in the field of the invention has been conveniently ignored because it is a very difficult thing for a court to deal with. (it quickly gets reduced to a yes/no argument between experts)
Smart cards CAN be used for fully secured transactions over untrusted networks but unfortunately, aren't. Consider a smart card and a digital 'wallet' that is actually a simple terminal into the card. Your 'PIN' is actually just a password to log in to your own card.
They are being used in parts of Europe, and have been for some time. From what I understand, the system is now mandatory in the UK.
Being first to market, others needing time to figure out what you did and how it works give you a time advantage already.. Don't see any problem there.
Regardless, there may be some very very specific areas where patents make sense, but that doesn't mean that every field of technology or every inmvention has to be bothered by it really.
Patents also give time benefits. They speed up the invention process by encouraging investment.
That is an assumption, not a proven fact.
Also, investment != speed of invention. It has a relation, but if you believe that throwing money at a problem is enough to invent a solution, I suggest you go look into the invention of television. It is a simplistic way of looking at things that ignores reality in quite some cases.
You can have companies spend millions or even billions of dollars to get new technology out next year (and give them sole rights for 20 years), or you can wait 50 years until a person develops the technology in his spare time. The benefit for the company is a short term monopoly, the benefit for society is 30 extra years with the invention.
There is no proof of that, again, this is an assumption.
There is no system to compare with to see which works better. There are however quite some cases where the patent system van be shown to have delayed the availability of inventions for decades. (Farnsworth and the TV once more, but for something really interesting, try to find some information about a Dutch guy called 'Leegwater' and the invention of the windmill driven pump and sawmill in the 1500s or early 1600s)
Hmm, I suppose you intended to reply to the parent of my post? at any rate, I agree with you, and I rather think that a patent system should cover those specific cases only.
You are basically asking someone to prove a negative.
Not at all. I asked for showing cause and effect.
The factual record is that there was more economic growth in 100 years than there was in the previous 1000. Patents were a key component of that. You can hypothesize that it would have happened without the modern patent system, but the fact is that it didn't.
I'm not a historian, especially not a historian of patent law. I can't give you data. Sorry. Call yourself the winner of the argument if you like.
I won't and that wasn't the point of my post really.
But I do know that the rate of inventions increased dramatically in the past couple of hundred years. The United States was a dramatic mover in technology from its inception as a country. Perhaps it's a coincidence that the US also had a strong notion of patents (inherited from England, another patent-awarding country and producer of many of the Industrial Revolution's first advances).
There are 2 things that coincide. That may point at a relationship, but does not in any way say that one caused the other, it merely makes it a possibility. It doesn't even say that there is such a relationship by definition.
One can as easily argue that patents are the result of those with some political or economic power wanting to have some control over inventions.
In the end it is very simple. In order to claim that patents are effective, one has to show cause and effect, not a mere coincidence.
It's equally possible that the existence of patents doesn't provide any incentive to potential inventors. I think the truth is somewhere in between, but the main point is that the frequency of multiple independent invention doesn't really say anything one way or the other about the efficacy of patents as motivators for creating and publishing new ideas.
What it does say is that most inventions do not take unique capabilities or unique ideas, and that the temporary economic monopoly in quite a few cases gets assigned to the random inventor who happens to be at the patent office first, and not by definition to the one who put in the most efford, made the best variation on the invention, made the best documentation or anything like that.
What is more, if you look at the RCA vs Farnsworth battle about TV, patents can in fact delay the introduction of an invention by decades easily.
In other words, independent creation of invention occurs in part because the economic incentive of patents encourages many people to work on the problem simultaneously.
Care to provide any kind of proof that patents have anything to do with this whatsoever?
Without that encouragement, perhaps none of them would have worked on the telephone and it might not have happened until much later.
Perhaps, most likely, there would be a zillion other incentives to still invent those things.
People have been inventing stuff for thousands of years before anyone came up with the silly idea of patents, there is really no reason whatsoever to assume that inventions somehow depend on patents.
Interestingly enough, I have the originals of Elite for both the Spectrum and the C64, both bought almost inmediately after release of the game, and both without this device.
On the C64 it took years before a well working cracked version of the game appeared. There was an early cracked version by YAK (supposedly that was Jeff Minter, but I'm not sure about this claim).
The game was somewhat encrypted (xor with the previous 'decrypted' byte) and had a nice loader that sat in a rather voletile part of memory (ie, trying to somehow interupt the loading and decryption would destroy the loader and part of the initial game code. Also, the game needed almost all memory available, making it difficult to intorduce extra code to get around this.
In the late 80s a well working cracked version appeared (by TWH) including an editor for the command files. This version was produced with help of a final cardridge 3 (allowed to have a monitor outside of normal system memory). The cracked version was unencrypted and had a small extra (supersized cargo bay)
I lost interest in the spectrum version because my spectrum gave up. Have been playing the C64 version till the early 90s. It is most likely the game I spent most time on.
With 2k and a 6502 in there, you could actually run usefull software on a 1541. I remember writing a small database program for the C64 that had the drive execute queries and return the results instead of having the C64 do that. Also, I remember using it for offloading half of the calculations for making nice fractal images.
Following that reasoning, opening a bank account is not private. I understand what you are trying to say, but I disagree with the reasoning.
I DO understand why debt registration is not entirely private and protected as such, there are reasons that concern both you and society as a whole for this. Following from that, I also see how it isn't entirely private that you solve that debt. However, if you do that with one single transfer, 1000 small ones, or whatever is entirely your business and noone elses.
I am sorry, but all your explanations have not convinced me or imho even given a somewhat reasonable argument as to why this should not be considered completely private for as long as it is clear how you obtained the money for it. As said already, checing the income side of things is enough for that.
It is not about the fact that you have debt or not, it is about how you solve that debt with money you already have and that has already been checked.
Also, your explanations fail to make any argument as to why this should result in funds being blocked.
Even though the social security systems in Europe are well working *now*, it is unlikely that they will keep working for the next decades. The main reason is the drastic aging of the population in Europe - it is becoming harder and harder for the ever-shrinking population in productive age to sustain the ever-growing elderly population.
That is solvable however by letting people work longer. Makes sense also, people live longer. It is not very popular of course, but it is bound to happen anyway.
Also, pensions are only one side of the story, and failure of that part does not mean that for example unemployment related social security cannot work.
You can't dismiss the "indestinguishable" problem, the IRS as a third party does not know. More importantly whether or not there is taxable income is something the IRS can determine on it's own, the constitution does not require the IRS to take the recipients word. The constitution specifically grants the government the power to pass laws to enact it's other powers. So with the power to tax comes the power to investigate anything that could *potentially* be taxable.
I do understand the problems of things being difficult to differentiate, but that is really no excuse to investigate everything.
The problem with that reasoning is very simple.
The government also has the power to make laws that declare something a crime, and the power to investigate.
Since in many cases it isn't obvious that someone is commiting a crim, followign your reasoning, they can investigate everything and everyone at any gfiven time.
Its the same kind of reasoning that makes people give up many of their rights nowadays so they are supposedly more secure. The government has a duty to protecxt us, also against terrorists. SInce they can't tell a terrorist from a non terrorist, they should have the power to tap everyone no?
Sorry but unless you want to have a totalitarian government, you should be extremely carefull with blindly extending the rights granted to the government. The default is ALWAYS that they do NOT have the right, UNLESS it is specifically and explicitly mentioned in the constitution. Explicit means that 'implied' is simply NOT enough.
If there is a practical problem with this implementiation, they should rathe look for a way to solve the practical problem instead of extending their rights.
Slashdot Mirror
As Disreali once noted, nobody can say where night ends and day begins, but it doesn't mean there isn't a difference between them.
Day and night aren't such clearly defined concepts, that is the problem there. It is however relatively easy to draw a very clear line:
The moment the bit of sun climbs over the horizon is where the day starts and the night ends.
For practical purposes, we defined 2 inbetween states, morning and evening.
So sorry, despite Disreali and the in itself interesting subject, it holds no relevance to the situation because it is substantially different. Even when you want to argue that this difference is irrelevant, it is still not a good analogy for making your case because for the purpose of clarity one can very easily define such a line on a point that completely relates to the differences between day and night.
The law ends up having to draw a sharp line between night and day, which by implication necessarily involves making all kinds of absurd distinctions between situations that are very close to each other, but happen to be on either side of that line.
As shown above, no absurd distinctions have to be made for drawing such a line when it comes to day and night. You sure it still applies?
The problem here is much simpler however:
In order to obtain a patent, novelty and non-obviousness should have to be proven beyond any such doubts. In case of doubt the patent should be denied, not awarded. The fact that it is awarded puts unreasonable strain and cost on society without achieving anything valuable (other then potential proffit for a specific company, but that is really ot the purpose of the patent system).
Is this what current patent law says? maybe not.. It is clearly what the founding fathers and writers of the constitution had in mind however (read their discussion regarding patents as well as the actual text in the constitution for reference)
The problem of this patent with regards to current law seems simple:
All parts that make up such a system are pre-existing (prior art) and the reason for combining them is well known. This wualifies for obviousness I'd say.
In the mid 90s, I went to a big store near where I live to buy a TV. Another nearby store was sellig the same TV for approx 10% less, but their service sucks.
I made the store where I bought it an offer of 7.5% below their price, and they accepted. THey asked why I did that, but noone looked funny at me, rather, the clerk had to check with his boss and then made the deal..
Oh, and if you ever get to places in South East Asia, people won't look funny at you at all for sucha thing, rather, they laugh their ass off behind your back for not doing it (you often end up paying twice or more of what you should)
At any rate, that such concepts can be patented is one of the best signs I've seen so far that the USPTO approves things that it really really shouldn't, and again makes me doubt the level of understanding and intelligence of those who approved this patent.
Prior art + prior well known motivation == obvious in the legal sense. Both clearly exist in this case (not to mention the concept is obvious in the common sense of the word as well)
You are mistaken.
Making use of a patented invention, regardless if it is for selling or for your own private use, infringes on that patent, unless you have the appropriate licence.
And patents prevent that?
I'm sure mr. Farnsworth agrees with you....
You see, as long as you do this development in secret, you can come to market with your product before your competition has the slightest clue about your invention.
Obtaining a patent however means publishing your invention, and enables those with much bigger pockets to ignore or fight your patent untill it becomes irrelevant.
I think those who desire a privilege have to show they are worthy of the privilege, not the other way around.
You may have failed to notice that Switserland has quite a name in development of drugs and such, and at least till recently had a rather weak patent system.
After all, the patent system was created to reduce trade secrecy and and encourage invention, and it certainly does that, however imperfectly.
Not at all.
The patent system in its original incarnation predates the USA by many centuries and was created to give the king control over inventions and their use.
The idea was reused for other purposes (promoting invention), but that is from a much more recent time, and one can seriously debate how well this works (I'm not suggesting it never works, but I am saying that it has caused substantial delays in introduction of usefull inventions in quite a few cases, including the steam engine, television, and even something as old as a sawmill)
The problem is that obvious in this context doesn't mean what you think it does.
See this discussion for some more information.
You do realize that before a patent is awarded (and a short time thereafter), there is no property for other people to lament the restrictions applied to?
8 97559
8 97725
I'm sure that a competing inventor being an hour late at the patent office will agree with your argument...
Also, as someone else mentioned already, my brain, hands and tools aremine, that property already exists. Patents limit what I can do with those.
So you believe an inventor should invest their time/money/talent into something and just sit and hope they can make money off of it before some well-monied schmoe takes it and pumps the crap out of it, forcing our poorer inventor(s) to get next to nothing for their efforts?
Lets see...
The 'poor' inventors in the current situation will have to fight those trying to hijack their patents in court. Being poor is going to be a big obstacle for that. Also, they have to deal with others being able to prevent them from making use of their invention due to existing patents.
If you want to see how well a real inventor did, what it took to actually get the recognition he deserved, and how good this works for society, I suggest you look at the invention of television. The slashdot blurb had a pointer to an easy to read and understand article about this.
There are many more examples of this.
Arguing that patents protect the poor inventor is simply utter bullshit, they protect big corporations which have the money to defend them, and which have in many cases the money to hijack inventions from small inventors and get away with it because of having much bigger legal funds.
There are some very specific cases where patents make a lot of sense, but there is also a strong correlation between weak patents and a high rate of inventions.
There is no correlation between strong patents and an increase in inventions.
People have been inventing things for a long long time. Patents have been around for quite some time, and definitely longer then the last 100 years. Arguing that introducing patents encouraged inventions is nice, but there is simply no historical proof for this whatsoever. There are however many historical cases where patents prevented an invention from being used for decades. Thos examples go back to at least the early 1600s in Europe.
Some references:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=179900&cid=14
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=179900&cid=14
And again, the Farnsworth case. (see the slashdot blurb for a nice pointer to that)
All in all, there is basicly no proof underlying your argument, while there is substantial proof of that argument being wrong.
The non obvious test doesn't work because of the legal definition of 'obvious'. It is considered to be a combination of prior art and documented motivation for combining that prior art. The part about it being obvious to someone knowledgable in the field of the invention has been conveniently ignored because it is a very difficult thing for a court to deal with. (it quickly gets reduced to a yes/no argument between experts)
Smart cards CAN be used for fully secured transactions over untrusted networks but unfortunately, aren't. Consider a smart card and a digital 'wallet' that is actually a simple terminal into the card. Your 'PIN' is actually just a password to log in to your own card.
They are being used in parts of Europe, and have been for some time.
From what I understand, the system is now mandatory in the UK.
Its sad that this story repeats itself over and over isn't it?
Thanks for the interesting read.
Being first to market, others needing time to figure out what you did and how it works give you a time advantage already.. Don't see any problem there.
Regardless, there may be some very very specific areas where patents make sense, but that doesn't mean that every field of technology or every inmvention has to be bothered by it really.
Patents also give time benefits. They speed up the invention process by encouraging investment.
That is an assumption, not a proven fact.
Also, investment != speed of invention. It has a relation, but if you believe that throwing money at a problem is enough to invent a solution, I suggest you go look into the invention of television. It is a simplistic way of looking at things that ignores reality in quite some cases.
You can have companies spend millions or even billions of dollars to get new technology out next year (and give them sole rights for 20 years), or you can wait 50 years until a person develops the technology in his spare time. The benefit for the company is a short term monopoly, the benefit for society is 30 extra years with the invention.
There is no proof of that, again, this is an assumption.
There is no system to compare with to see which works better. There are however quite some cases where the patent system van be shown to have delayed the availability of inventions for decades. (Farnsworth and the TV once more, but for something really interesting, try to find some information about a Dutch guy called 'Leegwater' and the invention of the windmill driven pump and sawmill in the 1500s or early 1600s)
Hmm, I suppose you intended to reply to the parent of my post? at any rate, I agree with you, and I rather think that a patent system should cover those specific cases only.
You are basically asking someone to prove a negative.
Not at all. I asked for showing cause and effect.
The factual record is that there was more economic growth in 100 years than there was in the previous 1000. Patents were a key component of that. You can hypothesize that it would have happened without the modern patent system, but the fact is that it didn't.
See this post
I'm not a historian, especially not a historian of patent law. I can't give you data. Sorry. Call yourself the winner of the argument if you like.
I won't and that wasn't the point of my post really.
But I do know that the rate of inventions increased dramatically in the past couple of hundred years. The United States was a dramatic mover in technology from its inception as a country. Perhaps it's a coincidence that the US also had a strong notion of patents (inherited from England, another patent-awarding country and producer of many of the Industrial Revolution's first advances).
There are 2 things that coincide. That may point at a relationship, but does not in any way say that one caused the other, it merely makes it a possibility. It doesn't even say that there is such a relationship by definition.
One can as easily argue that patents are the result of those with some political or economic power wanting to have some control over inventions.
In the end it is very simple. In order to claim that patents are effective, one has to show cause and effect, not a mere coincidence.
It's equally possible that the existence of patents doesn't provide any incentive to potential inventors. I think the truth is somewhere in between, but the main point is that the frequency of multiple independent invention doesn't really say anything one way or the other about the efficacy of patents as motivators for creating and publishing new ideas.
What it does say is that most inventions do not take unique capabilities or unique ideas, and that the temporary economic monopoly in quite a few cases gets assigned to the random inventor who happens to be at the patent office first, and not by definition to the one who put in the most efford, made the best variation on the invention, made the best documentation or anything like that.
What is more, if you look at the RCA vs Farnsworth battle about TV, patents can in fact delay the introduction of an invention by decades easily.
In other words, independent creation of invention occurs in part because the economic incentive of patents encourages many people to work on the problem simultaneously.
Care to provide any kind of proof that patents have anything to do with this whatsoever?
Without that encouragement, perhaps none of them would have worked on the telephone and it might not have happened until much later.
Perhaps, most likely, there would be a zillion other incentives to still invent those things.
People have been inventing stuff for thousands of years before anyone came up with the silly idea of patents, there is really no reason whatsoever to assume that inventions somehow depend on patents.
Interestingly enough, I have the originals of Elite for both the Spectrum and the C64, both bought almost inmediately after release of the game, and both without this device.
On the C64 it took years before a well working cracked version of the game appeared. There was an early cracked version by YAK (supposedly that was Jeff Minter, but I'm not sure about this claim).
The game was somewhat encrypted (xor with the previous 'decrypted' byte) and had a nice loader that sat in a rather voletile part of memory (ie, trying to somehow interupt the loading and decryption would destroy the loader and part of the initial game code. Also, the game needed almost all memory available, making it difficult to intorduce extra code to get around this.
In the late 80s a well working cracked version appeared (by TWH) including an editor for the command files. This version was produced with help of a final cardridge 3 (allowed to have a monitor outside of normal system memory). The cracked version was unencrypted and had a small extra (supersized cargo bay)
I lost interest in the spectrum version because my spectrum gave up. Have been playing the C64 version till the early 90s. It is most likely the game I spent most time on.
With 2k and a 6502 in there, you could actually run usefull software on a 1541. I remember writing a small database program for the C64 that had the drive execute queries and return the results instead of having the C64 do that. Also, I remember using it for offloading half of the calculations for making nice fractal images.
Following that reasoning, opening a bank account is not private. I understand what you are trying to say, but I disagree with the reasoning.
I DO understand why debt registration is not entirely private and protected as such, there are reasons that concern both you and society as a whole for this. Following from that, I also see how it isn't entirely private that you solve that debt. However, if you do that with one single transfer, 1000 small ones, or whatever is entirely your business and noone elses.
I am sorry, but all your explanations have not convinced me or imho even given a somewhat reasonable argument as to why this should not be considered completely private for as long as it is clear how you obtained the money for it. As said already, checing the income side of things is enough for that.
It is not about the fact that you have debt or not, it is about how you solve that debt with money you already have and that has already been checked.
Also, your explanations fail to make any argument as to why this should result in funds being blocked.
Even though the social security systems in Europe are well working *now*, it is unlikely that they will keep working for the next decades. The main reason is the drastic aging of the population in Europe - it is becoming harder and harder for the ever-shrinking population in productive age to sustain the ever-growing elderly population.
That is solvable however by letting people work longer. Makes sense also, people live longer. It is not very popular of course, but it is bound to happen anyway.
Also, pensions are only one side of the story, and failure of that part does not mean that for example unemployment related social security cannot work.
You can't dismiss the "indestinguishable" problem, the IRS as a third party does not know. More importantly whether or not there is taxable income is something the IRS can determine on it's own, the constitution does not require the IRS to take the recipients word. The constitution specifically grants the government the power to pass laws to enact it's other powers. So with the power to tax comes the power to investigate anything that could *potentially* be taxable.
I do understand the problems of things being difficult to differentiate, but that is really no excuse to investigate everything.
The problem with that reasoning is very simple.
The government also has the power to make laws that declare something a crime, and the power to investigate.
Since in many cases it isn't obvious that someone is commiting a crim, followign your reasoning, they can investigate everything and everyone at any gfiven time.
Its the same kind of reasoning that makes people give up many of their rights nowadays so they are supposedly more secure. The government has a duty to protecxt us, also against terrorists. SInce they can't tell a terrorist from a non terrorist, they should have the power to tap everyone no?
Sorry but unless you want to have a totalitarian government, you should be extremely carefull with blindly extending the rights granted to the government. The default is ALWAYS that they do NOT have the right, UNLESS it is specifically and explicitly mentioned in the constitution. Explicit means that 'implied' is simply NOT enough.
If there is a practical problem with this implementiation, they should rathe look for a way to solve the practical problem instead of extending their rights.
You missed Madrid and London?
Ah yes, fewer people died, and unsurprisingly, people in Europe are a bit more used to such things so shock wasn't anywhere comparable.
Regardless, those were 2 major actions after the 2 you mentioned.
You must also be ignoring many of the attacks going on in Iraq, having killed lots and lots of people.
But hey, I'm sure that when you want to believe the party line, those are all irrelevant incidents or lies...