most organizations think that they are better than their competitors, even though statistically that simply cannot be true
Most organisations also think they have "the best" staff, which also statistically cannot be true. It is especially unlikely to be true if all their hires are entry level since the hires will have no basis for comparison and will be more likely to think they're pretty good because they can keep pace with the other Joe Averages in the place.
if the judge had ordered ICANN (an American corporation) to pull the plug on the domain, it most definitely would have affected them
There were two reasons given by the court for not issuing the requested order:
You haven't even established facts that would give this court jurisdiction to issue the order, you bonehead; and
Even if this court did have jurisdiction to issue that kind of order against a non-party, it would be way too broad in relation to the conduct.
For me (as it was for the court) the most important part was lack of jurisdiction to issue an injunction restraining a third party who is not acting in a closely connected way for the purpose of furthering the conduct of the defendant.
But can you expect a judge to be as technically savvy as anyone in IT, given the broad range of cases they must try?
Many superior courts have discipline-specific lists where the judges hearing cases on the list are those who have greater expertise in the area. In the New South Wales Supreme Court they have discipline specific lists for Criminal Law, Administrative Law, Probate, Commercial Law, Admiralty (matters involving ships) and Protective matters (welfare). Computer law is an area justifying the creation of specialist lists and the appointment of judges with suitable skills to go on such a list. It is not a prerequisite to this for there to be enough matters in the specialty area to keep the judge busy since a judge on the specialty list can still take cases from the general list.
It makes sense because we are being told that humans are causing the temps to "explode" over the last hundred years or so. But how then could the temps be warmer 10+K years ago? Why were the temps so high back then?
They weren't - they were colder. All they're saying is that they've examined evidence of temperatures over that period, and this is the warmest time in the entire period. They haven't reached any definite conclusions about earlier periods, although their tentative conclusions are that now is the warmest time since a lot more than 12,000 years ago (I think the tentative conclusions covered hundreds of thousands of years).
From TFA:
The most important result found by these researchers is that the warming in recent decades has brought global temperature to a level within about one degree Celsius (1.8F) of the maximum temperature of the past million years. According to Hansen, "That means that further global warming of 1 degree Celsius defines a critical level. If warming is kept less than that, effects of global warming may be relatively manageable. During the warmest interglacial periods the Earth was reasonably similar to today. But if further global warming reaches 2 or 3 degrees Celsius, we will likely see changes that make Earth a different planet than the one we know. The last time it was that warm was in the middle Pliocene, about three million years ago, when sea level was estimated to have been about 25 meters (80 feet) higher than today."
At current rates of warming, we will pass that stage in a little over 30 years, however the rate is not constant, it is accelerating. Accounting for the acceleration we could discount to 20 years or less. So what they're saying is that 2 years from now we are likely to have average temperatures not seen in 3 million years.
A 3-D reference atlas of the genes that are active in the mouse brain is now complete
Obviously they could only have mapped the portion of the mouse that intrudes into our dimension. Being transdimensional superior creatures, there's no way limited creatures in our dimension could get access to the most important parts of the mouse brain.
It wasn't even new then. There's an entire breed, called Siberians, that have been known to have this quality. All that seems to have happened here is selective cross-breading to get it into other more conventional species.
I see no reason for us all to feel sentimental for something being "retired" (anthropomorphism anyone?) that existed on this earth for the sole reason of killing human beings.
Pure fighter aircraft are defensive weaponry, not offensive weaponry. They are used in the first instance to intercept bombers. Of course if you know your bombers are going to be intercepted you will deploy fighters alongside your bombers to intercept the fighters intercepting your bombers, but even in that case they are defending the bomber, not attacking enemy infrastructure in their own right.
Only to somebody who's not a low-level kind of person. My interpretation is at least as valid as yours.
unless you then went on to implement your own C compiler, operating system, Ethernet drives...
That's just silly, none of these things would be correctly - or even casually - described as "libraries". You're really going to extremes to try to support your claim that your interpretation is the only possible one.
"3-4 hours" is also a pretty big clue as well
Not really - a competent C++ programmer with basic knowledge of the Linux system calls interface, using GNU C++ as the compiler could easily produce a basic web server that used no libraries whatsoever (even standard libraries) in this time.
Your approach is basically saying "hahaha, you guys suck, you don't even know what's implemented as libraries in a C++ program, so I'm going to show you up by saying it can't be done"
Hardly, since I'm saying it can be done within the limitations as I interpret them, and somebody who can do this within those limitation is going to be far more valuable than somebody who can't.
You've shown that you'd be very difficult to work with.
On the contrary, it is you who has shown this about yourself. One of the most difficult kinds of people to have on a team is somebody who cannot accept the possibility of somebody else disagreeing with them without either being definitively wrong. Such people can screw up a project like you would not believe. They usually insist on not using classes written by other people, preferring to write their own because the others are done the "wrong" way, they won't take feedback from management, let alone their peers, and will then really foul up their own contributions. The best thing to do with such people is fire them as soon as possible, and it is my policy to do so - it keeps the rest of the team much happier.
It is well known that natural language is imprecise and often susceptible to more than one meaning - this is one of the greatest problems that courts of law have to deal with. I prefer my interpretation. You prefer yours. That does not make either one necessarily the only valid interpretation.
The words used by the poster were "no external libraries of any kind", not "no libraries of any kind". All that stuff in the standard C/C++ libraries is PART OF THE LANGUAGE
I take "of any kind" to mean not even standard libraries. I take "external" to mean libraries not written as part of this exercise, so that you can write functionality that might otherwise have been found in a library. Since C++ can compile code that might otherwise look like C there's no need to use C++ language features, but many C++ language features do not require any support from the initialisation code. Your interpretation focuses on the word "external", but leaves "of any kind" otiose. The use of the phrase "of any kind" appears to be a deliberate choice and an interpretation that gives those words some useful meaning should be preferred.
Part of the point of the question may have been to determine if the candidate understands that some of these things that look like basic language features are actually libraries (to see if they are the sort of people who go a little deeper than basic text book knowledge). You would be surprised how many C programmers don't know that "printf" involves a library call. This can be worse with novice C++ programmers since "new" is a library call unless you have written your own implementation of new and delete, but it looks like standard syntax.
Heck, you SHOULD be able to write it all in 3-4 hours using nothing but system calls, no section (3) library calls at all.
Of course unless you're using inline assembly to make those system calls, there's still a library in between you and the kernel. If somebody says "no libraries of any kind", I take them at their word.
However they haven't said you can't assume you're launched by inetd. If it's just GET and HEAD, you're just up for parsing the "GET" request, and should be able to do it with only 5 system calls - read, write, stat, open, exit. I'd throw out all the incoming headers, check the incoming URL to make sure it has a leading '/' and no '/.', and just dump whatever file is there as the output or a stock error if there is none. The only headers output would be Content-Type ("text/html") and Content-Length. This would be possible in much less than 3-4 hours. Hell, you don't even need the C startup code - just make your main the program entry point.
in the case of GPL software, MS would argue that because the software itself is freely available, the author did not profit from it in any major way, and so is not suffering detriment to have it removed from the market.
They could argue it, but it wouldn't get them very far. The mere fact that somebody has put a lot of effort into building it is evidence of value (especially in a promissory estoppel case). Moreover, given that the person has chosen to give the software away, some of this value will be found in altruistic intent, and as this is not something that can be estimated in monetary terms, a court is more likely to find an estoppel, not less likely.
Still, if enough people violate these patents, then MS has no grounds on which to sue an individual, unless they show that they are defending their patent against all comers, right?
Wrong - selective enforcement of patents is not only legal, it's the normal course of things.
In the case of GPL software, somebody, somewhere is going to rely on this promise, and a consequence of this is there will be GPL software out there that effectively gives you something that should support an estoppel.
Having just read the text of the Microsoft promise, there is an argument (although not a strong one) that this may not be the case, however if that argument is successful, it would involve claiming that the promise as made is a contractual offer and so reliance on the promise while complying with its conditions would give rise to a contract. All you have to do to accept the promise as a contract is:
acknowledge... that no Microsoft rights are received from suppliers, distributors, or otherwise in connection with this promise; and
not file, maintain or voluntarily participate in a patent infringement lawsuit against a Microsoft implementation of such Covered Specification.
Acknowledgement... mental check. Not patent whoring... no problem.
the promise is only enforceable where reliance on it is reasonable
I'm trying to think of circumstances where reliance on a promise would be found to be unreasonable. Do you have a case that shows this? I suspect that if reliance was unreasonable then it wasn't a real promise in the first place, such as when the person has "promised" something over which they have no control or has used the word in circumstances where it should not be expected to be taken seriously (such as in a campaign for political office).
The question of whether it raises an estoppel (presumably, here, a promissory estoppel) depends on, among other things, the degree to which the reliance by the unlicensed user of the patent on the pledge to not enforce the patent is "reasonable", as well as consideration of whether injustice can be avoided by any other means than enforcing the promise.
As a statement of the law this is spot on, but it would have been more helpful to the person asking the question if you had applied it to a sample set of facts.
Note the requirement for reliance - this means you must at least have been aware of the promise. You (or at a minimum somebody you claim through) must have then acted, in reliance on the promise, in such a way that you would suffer a detriment if Microsoft resiled from the promise.
If, being aware of the promise, you produce any non-trivial amount of work depending on the patents, chances are that a court is going to be willing to impose a promissory estoppel. In the case of GPL software, somebody, somewhere is going to rely on this promise, and a consequence of this is there will be GPL software out there that effectively gives you something that should support an estoppel. It's going to be very difficult, if not impossible, for Microsoft to renege on this.
It is fairly safe* to take them at their word here.
OTOH, [plants] also require loads of sunlight, water and soil
Mean distances from Sun:
Earth: 1 A.U
Mars: 1.524 A.U
Mars:Earth ratio of sunlight per square metre: 1:1.542^2 = 1:2.378
The sunlight issue alone is not all that difficult - a sealed environment with sufficient biomass and prudent management could be brought into range by an arrangement of lenses and mirrors. Now you might say that if you're talking about a sealed environment, you can do that on Earth too, but let's see how long your environment remains sealed when you have crowds of starving, desperate people on the outside of your bubble.
Once a piece of code has been released under a license (such as the GPL), you cannot retroactively change that license (ie tell people they can no longer distribute it under that license)
That is not entirely correct. You can legally revoke a license at any time. "License" is just a legal term for "permission" or "consent", and you can withdraw permission and consent, and so can withdraw a license. Nevertheless, if you try enforcing that revocation in a court you are likely to run into issues of estoppel. In simple terms, if somebody has relied on the license in a way that would make it unconscionable for you to withdraw it, the court will hold you to the terms even though you may have revoked it.
With GPL software, where somebody else has relied on the license and produced non-trivially derivative works (or even non-derivative works that depend on the GPL software) then withdrawing the license would be unconscionable because they have expended significant effort (capital expenditure) in reliance on the license which is lost if the license to the original software is revoked. It may also be that if other people have refrained from developing equivalent software because of the existence of this particular GPL software, then it would be taken as unconscionable to withraw the license, at least until such time as equivalent software can be produced.
On the other hand, to use an extreme example, say you have produced something and released it under the GPL, but nobody has used it. You could revoke the GPL on that software at any time. You could also revoke the GPL at any time if there is a readily available substitute provided nobody has produced any derivative work.
While it is quite common to say that you cannot revoke the GPL on a piece of software once released, this is not literally true. While in many cases this will be the situation for all practical purposes, the general rule is more complex, and in the right circumstances it is possible to revoke it.
The "dickhead lawyer" happens to be Corporate Counsel- and he did it on the instructions of the CXO crowd in almost all cases.
I don't know where you're getting that from, but it's simply not true. If you look at these agreements as a lawyer it quickly becomes apparent that there's no way a non-lawyer could have requested much of the specific stuff in there since it requires a certain knowledge of the law to know what to ask for to get that result. These things are not becoming popular because CXOs are passing them around - when a customer asks for an employee NDA in an IP-heavy discipline lawyers are passing them around and are presenting them to their customers largely as a boilerplate. In some cases the agreement will have been prepared by the bar association and licensed to its members for this purpose - this is the quickest way for something new to become standard practice. Even if you have an internal "corporate counsel" a lot of things still get prepared externally, and this kind of thing is one of them (although usually if there is a lawyer at the CXO level it will get reviewed internally and this sort of overreaching canned).
There is a reason that law firms do this sort of thing - in Common Law jurisdictions they are trained in an adversarial tradition - everything is a competition in which you try to screw the most you possibly can out of your opponent and out of the system. This has been a huge problem in recent years with the move to alternative dispute resolution, particularly mediation - old school lawyers usually suck at it because they only look at the competition without taking account of down-the-line consequences.
I am of the CXO crowd but also a lawyer. We have just gotten one of these things prepared by our external lawyers and pointed out the impossibility of compliance with this particular clause, as well as pinging a whole lot of others for overreaching.
Slashdot Mirror
most organizations think that they are better than their competitors, even though statistically that simply cannot be true
Most organisations also think they have "the best" staff, which also statistically cannot be true. It is especially unlikely to be true if all their hires are entry level since the hires will have no basis for comparison and will be more likely to think they're pretty good because they can keep pace with the other Joe Averages in the place.
Come to Australia, we have plenty of land; though we could stand some more water
<div class="bogan" id="jwh">
Unless you're a reffo or towelhead. They you can bugger off 'cause we got no room for you.
</div>
if the judge had ordered ICANN (an American corporation) to pull the plug on the domain, it most definitely would have affected them
There were two reasons given by the court for not issuing the requested order:- You haven't even established facts that would give this court jurisdiction to issue the order, you bonehead; and
- Even if this court did have jurisdiction to issue that kind of order against a non-party, it would be way too broad in relation to the conduct.
For me (as it was for the court) the most important part was lack of jurisdiction to issue an injunction restraining a third party who is not acting in a closely connected way for the purpose of furthering the conduct of the defendant.But can you expect a judge to be as technically savvy as anyone in IT, given the broad range of cases they must try?
Many superior courts have discipline-specific lists where the judges hearing cases on the list are those who have greater expertise in the area. In the New South Wales Supreme Court they have discipline specific lists for Criminal Law, Administrative Law, Probate, Commercial Law, Admiralty (matters involving ships) and Protective matters (welfare). Computer law is an area justifying the creation of specialist lists and the appointment of judges with suitable skills to go on such a list. It is not a prerequisite to this for there to be enough matters in the specialty area to keep the judge busy since a judge on the specialty list can still take cases from the general list.
In a nutshell: I agree, the Illinois has no dick.
Obviously this is wrong - it has a huge dick who wears a black robe.
2 years from now
Ugh. 20 years. I meant 20 years!
It makes sense because we are being told that humans are causing the temps to "explode" over the last hundred years or so. But how then could the temps be warmer 10+K years ago? Why were the temps so high back then?
They weren't - they were colder. All they're saying is that they've examined evidence of temperatures over that period, and this is the warmest time in the entire period. They haven't reached any definite conclusions about earlier periods, although their tentative conclusions are that now is the warmest time since a lot more than 12,000 years ago (I think the tentative conclusions covered hundreds of thousands of years).
From TFA:
At current rates of warming, we will pass that stage in a little over 30 years, however the rate is not constant, it is accelerating. Accounting for the acceleration we could discount to 20 years or less. So what they're saying is that 2 years from now we are likely to have average temperatures not seen in 3 million years.
A 3-D reference atlas of the genes that are active in the mouse brain is now complete
Obviously they could only have mapped the portion of the mouse that intrudes into our dimension. Being transdimensional superior creatures, there's no way limited creatures in our dimension could get access to the most important parts of the mouse brain.
if holding a rabbit or petting a dog also gives you an allergy, getting a Siberian won't help at all
Actually, rabbits produce the same dominant allergen enzyme as cats, so if you are allergic to cats, you are probably also allergic to rabbits.
It wasn't even new then. There's an entire breed, called Siberians, that have been known to have this quality. All that seems to have happened here is selective cross-breading to get it into other more conventional species.
Does anyone know if this gene has a desired effect besides "make humans allergic to us"?
You don't think "keeping humans away" is enough of a positive side-effect in an animal gene?
I see no reason for us all to feel sentimental for something being "retired" (anthropomorphism anyone?) that existed on this earth for the sole reason of killing human beings.
Pure fighter aircraft are defensive weaponry, not offensive weaponry. They are used in the first instance to intercept bombers. Of course if you know your bombers are going to be intercepted you will deploy fighters alongside your bombers to intercept the fighters intercepting your bombers, but even in that case they are defending the bomber, not attacking enemy infrastructure in their own right.
A more obvious meaning for their request is...
Only to somebody who's not a low-level kind of person. My interpretation is at least as valid as yours.
unless you then went on to implement your own C compiler, operating system, Ethernet drives...
That's just silly, none of these things would be correctly - or even casually - described as "libraries". You're really going to extremes to try to support your claim that your interpretation is the only possible one.
"3-4 hours" is also a pretty big clue as well
Not really - a competent C++ programmer with basic knowledge of the Linux system calls interface, using GNU C++ as the compiler could easily produce a basic web server that used no libraries whatsoever (even standard libraries) in this time.
Your approach is basically saying "hahaha, you guys suck, you don't even know what's implemented as libraries in a C++ program, so I'm going to show you up by saying it can't be done"
Hardly, since I'm saying it can be done within the limitations as I interpret them, and somebody who can do this within those limitation is going to be far more valuable than somebody who can't.
You've shown that you'd be very difficult to work with.
On the contrary, it is you who has shown this about yourself. One of the most difficult kinds of people to have on a team is somebody who cannot accept the possibility of somebody else disagreeing with them without either being definitively wrong. Such people can screw up a project like you would not believe. They usually insist on not using classes written by other people, preferring to write their own because the others are done the "wrong" way, they won't take feedback from management, let alone their peers, and will then really foul up their own contributions. The best thing to do with such people is fire them as soon as possible, and it is my policy to do so - it keeps the rest of the team much happier.
It is well known that natural language is imprecise and often susceptible to more than one meaning - this is one of the greatest problems that courts of law have to deal with. I prefer my interpretation. You prefer yours. That does not make either one necessarily the only valid interpretation.
The words used by the poster were "no external libraries of any kind", not "no libraries of any kind". All that stuff in the standard C/C++ libraries is PART OF THE LANGUAGE
I take "of any kind" to mean not even standard libraries. I take "external" to mean libraries not written as part of this exercise, so that you can write functionality that might otherwise have been found in a library. Since C++ can compile code that might otherwise look like C there's no need to use C++ language features, but many C++ language features do not require any support from the initialisation code. Your interpretation focuses on the word "external", but leaves "of any kind" otiose. The use of the phrase "of any kind" appears to be a deliberate choice and an interpretation that gives those words some useful meaning should be preferred.
Part of the point of the question may have been to determine if the candidate understands that some of these things that look like basic language features are actually libraries (to see if they are the sort of people who go a little deeper than basic text book knowledge). You would be surprised how many C programmers don't know that "printf" involves a library call. This can be worse with novice C++ programmers since "new" is a library call unless you have written your own implementation of new and delete, but it looks like standard syntax.
Heck, you SHOULD be able to write it all in 3-4 hours using nothing but system calls, no section (3) library calls at all.
Of course unless you're using inline assembly to make those system calls, there's still a library in between you and the kernel. If somebody says "no libraries of any kind", I take them at their word.
However they haven't said you can't assume you're launched by inetd. If it's just GET and HEAD, you're just up for parsing the "GET" request, and should be able to do it with only 5 system calls - read, write, stat, open, exit. I'd throw out all the incoming headers, check the incoming URL to make sure it has a leading '/' and no '/.', and just dump whatever file is there as the output or a stock error if there is none. The only headers output would be Content-Type ("text/html") and Content-Length. This would be possible in much less than 3-4 hours. Hell, you don't even need the C startup code - just make your main the program entry point.
in the case of GPL software, MS would argue that because the software itself is freely available, the author did not profit from it in any major way, and so is not suffering detriment to have it removed from the market.
They could argue it, but it wouldn't get them very far. The mere fact that somebody has put a lot of effort into building it is evidence of value (especially in a promissory estoppel case). Moreover, given that the person has chosen to give the software away, some of this value will be found in altruistic intent, and as this is not something that can be estimated in monetary terms, a court is more likely to find an estoppel, not less likely.
Still, if enough people violate these patents, then MS has no grounds on which to sue an individual, unless they show that they are defending their patent against all comers, right?
Wrong - selective enforcement of patents is not only legal, it's the normal course of things.
In the case of GPL software, somebody, somewhere is going to rely on this promise, and a consequence of this is there will be GPL software out there that effectively gives you something that should support an estoppel.
Having just read the text of the Microsoft promise, there is an argument (although not a strong one) that this may not be the case, however if that argument is successful, it would involve claiming that the promise as made is a contractual offer and so reliance on the promise while complying with its conditions would give rise to a contract. All you have to do to accept the promise as a contract is:
Acknowledgement... mental check. Not patent whoring... no problem.
I know its true of trademarks, but I wasn't thinking of them. I'm pretty sure its true of patents as well.
It is not, although in the right circumstances, laches might apply (references can be found in other comments to this story).
the promise is only enforceable where reliance on it is reasonable
I'm trying to think of circumstances where reliance on a promise would be found to be unreasonable. Do you have a case that shows this? I suspect that if reliance was unreasonable then it wasn't a real promise in the first place, such as when the person has "promised" something over which they have no control or has used the word in circumstances where it should not be expected to be taken seriously (such as in a campaign for political office).
The question of whether it raises an estoppel (presumably, here, a promissory estoppel) depends on, among other things, the degree to which the reliance by the unlicensed user of the patent on the pledge to not enforce the patent is "reasonable", as well as consideration of whether injustice can be avoided by any other means than enforcing the promise.
As a statement of the law this is spot on, but it would have been more helpful to the person asking the question if you had applied it to a sample set of facts.
Note the requirement for reliance - this means you must at least have been aware of the promise. You (or at a minimum somebody you claim through) must have then acted, in reliance on the promise, in such a way that you would suffer a detriment if Microsoft resiled from the promise.
If, being aware of the promise, you produce any non-trivial amount of work depending on the patents, chances are that a court is going to be willing to impose a promissory estoppel. In the case of GPL software, somebody, somewhere is going to rely on this promise, and a consequence of this is there will be GPL software out there that effectively gives you something that should support an estoppel. It's going to be very difficult, if not impossible, for Microsoft to renege on this.
It is fairly safe* to take them at their word here.
* - usual disclaimers apply.
Oh great, tax people for working out, breathing out CO2, and not the fatties, storing carbon in their blubber. That won't backfire, will it?
You're right, the US will become a nation of fat slobs. Oh wait...
OTOH, [plants] also require loads of sunlight, water and soil
Mean distances from Sun:
Mars:Earth ratio of sunlight per square metre: 1:1.542^2 = 1:2.378
The sunlight issue alone is not all that difficult - a sealed environment with sufficient biomass and prudent management could be brought into range by an arrangement of lenses and mirrors. Now you might say that if you're talking about a sealed environment, you can do that on Earth too, but let's see how long your environment remains sealed when you have crowds of starving, desperate people on the outside of your bubble.
Not this one, because the license terms themselves:
Sorry, but that's simply not correct. The terms you indicate do not have the effect you describe.
Once a piece of code has been released under a license (such as the GPL), you cannot retroactively change that license (ie tell people they can no longer distribute it under that license)
That is not entirely correct. You can legally revoke a license at any time. "License" is just a legal term for "permission" or "consent", and you can withdraw permission and consent, and so can withdraw a license. Nevertheless, if you try enforcing that revocation in a court you are likely to run into issues of estoppel. In simple terms, if somebody has relied on the license in a way that would make it unconscionable for you to withdraw it, the court will hold you to the terms even though you may have revoked it.
With GPL software, where somebody else has relied on the license and produced non-trivially derivative works (or even non-derivative works that depend on the GPL software) then withdrawing the license would be unconscionable because they have expended significant effort (capital expenditure) in reliance on the license which is lost if the license to the original software is revoked. It may also be that if other people have refrained from developing equivalent software because of the existence of this particular GPL software, then it would be taken as unconscionable to withraw the license, at least until such time as equivalent software can be produced.
On the other hand, to use an extreme example, say you have produced something and released it under the GPL, but nobody has used it. You could revoke the GPL on that software at any time. You could also revoke the GPL at any time if there is a readily available substitute provided nobody has produced any derivative work.
While it is quite common to say that you cannot revoke the GPL on a piece of software once released, this is not literally true. While in many cases this will be the situation for all practical purposes, the general rule is more complex, and in the right circumstances it is possible to revoke it.
The "dickhead lawyer" happens to be Corporate Counsel- and he did it on the instructions of the CXO crowd in almost all cases.
I don't know where you're getting that from, but it's simply not true. If you look at these agreements as a lawyer it quickly becomes apparent that there's no way a non-lawyer could have requested much of the specific stuff in there since it requires a certain knowledge of the law to know what to ask for to get that result. These things are not becoming popular because CXOs are passing them around - when a customer asks for an employee NDA in an IP-heavy discipline lawyers are passing them around and are presenting them to their customers largely as a boilerplate. In some cases the agreement will have been prepared by the bar association and licensed to its members for this purpose - this is the quickest way for something new to become standard practice. Even if you have an internal "corporate counsel" a lot of things still get prepared externally, and this kind of thing is one of them (although usually if there is a lawyer at the CXO level it will get reviewed internally and this sort of overreaching canned).
There is a reason that law firms do this sort of thing - in Common Law jurisdictions they are trained in an adversarial tradition - everything is a competition in which you try to screw the most you possibly can out of your opponent and out of the system. This has been a huge problem in recent years with the move to alternative dispute resolution, particularly mediation - old school lawyers usually suck at it because they only look at the competition without taking account of down-the-line consequences.
I am of the CXO crowd but also a lawyer. We have just gotten one of these things prepared by our external lawyers and pointed out the impossibility of compliance with this particular clause, as well as pinging a whole lot of others for overreaching.