There are five ways that stealing/revealing a trade secret can be considered a federal crime under US Code Title 18 Part 1, instead of merely a civil matter.
Trade Secret law is not based on NDAs. It is a distinct section of US intellectual property law.
Incidentally, Woodward *did* get independent corroboration, and didn't publish based on a single anonymous source. If Mark Felt was trying to libel for political gain back then, he wouldn't have gotten away with it. I'm not sure the same is true today.
First is the fact that Apple couldn't show that the Web sites in question knew their source was breaching an NDA.
I don't see a problem there, since they weren't trying to hold the blogger accountable for the breach, but merely to have the blogger reveal the name of the person who was responsible.
Second is the rule that says you can only subpoena a journalist in the way Apple wanted to if all other avenues of investigation have been exhausted. As the judge observed, Apple could have questioned it's own employees about whether they'd disclosed the information and to whom, and done so under penalty of perjury to add weight to the questioning.
Basically, this is a ruling that says you can brag about your crimes to a blogger, and they can publish your account, and they are free to cover up your crime.
Allowing "news" from anonymous sources to be published without independent on-the-record confirmation is bad enough. Being able to protect your source that broke the law isn't good for *anybody*. I know this strikes close to home because many people who read Slashdot could be considered bloggers, and nobody wants to be sued, but there is so much potential for abuse that comes out of this ruling that it isn't even funny. I can't imagine that this will result is anywhere near as much good as it will bad. Essentially this means that nobody is guilty of libel anymore as long as they write it as "an anonymous source said:".
If you want to protect whistleblowers, fine, but we don't need to protect people that illegally divulge trade secrets at the same time.
Even then, they'll let you transfer the license at least once to a different product.
I've even had a Compaq Athlon laptop die and replaced it with a whitebox PC that ran a Core 2 Duo, and they gave me an activation key for the OEM copy of XP over the phone. They didn't even give me a hard time about it, and I didn't even have to make up some lame story. I told them exactly what I was doing, and why I was doing it. They asked me if the copy of Windows was only installed on a single working machine, I said yes, and they gave me a number to type in.
I suspect that there is more to this guy's story than he lets on.
Sigs on slashdot can be turned off. I hate them, so I disabled them. If you weren't posting about it, I wouldn't have even known you had a sig. You can advertise all you want in there because I can easily opt out without losing any desirable content. If you ask me, Slashdot would be unreadable without this feature.
E-mail cannot be treated the same way.
If marketing e-mail was marked as such in a machine readable fashion, with an easy traceback to the human originator of the message, and failure to comply was punishable by a lifetime of painful torture, I wouldn't care what marketing people sent to me in e-mail.
Not only that, but if their own feedback loop is any indication one AOL user clicking the spam button gets your IP blacklisted. It's really fun when you then call the user (because you know them personally, and sent them a completely non-automated message) and they say "Ooops. I clicked the button twice." and then you have to spend hours getting de-listed.
If you're so very sure on your legal information, file a case. If you feel you're too small to take on MS, build up support for a class action suit.
Why should he? What's in it for him? Especially in a class action, since a pro-bono attorney in a class-action would take the bulk of the settlement/judgement. No matter how you look at it, he could never recoup his loss of time and the opportunity cost of neglecting his business.
It is better to build up awareness of this to the point that it gets the Department of Justice off their asses and forces them to do their job.
Your argument is equivalent to "If Bobby is such a bully, why don't you tell the teacher?" Why? Because sure, he may get in trouble, but after school he's going to kick your ass anyway.
If I believe you have violated my contract with you, I may ask to inspect the objects under contract to verify whether it has or has not been broken. That's one of the risks with all contracts. If you don't like it, use software that doesn't require a contract to use.
That's the thing about a click-through EULA though. They don't necessarily even know if you have a contract with them before they demand the audit/sue you for not complying with the audit.
A voluntary audit is much better than suing and being subject to a subpoena.
A lawsuit from these guys shouldn't be allowed to get to the subpoena phase until they prove that you have a contract with them. Since they have such an abusive record, they should also be required to show plausible evidence that you are in violation of that agreement.
Click-throughs should burn in hell. This problem wouldn't exist without them. You don't need to have an EULA to sell access to a copyrighted work, and in a business environment getting a signature on a physical document is not a big burden.
Built-in firewall is too confusing and gives a green light to the OS components (god knows what communication takes place between my computer and microsoft).
A firewall that you can't block IE with is completely useless, as any program on your system can use IE to do its dirty work for it.
Call me when you can uninstall that crap and replace it with ZoneAlarm.
GUI is beautiful. OSX pales in comparison
OSX has bash, and Vista still has the crappy ass DOS CLI. Game over.
The thing is that if you bid early you're more likely to get some random moron who hates losing an auction to bid more that he normally would have been willing to pay. Theoretically early bidding results in a higher ending price than sniping.
After all, the point really isn't to get the item for as much or less than you were willing to pay. The point is to get the item for as little as possible. Additionally, other auctions for the same item may exist, so if you bid as much as you're willing to pay early on you may end up with multiple items, or missing a better deal because you're stuck with your bid in another auction.
If you ask me, it's the people who don't snipe who are the assholes.;)
Are people stupid enough to bid $20, and then when they see someone else bids $22 they then go and bid $25 ?
Yes. Not only that, but they may do exactly that even if $20 really was the most they were actually willing to pay for an item.
The big two autoparts software packages both used dumb terminals. Even autoparts stores that have PCs as terminals run either a browser or a terminal emulator to access the package.
Anybody who thinks the trend back towards dumb clients and centralized applications must not have been paying attention for the last decade as browser based apps have become so commonplace.
The original poster needs to crawl out from under his rock...
if PS3 actually shows signs of life in two years (and that's unlikely, since the market folds in on a leader pretty fast), then a technologically superior console can be cranked out.
You're contradicting yourself. Additionally I think it's way to early for you to be able to call the success of the PS3 "unlikely"; we have to wait to see if people still don't buy it when the first round of good exclusives comes out. If the market squeezes one of the three out, there will be less pressure to develop the next generation, not more. This is even more the case if Sony is the one that gets squeezed out, since Nintendo is essentially a generation behind technologically.
If you consider that most 360s were sold this past Christmas, if Microsoft asks parents to shell out another $400+ after only two years, I think they're going to get a cold response. You're also ignoring what I said about the developers. A game that started development for the 360 or the PS3 this January at one of the behemoth, money wasting development studios may not be ready for release until 2009. You're going to piss off a shitload of developers if you cut the console lifecycle back to 3 years. You don't want to piss off developers, since game availability is the biggest thing controlling a console's success.
There is also some inside info available from the battle for HD in this generation. Microsoft and Sony clearly designed their current consoles for the long haul. Sony because that's all they know, and Microsoft because they have a bad taste in their mouth from the horrible (financial) failure of the original Xbox.
There are government documents and systems that some business must interact with that require windows (usually state government. The Feds have cleaned up their act). Many industries require you to run certain software packages to have any chance at doing business in that industry. It is not uncommon for the required software package to run solely on windows. The fact of the matter is that windows is absolutely required for many small businesses, and there is no amount of effort or money that could be invested to get out of that requirement. There is a reason that they were found to have a monopoly. It's because they do.
If we can be forced to agree to their license to stay in business, they should be forced to have reasonable license terms.
In 2001, the company I worked for switched from a Windows NT 3.5 server to Linux. The workstations stayed with Windows and upgraded to Windows 98. We payed for all of our upgrade licenses for the workstations and for full licenses on the whiteboxes we built to add to the network... Everything was perfectly legal. But we didn't upgrade the server with the rest of the network and it triggered a BSA audit. The audit took about 100 hours of two administrators time to document all the software on all of our boxes, and to properly convince them that the internally written software was really internally written. It was a HUGE waste of time and money all because they thought that maybe we pirated a copy of NT 4.0 (Or to punish us for converting to Linux.. Who knows?).
If the notices are that you have to produce a bunch of documentation that is going to take hundreds of man hours to come up with, then yes. It is an intrusive action. They should have to provide some evidence that you are breaking the rules, and "you didn't buy the new version from us yet" is *not* sufficient. They shouldn't be allowed to force you to prove your innocence because they feel like it.
It seems to be because American car companies tried to implement technology that had a recurring revenue model. GPS navigation signals are free, and once you've sold the device there are typically no more checks in the mail (most users don't update their maps). Now that customers have largely rejected the recurring revenue model of OnStar and the like (having seen the GPS systems available on Japanese and European cars) Nav systems are becoming more common.
If the US had such a wide range of wireless providers as Europe, the OnStar model would never have worked from a business perspective, and things over here would be the same as things are over there GPS wise...
Nobody is saying that he needs to watch all the shows his Myth box can record. Just as he can have parallel recorders, he can have parallel viewers. Either way he still pays the same amount for the content feed.
That's such a cop-out. The link should be there, sure, but there is no excuse for giving a poor description of what can be found via the hyperlink when you could just as easily given a good description. Your way is only marginally better than the universally despised as poor practice "here" links of the mid '90s.
Congratulations on showing me how much more "web savvy" you are than me though.
...to include half a sentence describing the basics of the patent in the hyperlink?
"The patent discussed on saturday" isn't significantly shorter than "the patent on a copied IDE feature" but contains more useful knowledge and less useless knowledge.
I can understand this, but do disagree; you should never have a process on your own system that you cannot kill. The left open locks issue could easily be resolved by updating the server on closed connections on reconnect etc, and these days with other network filesystems like CIFS, and removable media (linux ready for the desktop?) reads shouldn't expect to always be able to resume.
When media goes away, pending IO should come back as a failure, or timeouts should occur eventually...
The real problem is that you may have sent a request to a DMA controller, and you don't know that it is done modifying a memory location without CPU interaction until it tells you so. If that response never comes back, and you can't guarantee that bit of hardware isn't going to muck with the data at some point in the future you need a way to account for the fact that the memory is spoken for. What better way to account for this than by having the process which owns the request stick around? Sure, you could have the I/O owned by some independent process while the real parent goes away, but what would that accomplish in most situations?
Leaving locks open on a network fileserver is actually a terrible reason to disallow interruption of IO. It's the server's responsibility to deal with that crap, as there is no guarantee that a client won't go away and never come back.
Slashdot Mirror
There are five ways that stealing/revealing a trade secret can be considered a federal crime under US Code Title 18 Part 1, instead of merely a civil matter.
Trade Secret law is not based on NDAs. It is a distinct section of US intellectual property law.
Incidentally, Woodward *did* get independent corroboration, and didn't publish based on a single anonymous source. If Mark Felt was trying to libel for political gain back then, he wouldn't have gotten away with it. I'm not sure the same is true today.
With laws that protect whistleblowers, none of the case you describe would involve a source breaking the law.
First is the fact that Apple couldn't show that the Web sites in question knew their source was breaching an NDA.
I don't see a problem there, since they weren't trying to hold the blogger accountable for the breach, but merely to have the blogger reveal the name of the person who was responsible.
Second is the rule that says you can only subpoena a journalist in the way Apple wanted to if all other avenues of investigation have been exhausted. As the judge observed, Apple could have questioned it's own employees about whether they'd disclosed the information and to whom, and done so under penalty of perjury to add weight to the questioning.
This is a perfectly reasonable argument.
Basically, this is a ruling that says you can brag about your crimes to a blogger, and they can publish your account, and they are free to cover up your crime.
Allowing "news" from anonymous sources to be published without independent on-the-record confirmation is bad enough. Being able to protect your source that broke the law isn't good for *anybody*. I know this strikes close to home because many people who read Slashdot could be considered bloggers, and nobody wants to be sued, but there is so much potential for abuse that comes out of this ruling that it isn't even funny. I can't imagine that this will result is anywhere near as much good as it will bad. Essentially this means that nobody is guilty of libel anymore as long as they write it as "an anonymous source said:".
If you want to protect whistleblowers, fine, but we don't need to protect people that illegally divulge trade secrets at the same time.
Even then, they'll let you transfer the license at least once to a different product.
I've even had a Compaq Athlon laptop die and replaced it with a whitebox PC that ran a Core 2 Duo, and they gave me an activation key for the OEM copy of XP over the phone. They didn't even give me a hard time about it, and I didn't even have to make up some lame story. I told them exactly what I was doing, and why I was doing it. They asked me if the copy of Windows was only installed on a single working machine, I said yes, and they gave me a number to type in.
I suspect that there is more to this guy's story than he lets on.
Sigs on slashdot can be turned off. I hate them, so I disabled them. If you weren't posting about it, I wouldn't have even known you had a sig. You can advertise all you want in there because I can easily opt out without losing any desirable content. If you ask me, Slashdot would be unreadable without this feature.
E-mail cannot be treated the same way.
If marketing e-mail was marked as such in a machine readable fashion, with an easy traceback to the human originator of the message, and failure to comply was punishable by a lifetime of painful torture, I wouldn't care what marketing people sent to me in e-mail.
Not only that, but if their own feedback loop is any indication one AOL user clicking the spam button gets your IP blacklisted. It's really fun when you then call the user (because you know them personally, and sent them a completely non-automated message) and they say "Ooops. I clicked the button twice." and then you have to spend hours getting de-listed.
It seems more likely to me that they're both announcing this "new technology" around now for a different reason.
The first US patent to mention the use of a hafnium oxide as a dielectric expires later this year.
If you're so very sure on your legal information, file a case. If you feel you're too small to take on MS, build up support for a class action suit.
Why should he? What's in it for him? Especially in a class action, since a pro-bono attorney in a class-action would take the bulk of the settlement/judgement. No matter how you look at it, he could never recoup his loss of time and the opportunity cost of neglecting his business.
It is better to build up awareness of this to the point that it gets the Department of Justice off their asses and forces them to do their job.
Your argument is equivalent to "If Bobby is such a bully, why don't you tell the teacher?" Why? Because sure, he may get in trouble, but after school he's going to kick your ass anyway.
Click-throughs should burn in hell. This problem wouldn't exist without them. You don't need to have an EULA to sell access to a copyrighted work, and in a business environment getting a signature on a physical document is not a big burden.
Built-in firewall is too confusing and gives a green light to the OS components (god knows what communication takes place between my computer and microsoft).
A firewall that you can't block IE with is completely useless, as any program on your system can use IE to do its dirty work for it.
Call me when you can uninstall that crap and replace it with ZoneAlarm.
GUI is beautiful. OSX pales in comparison
OSX has bash, and Vista still has the crappy ass DOS CLI. Game over.
The thing is that if you bid early you're more likely to get some random moron who hates losing an auction to bid more that he normally would have been willing to pay. Theoretically early bidding results in a higher ending price than sniping.
;)
After all, the point really isn't to get the item for as much or less than you were willing to pay. The point is to get the item for as little as possible. Additionally, other auctions for the same item may exist, so if you bid as much as you're willing to pay early on you may end up with multiple items, or missing a better deal because you're stuck with your bid in another auction.
If you ask me, it's the people who don't snipe who are the assholes.
Are people stupid enough to bid $20, and then when they see someone else bids $22 they then go and bid $25 ?
Yes. Not only that, but they may do exactly that even if $20 really was the most they were actually willing to pay for an item.
The big two autoparts software packages both used dumb terminals. Even autoparts stores that have PCs as terminals run either a browser or a terminal emulator to access the package.
Anybody who thinks the trend back towards dumb clients and centralized applications must not have been paying attention for the last decade as browser based apps have become so commonplace.
The original poster needs to crawl out from under his rock...
if PS3 actually shows signs of life in two years (and that's unlikely, since the market folds in on a leader pretty fast), then a technologically superior console can be cranked out.
You're contradicting yourself. Additionally I think it's way to early for you to be able to call the success of the PS3 "unlikely"; we have to wait to see if people still don't buy it when the first round of good exclusives comes out. If the market squeezes one of the three out, there will be less pressure to develop the next generation, not more. This is even more the case if Sony is the one that gets squeezed out, since Nintendo is essentially a generation behind technologically.
If you consider that most 360s were sold this past Christmas, if Microsoft asks parents to shell out another $400+ after only two years, I think they're going to get a cold response. You're also ignoring what I said about the developers. A game that started development for the 360 or the PS3 this January at one of the behemoth, money wasting development studios may not be ready for release until 2009. You're going to piss off a shitload of developers if you cut the console lifecycle back to 3 years. You don't want to piss off developers, since game availability is the biggest thing controlling a console's success.
There is also some inside info available from the battle for HD in this generation. Microsoft and Sony clearly designed their current consoles for the long haul. Sony because that's all they know, and Microsoft because they have a bad taste in their mouth from the horrible (financial) failure of the original Xbox.
Nobody's forcing you to use Windows
That is just plain wrong.
There are government documents and systems that some business must interact with that require windows (usually state government. The Feds have cleaned up their act). Many industries require you to run certain software packages to have any chance at doing business in that industry. It is not uncommon for the required software package to run solely on windows. The fact of the matter is that windows is absolutely required for many small businesses, and there is no amount of effort or money that could be invested to get out of that requirement. There is a reason that they were found to have a monopoly. It's because they do.
If we can be forced to agree to their license to stay in business, they should be forced to have reasonable license terms.
In 2001, the company I worked for switched from a Windows NT 3.5 server to Linux. The workstations stayed with Windows and upgraded to Windows 98. We payed for all of our upgrade licenses for the workstations and for full licenses on the whiteboxes we built to add to the network... Everything was perfectly legal. But we didn't upgrade the server with the rest of the network and it triggered a BSA audit. The audit took about 100 hours of two administrators time to document all the software on all of our boxes, and to properly convince them that the internally written software was really internally written. It was a HUGE waste of time and money all because they thought that maybe we pirated a copy of NT 4.0 (Or to punish us for converting to Linux.. Who knows?).
If the notices are that you have to produce a bunch of documentation that is going to take hundreds of man hours to come up with, then yes. It is an intrusive action. They should have to provide some evidence that you are breaking the rules, and "you didn't buy the new version from us yet" is *not* sufficient. They shouldn't be allowed to force you to prove your innocence because they feel like it.
It seems to be because American car companies tried to implement technology that had a recurring revenue model. GPS navigation signals are free, and once you've sold the device there are typically no more checks in the mail (most users don't update their maps). Now that customers have largely rejected the recurring revenue model of OnStar and the like (having seen the GPS systems available on Japanese and European cars) Nav systems are becoming more common.
If the US had such a wide range of wireless providers as Europe, the OnStar model would never have worked from a business perspective, and things over here would be the same as things are over there GPS wise...
Nobody is saying that he needs to watch all the shows his Myth box can record. Just as he can have parallel recorders, he can have parallel viewers. Either way he still pays the same amount for the content feed.
...but will it boil water as quickly as the (120 watt!) clovertown?
That's such a cop-out. The link should be there, sure, but there is no excuse for giving a poor description of what can be found via the hyperlink when you could just as easily given a good description. Your way is only marginally better than the universally despised as poor practice "here" links of the mid '90s.
Congratulations on showing me how much more "web savvy" you are than me though.
Really, they're more likely to push for "first to file" instead of "first to invent" so that patent applications like this will actually be valid.
...to include half a sentence describing the basics of the patent in the hyperlink?
"The patent discussed on saturday" isn't significantly shorter than "the patent on a copied IDE feature" but contains more useful knowledge and less useless knowledge.
I can understand this, but do disagree; you should never have a process on your own system that you cannot kill. The left open locks issue could easily be resolved by updating the server on closed connections on reconnect etc, and these days with other network filesystems like CIFS, and removable media (linux ready for the desktop?) reads shouldn't expect to always be able to resume.
When media goes away, pending IO should come back as a failure, or timeouts should occur eventually...
The real problem is that you may have sent a request to a DMA controller, and you don't know that it is done modifying a memory location without CPU interaction until it tells you so. If that response never comes back, and you can't guarantee that bit of hardware isn't going to muck with the data at some point in the future you need a way to account for the fact that the memory is spoken for. What better way to account for this than by having the process which owns the request stick around? Sure, you could have the I/O owned by some independent process while the real parent goes away, but what would that accomplish in most situations?
Leaving locks open on a network fileserver is actually a terrible reason to disallow interruption of IO. It's the server's responsibility to deal with that crap, as there is no guarantee that a client won't go away and never come back.
How long has it been since the early '90s?
How long do US patents last?
Think it's a coincidence?