Think you are the only ONE who is working for a great idea and you are all most done to 80% and to complete the remining 20% you need another good 24 months. Beeing in this situvation you applied for the patent and USPTO publishes it.
If you're that far from a working idea, you have not yet invented it, and you have no right to patent it. A patent should specify clearly how to reproduce your invention so that others could do the same. That is your side of the bargain, in exchange for the protection afforded by granting the patent. In your scenario, the USPTO should reject your patent, you should know that this is likely to happen, and if you're stupid enough to try and preempt competitors by legal means and make a hash of it, that's your problem.
Remember, a patent application does not give any legal protection. That is why you are not required to publish it. It is only after the patent has been granted, and you therefore have legel patent protection, that publication is required and is a matter of course.
I'm not sure what you say about legal protection is quite true; consider the origins of the expression "patent pending", and your own point about prior art. In any case, you should only be applying for a patent if you reasonably expect it to be granted, in which case you should have no fear of revealing your information. If you then find it's not granted, well, presumably that's because the patent officials found that your idea didn't meet one of the required criteria, in which case the chances are it was so obvious that revealing it hasn't hurt you anyway...
Sorry to reply twice to the same post, but another significant point is that I have given no permission for any credit reference agency to hold any information about me in the first place.
Now, financial institutions are perfectly entitled to decline to offer credit to someone who doesn't have a credit record at the agency they use. As an individual you must accept the consequences if you don't wish to work within that system, even if that means you can't get a loan or mortgage.
However, whether the credit reference agency should be allowed to keep information at all without explicit consent from the individual is highly questionable. I believe that consent really should be explicit, with a genuine option not to agree. (A sign saying "we will pass your information to a credit reference agency" is not giving you an option!) If I never apply for credit -- not a bad policy in today's society -- why should such an organisation be entitled to keep all kinds of personal information about me without my consent, particularly when they seem to do such a bad job of maintaining their databases accurately? There is nothing two-way at that point; the only thing that can happen is for information to leak to my detriment.
I'm not suggesting you should be allowed to force removal of relevant information, just that it should be clear that you can require removal of personal information about yourself that a company has no current need to hold. Your examples would not fall into this category (although since the credit reference agencies appear to be exempt from the normal safeguards yet do a terrible job of maintaining accurate records and frequently damage innocent individuals as a result, I have little sympathy for that particular group and would be happy if OIC staff walked in and shook them all down tomorrow).
There is an interesting possibility here; I don't know whether it's applicable in the US today, but certainly the position has merit under various European data protection legislation.
Under the UK's Data Protection Acts, for example, a company holding personal information about an individual can normally be required to provide all of that information to the individual for a nominal fee. Moreover, they would have certain obligations to fix incorrect information, handle the information in a reasonably secure way, etc.
The one glaring hole I've found with UK data protection legislation is that you can't forcibly remove information somebody has about you as long as the information is correct. In other words, the fact that I cancelled my order with a particular company and have no other dealings with them, and after reading about their data handling practices I don't trust them to keep my credit card number safe, does not automatically entitle me to have the card number removed from their database. We need only look at recent events reported right here on Slashdot to see what happens when an organisation with lots of personal information held under imperfect security gets compromised.
Perhaps this sort of deception, followed by a couple of spectacular failures of security and successful lawsuits by people who'd asked for the information to be deleted and later found that it wasn't, will be the catalyst for fixing data protection legislation in many places. All a company should be allowed to keep if you ask for your information to be deleted and they have no current reason to hold it is your identity and a flag that says you don't want to have your information kept on their system.
At present, you would have to jump through all kinds of hoops to demonstrate to the data protection officials that there wasn't a valid current reason to hold your data. And that's valid as in "the organisation's data protection entry mentions it", not valid as in "they actually need it to have an effective relationship with you"; just check all the blatantly unnecessary information that Transport for London has in its entry if you don't appreciate the difference.:-(
The strange thing seems to be that there is an option to ask the USPTO not to publish a patent application. I appreciate that this is the same as not publishing a patent that has been granted, but since disclosure in exchange for temporary monopoly is the fundamental principle of patents, isn't having an unpublished procedure rather one-sided?
You miss my point entirely. I don't care what term people use. I was not seeking to justify modern usage on the basis of historical usage; I was merely pointing out that claiming modern usage is incorrect because the word "pirate" implies ships and hooks and eye patches is not true now and has not been so for centuries.
Language evolves naturally, but the action in question is well understood in all cases, whether it's described as "copyright infringement", "intellectual property theft", "DVD piracy" or whatever. A point to which you alluded in your post was that all terms used in such a passionate debate are somewhat coloured. Each side of the debate will use descriptions that it feels portrary the matter being debated in the light that best suits its case.
Personally, I would rather have a substantive debate on things like:
the merits or otherwise of copyright
the level to which exemptions should be allowed
any rights users of copyright material should be given
and other relevant subjects.
Incidentally, the latter two aren't the same issue: "fair use rights" is another popular term around here whose users clearly don't understand the legal significance of the word "exemption". In this case, there is a significant difference in the meaning of the terms, and the correct one should be used. For example, whether the current fair use exemptions should be replaced by a right to the ability to copy the material under the circumstances described, regardless of DRM for example, is a pertinent question in the debate.
You can have these debates quite constructively regardless of the synonyms you choose to use. Where terms have genuinely different meanings, by all means select the correct one, or challenge someone who does not. Otherwise, arguing semantics does nothing to further the genuine debate behind the words.
The term "piracy" has been used to refer to this sort of activity since well before the **AA existed. This meaning is listed in every dictionary I own, and has been for years. In fact, from the Online Etymology Dictionary entry for "pirate":
Meaning "one who takes another's work without permission" first recorded 1701; sense of "unlicensed radio broadcaster" is from 1913.
It's sad how many people on Slashdot seem to accept compaints about using "piracy" or "theft" for copyright infringement as a substitute for informed, logical argument. Ironically, perhaps the biggest offender in the "not quite what the word really means" stakes is the FSF's use of "free", but few people ever object to that.
If you do have a TV set but use it for games, or for DVDs, you don't need a licence either.
When did that change? It used to be that any receiver capable of decoding a broadcast TV signal qualified, whether it was actually in use for that purpose or not. Indeed, I have at least two friends who never watch broadcast TV because the relevant electronics in their box is broken, but they've been told in the past that as long as they keep the box for other purposes (such as watching videos) and the decoder is functional, they are legally required to have a TV licence.
If you don't have a licence, you're suspected of dodging the licence fee.
In fact, rumour has it that for a while they were worse than that; their new database system didn't have a standard way of indicating that a property had no TV. Their system therefore assumed everyone needed a licence, and you weren't just a "suspect" if you didn't have one.
For example, there was a famous story in the local news a while back about an older gentleman, a well-respected academic IIRC, who had dutifully and honestly told the TV licensing people that he had no TV every year for a decade. One day he came home to find TV licence inspectors escorted by police officers had actually broken into his home in his absence to check (and, unsurprisingly, found nothing).
What pisses me off about the TV license is that you can only pay for a full year, which is crap if you only have a TV for a limited period. Also the TV-license system makes no difference between people with very limited amounts of money (for instance students and OAPs) and a small 17" screen and rich people with 44" plasma screens. Only a difference between b/w TVs and colour TVs (who has b/w these days?).
FWIW, I believe you're mistaken about the elderly.
In any case, to me (as a licence fee payer) the most annoying thing is that the TV licence fee funds almost all of the BBC's activities, not just television. That includes both BBC radio (beloved of a significant number of non-TV-owners who pay no licence fee) and the newer on-line systems (the BBC news web site surely being one of the most popular in the world, but again supported by those of us with TVs).
These are all valuable services to many of our people, and I have no objection to supporting them. What I do object to is contributing support for these things when others who use the services just as much aren't, just because they don't have a TV.
Indeed, but that goes both ways: a function doing 0.2 of a thing, combined with four other functions each doing a different 0.2 of that thing, is as bad as one function that does several things.
As a person who's been refactoring long functions, I can attest to how many bugs we've found in the process and how much cleaner the functions end up being.
It's funny you mention that. I've spent most of the last year refactoring a lot of the core code in the project I work on, tidying up various oddities that have accumulated over a decade or so of development. The vast majority of bugs I've found have been caused by one-off special cases or unfortunate interactions between features that were developed independently. The bugs generally haven't been in the long but well-planned algorithms, as it's far easy to hide special cases in a raft of smaller functions than in one long but well-structured one.
In fact, the single biggest improvement I've made was basically to draw numerous one-off possibilities scattered through the codebase into a single, fairly long (probably around 150 lines) function. There you could easily see the order in which they occurred and the potential interactions between them.
People, if your function is more than 10 lines long, you should start to consider splitting it. If it's more than 100 lines long, you're probably doing something wrong.
So I've been told, sometimes by some of the biggest names in programming. Unfortunately, a firm belief among the industry doesn't make them right.
Rather than debunking this one here, I'll simply refer you to Steve McConnell's excellent Code Complete. McConnell cites a large amount of hard data to show that longer routines can be at least as good on both development time and error count grounds as shorter routines, and indeed exceptionally short routines (the 10-liners you're advocating) are amongst the worst on both metrics.
As an aside for general interest, since I'm sure a lot of people reading this comment also found that book very good, it seems a second edition has recently been published, updating the examples by a decade or so and putting much more emphasis on recent coding approaches, particularly OO. Whether that is an improvement remains to be seen, but I'll certainly be buying a copy. I guess if he's reversed his position based on more recent studies, I'll have to eat my words, too, but I doubt it.;-)
Automated test suites are vastly overrated. If all your subprograms have cleanly defined functions, cleanly defined I/O, and are small enough, it is very easy to run them through a few critical test cases.
And the chances of picking up a subtle bug in a comprehensive automated test system that runs at least nightly, compared to running "a few critical test cases" on the whim of a developer, are orders of magnitude higher.
Please don't confuse the bad idea that is "test driven design" with the good idea that is designing your code so that it can be tested regularly and automatically. The two ideas are completely orthogonal.
There is no ability on the part of the government to arbitrarily say that something is bad or harmful and make it illegal.
Of course there is. They can do that to anything not blocked by your constitution immediately, and they can do it even if it would violate the constitution as long as they can convince enough of your population that their view is correct and the constitution should be amended.
The reason that I make the distinction of personal arms is that the intent of the second amendment is to allow people to defend themselves, a nuke does not fit that intent - an assault riffle does.
That may be your interpretation of the amendment, and your interpretation may be a reasonable one, but that's not what it actually says. Others could argue that its purpose is to prevent an oppressive government seizing power over its people, and nothing to do with self defence. Others still might argue that the case against firearms has not been made, and therefore that as a matter of principle your right should not be removed.
So, if I want to walk down the street with a nuke on my back, what right does your government have to stop me? When you work that out, hopefully you'll understand where I'm coming from with the case at hand too.
The only reason I see people jumping up to defend Apple is because they are Apple.
Not at all. I'm defending them because I happen to think that they are both legally and ethically in the right here, not because I'm some sort of unthinking Apple fan-boy. I would defend Microsoft the same way under the same circumstances.
Obviously in the real world we have laws that lay out what is and is not acceptable, but we don't preemptively remove rights from people - if someone violates the law, then we can remove those rights from them.
Of course we do. We know from experience that some things are harmful to society, and we prohibit them by making them illegal. No-one may commit these acts lawfully, even if they have never violated the law before.
Your own second paragraph, where you describe which weapons you think are and aren't covered by an absolute right to bear arms, is a great example. I have never seen the words "personal arm" anywhere in the laws of the US, certainly not in the second amendment that is the usual defence to any proposed anti-firearm legislation. And yet you have immediately acknowledged that some arms are too dangerous to include in the terms of that "absolute right".
In the same way, history has shown us that saying certain things can be disproportionately damaging, and therefore your "freedom of expression" does not extend to defamation, for example. It also doesn't extend to violating an NDA you entered into willingly, and my argument is simply that it should extend to helping someone else to violate an NDA either.
What Apple is looking to do is to find who's violating a private contract between itself and (presumably) an employee by going after someone with whom it doesn't have any relationship. But how far does that extend? What if the ThinkSecret guy tells you, and you tell me, and I publish it as a "rumor"? Can they go after you? Me? At what point does that "reasonable expectation" that someone violated a contract evaporate? Ever?
The wonderful thing about the word "reasonable" in law is that it leaves it up to a court to decide. That court is free to investigate the specifics of the particular case as much as it needs to, and has no need to rely on generalities. It is then up to a jury to form a collective opinion about whether something was "reasonable" in that case.
In your particular example, whoever violated the NDA was clearly liable. There was an explicit agreement. Moreover, if he knowingly leaked the material to a journalist, he knew it was likely to be republished to a wider audience and the damage extensive. If, on the other hand, he honestly believed he was just telling it to a guy at a pub and had no idea it would immediately be widely published, he would still be liable but a court might reasonably award lower damages against him.
It's a good bet that the ThinkSecret guy would be liable in this case, too: he's very familiar with the subject, he knows that he's getting the information from an inside source, and he knows that it hasn't been widely published before or provided through an official channel. He might reasonably be expected to know that it was probably covered by an NDA, and therefore he might reasonably be assigned responsibility for checking that it wasn't before publishing it. Moreover, he knows that he's propagating information from a narrow source to a widely read site, and therefore that if the information is being obtained illegally then he is probably magnifying any damage caused by that illegal act.
After that it gets more dubious. If you found the information on the ThinkSecret site under a blatant warning that said "Secret info leaked from NDA's Apple source!" and you still continued to spread the rumour, you might conceivably be liable. Even then, any damage you do would probably be negligible and I'd expect a court to conclude that you haven't unreasonably damaged the original owner (because the damage was already done). However, if say you'd picked it up from a mailing list with a readership of 5 carrying the same warning and you then republished it on your own site with a readership of 5 million, there would clearly be scope for the court to hold you liable for increasing the damages as well.
A free and informed press has nothing to do with responsibility or public interest. Its about publishing what you want.
Perhaps that's true, but if it's not necessarily in society's interest, why should the law protect it? A free press is a means to an end, not an end in itself.
Long answer is that an unrestrained press can do damage to members of the public, but overall an informed public is as essential to public liberty as the right to bear arms.
Is the right to bear arms an absolute, even to the most hardened supported of the second amendment to the US constitution? In the absurd limit, are we really safer if absolutely everyone has a nuclear bomb on their back that they can detonate at will?
Of course we're not, for the simple reason that not everyone in society can be trusted to act in society's best interests. If they could, we wouldn't need laws in the first place, but in the real world it just ain't so.
For the same reason, it is necessary to limit the extent of certain "freedoms", to ensure that they are exercised with due responsibility and that those who choose to exercise them are accountable for that choice.
What would you prefer that we worship? This is a serious question, not a troll.
Then it certainly merits a serious answer. I would prefer you not to worship anything, but to consider cases like this on their merits. Consider the general principles, but also think about the implications of those principles in the specific case, particularly where there are apparent conflicts between two ideas that each have some merit in isolation.
In this case, please consider the following. The law as it stands today would clearly condemn someone violating a NDA to which they agreed prior to being told a trade secret. Thus the law takes the position that allowing the enforcement of NDAs is in the interests of society.
However, if this case is successfully defended then the law provides no sanction against someone taking advantage of information that they could reasonably expect was obtained through illegal means. Now the law is taking the position that it's not important to protect that information in the first place. The two positions are inherently contradictory.
Moreover, the second position supports knowing violation of the intended protections of the law, as long as you get someone else to do your dirty work for you. It places anyone with sufficient isolation above the law, no matter that they might ultimately be the cause of any damage and/or be the only one capable of offering adequate compensation to the damaged party. Surely this is a dangerous idea.
In other words, if we accept that it is right to permit a freedom of the press style defence in this case, we have undermined the whole point of NDAs, and should remove any legal support for such agreements in the first place. Conversely, if we believe that NDAs have merit and should be given legal weight, we cannot logically accept a freedom of the press style defence here.
If you have trade secrets, you need to be very careful who you give them to, period. If a person you trust releases their secrets, its because you didn't do a good enough job of understanding that person.
That was modded (+1, Insightful). I'm sorry, but (-1, Staggeringly Naive) would be more appropriate.
Why do so many people in this thread not see the simple facts here: Apple was wronged, they are seeking redress within the law, and the people who wronged them (legally, morally or both) are in danger of being on the receiving end. Everything else in this thread is just smoke and mirrors in an attempt to deflect the fact that somebody who tried to screw somebody else might be about to get what's coming to them.
That includes all the claims that Apple should "just go after the leak": that's exactly what they're trying to do, via the most expedient method possible. Saying they should try some security audit instead simply demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of how real life works: people get paid to infiltrate these places to commit industrial espionage, they're very good at it, and adding an isolation layer that can't afford to pay back the damage if they get caught should not be a valid legal defence for screwing someone.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're that far from a working idea, you have not yet invented it, and you have no right to patent it. A patent should specify clearly how to reproduce your invention so that others could do the same. That is your side of the bargain, in exchange for the protection afforded by granting the patent. In your scenario, the USPTO should reject your patent, you should know that this is likely to happen, and if you're stupid enough to try and preempt competitors by legal means and make a hash of it, that's your problem.
I'm not sure what you say about legal protection is quite true; consider the origins of the expression "patent pending", and your own point about prior art. In any case, you should only be applying for a patent if you reasonably expect it to be granted, in which case you should have no fear of revealing your information. If you then find it's not granted, well, presumably that's because the patent officials found that your idea didn't meet one of the required criteria, in which case the chances are it was so obvious that revealing it hasn't hurt you anyway...
Sorry to reply twice to the same post, but another significant point is that I have given no permission for any credit reference agency to hold any information about me in the first place.
Now, financial institutions are perfectly entitled to decline to offer credit to someone who doesn't have a credit record at the agency they use. As an individual you must accept the consequences if you don't wish to work within that system, even if that means you can't get a loan or mortgage.
However, whether the credit reference agency should be allowed to keep information at all without explicit consent from the individual is highly questionable. I believe that consent really should be explicit, with a genuine option not to agree. (A sign saying "we will pass your information to a credit reference agency" is not giving you an option!) If I never apply for credit -- not a bad policy in today's society -- why should such an organisation be entitled to keep all kinds of personal information about me without my consent, particularly when they seem to do such a bad job of maintaining their databases accurately? There is nothing two-way at that point; the only thing that can happen is for information to leak to my detriment.
I'm not suggesting you should be allowed to force removal of relevant information, just that it should be clear that you can require removal of personal information about yourself that a company has no current need to hold. Your examples would not fall into this category (although since the credit reference agencies appear to be exempt from the normal safeguards yet do a terrible job of maintaining accurate records and frequently damage innocent individuals as a result, I have little sympathy for that particular group and would be happy if OIC staff walked in and shook them all down tomorrow).
Unfortunately, while IANAL, I'm not at all sure that's the case. Please see my later post on this subject.
There is an interesting possibility here; I don't know whether it's applicable in the US today, but certainly the position has merit under various European data protection legislation.
Under the UK's Data Protection Acts, for example, a company holding personal information about an individual can normally be required to provide all of that information to the individual for a nominal fee. Moreover, they would have certain obligations to fix incorrect information, handle the information in a reasonably secure way, etc.
The one glaring hole I've found with UK data protection legislation is that you can't forcibly remove information somebody has about you as long as the information is correct. In other words, the fact that I cancelled my order with a particular company and have no other dealings with them, and after reading about their data handling practices I don't trust them to keep my credit card number safe, does not automatically entitle me to have the card number removed from their database. We need only look at recent events reported right here on Slashdot to see what happens when an organisation with lots of personal information held under imperfect security gets compromised.
Perhaps this sort of deception, followed by a couple of spectacular failures of security and successful lawsuits by people who'd asked for the information to be deleted and later found that it wasn't, will be the catalyst for fixing data protection legislation in many places. All a company should be allowed to keep if you ask for your information to be deleted and they have no current reason to hold it is your identity and a flag that says you don't want to have your information kept on their system.
At present, you would have to jump through all kinds of hoops to demonstrate to the data protection officials that there wasn't a valid current reason to hold your data. And that's valid as in "the organisation's data protection entry mentions it", not valid as in "they actually need it to have an effective relationship with you"; just check all the blatantly unnecessary information that Transport for London has in its entry if you don't appreciate the difference. :-(
The strange thing seems to be that there is an option to ask the USPTO not to publish a patent application. I appreciate that this is the same as not publishing a patent that has been granted, but since disclosure in exchange for temporary monopoly is the fundamental principle of patents, isn't having an unpublished procedure rather one-sided?
You miss my point entirely. I don't care what term people use. I was not seeking to justify modern usage on the basis of historical usage; I was merely pointing out that claiming modern usage is incorrect because the word "pirate" implies ships and hooks and eye patches is not true now and has not been so for centuries.
Language evolves naturally, but the action in question is well understood in all cases, whether it's described as "copyright infringement", "intellectual property theft", "DVD piracy" or whatever. A point to which you alluded in your post was that all terms used in such a passionate debate are somewhat coloured. Each side of the debate will use descriptions that it feels portrary the matter being debated in the light that best suits its case.
Personally, I would rather have a substantive debate on things like:
- the merits or otherwise of copyright
- the level to which exemptions should be allowed
- any rights users of copyright material should be given
and other relevant subjects.Incidentally, the latter two aren't the same issue: "fair use rights" is another popular term around here whose users clearly don't understand the legal significance of the word "exemption". In this case, there is a significant difference in the meaning of the terms, and the correct one should be used. For example, whether the current fair use exemptions should be replaced by a right to the ability to copy the material under the circumstances described, regardless of DRM for example, is a pertinent question in the debate.
You can have these debates quite constructively regardless of the synonyms you choose to use. Where terms have genuinely different meanings, by all means select the correct one, or challenge someone who does not. Otherwise, arguing semantics does nothing to further the genuine debate behind the words.
So the solution to all our problems is to introduce Jack Bauer to Brannon Braga? Now that I would pay to see.
The term "piracy" has been used to refer to this sort of activity since well before the **AA existed. This meaning is listed in every dictionary I own, and has been for years. In fact, from the Online Etymology Dictionary entry for "pirate":
It's sad how many people on Slashdot seem to accept compaints about using "piracy" or "theft" for copyright infringement as a substitute for informed, logical argument. Ironically, perhaps the biggest offender in the "not quite what the word really means" stakes is the FSF's use of "free", but few people ever object to that.
When did that change? It used to be that any receiver capable of decoding a broadcast TV signal qualified, whether it was actually in use for that purpose or not. Indeed, I have at least two friends who never watch broadcast TV because the relevant electronics in their box is broken, but they've been told in the past that as long as they keep the box for other purposes (such as watching videos) and the decoder is functional, they are legally required to have a TV licence.
In fact, rumour has it that for a while they were worse than that; their new database system didn't have a standard way of indicating that a property had no TV. Their system therefore assumed everyone needed a licence, and you weren't just a "suspect" if you didn't have one.
For example, there was a famous story in the local news a while back about an older gentleman, a well-respected academic IIRC, who had dutifully and honestly told the TV licensing people that he had no TV every year for a decade. One day he came home to find TV licence inspectors escorted by police officers had actually broken into his home in his absence to check (and, unsurprisingly, found nothing).
FWIW, I believe you're mistaken about the elderly.
In any case, to me (as a licence fee payer) the most annoying thing is that the TV licence fee funds almost all of the BBC's activities, not just television. That includes both BBC radio (beloved of a significant number of non-TV-owners who pay no licence fee) and the newer on-line systems (the BBC news web site surely being one of the most popular in the world, but again supported by those of us with TVs).
These are all valuable services to many of our people, and I have no objection to supporting them. What I do object to is contributing support for these things when others who use the services just as much aren't, just because they don't have a TV.
Indeed, but that goes both ways: a function doing 0.2 of a thing, combined with four other functions each doing a different 0.2 of that thing, is as bad as one function that does several things.
It's funny you mention that. I've spent most of the last year refactoring a lot of the core code in the project I work on, tidying up various oddities that have accumulated over a decade or so of development. The vast majority of bugs I've found have been caused by one-off special cases or unfortunate interactions between features that were developed independently. The bugs generally haven't been in the long but well-planned algorithms, as it's far easy to hide special cases in a raft of smaller functions than in one long but well-structured one.
In fact, the single biggest improvement I've made was basically to draw numerous one-off possibilities scattered through the codebase into a single, fairly long (probably around 150 lines) function. There you could easily see the order in which they occurred and the potential interactions between them.
So I've been told, sometimes by some of the biggest names in programming. Unfortunately, a firm belief among the industry doesn't make them right.
Rather than debunking this one here, I'll simply refer you to Steve McConnell's excellent Code Complete. McConnell cites a large amount of hard data to show that longer routines can be at least as good on both development time and error count grounds as shorter routines, and indeed exceptionally short routines (the 10-liners you're advocating) are amongst the worst on both metrics.
As an aside for general interest, since I'm sure a lot of people reading this comment also found that book very good, it seems a second edition has recently been published, updating the examples by a decade or so and putting much more emphasis on recent coding approaches, particularly OO. Whether that is an improvement remains to be seen, but I'll certainly be buying a copy. I guess if he's reversed his position based on more recent studies, I'll have to eat my words, too, but I doubt it. ;-)
And the chances of picking up a subtle bug in a comprehensive automated test system that runs at least nightly, compared to running "a few critical test cases" on the whim of a developer, are orders of magnitude higher.
Please don't confuse the bad idea that is "test driven design" with the good idea that is designing your code so that it can be tested regularly and automatically. The two ideas are completely orthogonal.
Of course there is. They can do that to anything not blocked by your constitution immediately, and they can do it even if it would violate the constitution as long as they can convince enough of your population that their view is correct and the constitution should be amended.
That may be your interpretation of the amendment, and your interpretation may be a reasonable one, but that's not what it actually says. Others could argue that its purpose is to prevent an oppressive government seizing power over its people, and nothing to do with self defence. Others still might argue that the case against firearms has not been made, and therefore that as a matter of principle your right should not be removed.
So, if I want to walk down the street with a nuke on my back, what right does your government have to stop me? When you work that out, hopefully you'll understand where I'm coming from with the case at hand too.
Not at all. I'm defending them because I happen to think that they are both legally and ethically in the right here, not because I'm some sort of unthinking Apple fan-boy. I would defend Microsoft the same way under the same circumstances.
Of course we do. We know from experience that some things are harmful to society, and we prohibit them by making them illegal. No-one may commit these acts lawfully, even if they have never violated the law before.
Your own second paragraph, where you describe which weapons you think are and aren't covered by an absolute right to bear arms, is a great example. I have never seen the words "personal arm" anywhere in the laws of the US, certainly not in the second amendment that is the usual defence to any proposed anti-firearm legislation. And yet you have immediately acknowledged that some arms are too dangerous to include in the terms of that "absolute right".
In the same way, history has shown us that saying certain things can be disproportionately damaging, and therefore your "freedom of expression" does not extend to defamation, for example. It also doesn't extend to violating an NDA you entered into willingly, and my argument is simply that it should extend to helping someone else to violate an NDA either.
The elected government and/or the courts.
The wonderful thing about the word "reasonable" in law is that it leaves it up to a court to decide. That court is free to investigate the specifics of the particular case as much as it needs to, and has no need to rely on generalities. It is then up to a jury to form a collective opinion about whether something was "reasonable" in that case.
In your particular example, whoever violated the NDA was clearly liable. There was an explicit agreement. Moreover, if he knowingly leaked the material to a journalist, he knew it was likely to be republished to a wider audience and the damage extensive. If, on the other hand, he honestly believed he was just telling it to a guy at a pub and had no idea it would immediately be widely published, he would still be liable but a court might reasonably award lower damages against him.
It's a good bet that the ThinkSecret guy would be liable in this case, too: he's very familiar with the subject, he knows that he's getting the information from an inside source, and he knows that it hasn't been widely published before or provided through an official channel. He might reasonably be expected to know that it was probably covered by an NDA, and therefore he might reasonably be assigned responsibility for checking that it wasn't before publishing it. Moreover, he knows that he's propagating information from a narrow source to a widely read site, and therefore that if the information is being obtained illegally then he is probably magnifying any damage caused by that illegal act.
After that it gets more dubious. If you found the information on the ThinkSecret site under a blatant warning that said "Secret info leaked from NDA's Apple source!" and you still continued to spread the rumour, you might conceivably be liable. Even then, any damage you do would probably be negligible and I'd expect a court to conclude that you haven't unreasonably damaged the original owner (because the damage was already done). However, if say you'd picked it up from a mailing list with a readership of 5 carrying the same warning and you then republished it on your own site with a readership of 5 million, there would clearly be scope for the court to hold you liable for increasing the damages as well.
Perhaps that's true, but if it's not necessarily in society's interest, why should the law protect it? A free press is a means to an end, not an end in itself.
Is the right to bear arms an absolute, even to the most hardened supported of the second amendment to the US constitution? In the absurd limit, are we really safer if absolutely everyone has a nuclear bomb on their back that they can detonate at will?
Of course we're not, for the simple reason that not everyone in society can be trusted to act in society's best interests. If they could, we wouldn't need laws in the first place, but in the real world it just ain't so.
For the same reason, it is necessary to limit the extent of certain "freedoms", to ensure that they are exercised with due responsibility and that those who choose to exercise them are accountable for that choice.
Then it certainly merits a serious answer. I would prefer you not to worship anything, but to consider cases like this on their merits. Consider the general principles, but also think about the implications of those principles in the specific case, particularly where there are apparent conflicts between two ideas that each have some merit in isolation.
In this case, please consider the following. The law as it stands today would clearly condemn someone violating a NDA to which they agreed prior to being told a trade secret. Thus the law takes the position that allowing the enforcement of NDAs is in the interests of society.
However, if this case is successfully defended then the law provides no sanction against someone taking advantage of information that they could reasonably expect was obtained through illegal means. Now the law is taking the position that it's not important to protect that information in the first place. The two positions are inherently contradictory.
Moreover, the second position supports knowing violation of the intended protections of the law, as long as you get someone else to do your dirty work for you. It places anyone with sufficient isolation above the law, no matter that they might ultimately be the cause of any damage and/or be the only one capable of offering adequate compensation to the damaged party. Surely this is a dangerous idea.
In other words, if we accept that it is right to permit a freedom of the press style defence in this case, we have undermined the whole point of NDAs, and should remove any legal support for such agreements in the first place. Conversely, if we believe that NDAs have merit and should be given legal weight, we cannot logically accept a freedom of the press style defence here.
That was modded (+1, Insightful). I'm sorry, but (-1, Staggeringly Naive) would be more appropriate.
Why do so many people in this thread not see the simple facts here: Apple was wronged, they are seeking redress within the law, and the people who wronged them (legally, morally or both) are in danger of being on the receiving end. Everything else in this thread is just smoke and mirrors in an attempt to deflect the fact that somebody who tried to screw somebody else might be about to get what's coming to them.
That includes all the claims that Apple should "just go after the leak": that's exactly what they're trying to do, via the most expedient method possible. Saying they should try some security audit instead simply demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of how real life works: people get paid to infiltrate these places to commit industrial espionage, they're very good at it, and adding an isolation layer that can't afford to pay back the damage if they get caught should not be a valid legal defence for screwing someone.