Parent post talked about not having rebates over "here".. and referred to the US as there. I did the same.
I did the same. The laws are the same all over Europe, and the euro is a damn nice currency imho (still not as good Norwegian kroners ofc, because that is *my* currency).
ISP's shouldn't read email, IM providers shouldn't read IM's. Telephone companies shouldn't listen in on phonecalls. Bus companies shouldn't record conversation on their busses. You shouldn't record your neighbours movements. You shouldn't stalk ugly women walking in circles around trees.
We don't have that stupid sales tax they have some places there too. I mean, why can't they just add the bloody thing to the prices, and nobody would notice, but nooo; they have to add it when you're checking out so it's 96% impossible to calculate how much you're going to spend and find the money before checking out (and when you spend about 5 minutes finding out which money is which that *is* quite annoying.. whoever decided to make all your money so damn similar should be shot too!)
Plus, if I ever really wanted to send sensitive information, I'd find a better way. So essentially, I think, this is a non-issue. But I could be wrong.
Yeah, but this really is a potential gotch'ya.
What this means, is that if a disloyal employee at AOL uses his access to spy on somebody for whatever reason (industrial, personal, etc) he'll most certainly be breaking company rules, but you will have no case against him since AOL had the right to do this. Arbitrarely signing away rights for no reason is never a Good Thing.
Beware a company stating 'we will never do that! (but we reserve the right in-case we ever want to)'
They are not being held liable. They won't have to pay a cent.
Yes, I know, but under current EU/US trademark laws, they actually could be held liable, and that's what scares the shit out of me
But they are not allowed to withold evidence, that's a different thing entirely.
That is assuming there was a crime here. I'd hardly call breaking a contract a criminal, it ought to be purely civil matter. The right to not say something as important to free speech as the right to say something. Just because somebody wants to know, doesn't mean I should have to tell, and just because I signed a contract with somebody, doesn't mean both parties suddenly have the right to get court orders to investigate eachothers lives!
This, of course, completely ignores the basic ideas of property, including intellectual property, and good-faith agreements to not reveal your employer's secrets, not to mention fundamental ideas of ethics, and further ignores the idea that free speech is not, and never has been, absolute, in that it has ramifications.
1. One would assume that one finding "trade secrets" and the UTSA unconstitutional wasn't all that keen on intellectual property in the first place, and most certainly would dismiss that it has anything to do with real property. This line of argueing is thus only valid if you agree with the conclusion in the first place.
2. Secondly; yes, free speech has always had ramifications. Somebody most certainly broke a non-disclure contract here, and they most certainly are liable by whatever stipulated there. The kicker is however, how does this pertain to third parties in poessesion of the 'illegal information'? A great many people find the prospect that they should be held liable for publishing information gotten legally (from their point of view that is) just because whoever they got it from brok a NDA ridicilous. Not everybody accepts the notion that some information can suddenly be flagged as secret, and that you have to go around pretending not to know it. Signing away your own free speech is one thing, signing away others' is a whole different slew!
3. Moreover, I also believe quitr alot of people would be against the notion that these bloggers have to give up their sources. A potential breach of a NDA should be treated as a contract dispute, and this shouldn't have anything to do with special tradelaws, and shouldn't involve courts/police at all! It ain't the governments job to create special provions for certain kind of contracts just because somebody crybabied themselves to it. This is just artificially plugging the market something it's perfectly able to fix itself (god forbid somebody actually had to try to keep their employees happy!)
Re:Poor choice of dates, and show me the numbers.
on
Women Leaving I.T.
·
· Score: 1
Is this the IT market globally, including countries like India, China, Russia, and others? Or is this the IT market in the US?
The citizens of Russia always had more rights than you do, just as you always have had more rights than them.
Did you have a right to a state-sponsored 2 week paid vacation to the sunny south every second year in the US in the 80's? Russian citizens had.
Did they have the right to express their own political opinions whenever they wanted without fear of reprecussions? No, they most certainly didn't, and by large, us in the west have.
You're right, I haven't studiet law and certainly not american law.
A contract is a deal where people agree to exchange some of their rights, or to limit their freedom to use their rights.
Yes, but it can not limit someone else's rights. You can't include "oh, if you tell somebody this, they're not allowed to tell" (the specific laws concerning Trade secrets does seem to be doing a good job at this though, and I really didn't think of them at the time). My original point was that contract alone by itself is two-party, civil matter and shouldn't be any of the bloggers concern.
Either way, I'm holding to my opinion; Apple has no civil dispute with the bloggers; the bloggers have never made any agreements with Apple and Apple has thus no grounds to do anything to the bloggers.
On the other hand, if this is s criminal matter, then it should be up to the police to investigate, and Apple should stay the hell out of the criminal matters.
That makes it the bloggers's civic duty to give the court the information it's asking for in Apple's civil suit, and to share any knowledge they have that might bring a group of criminal NDA violators to justice. But they didn't want to do that, so they claimed journalistic privilege instead, even though they haven't been acting like responsible journalists up to this point.
Here you're loosing me again. I thought this was a contractual dispute between two parties. Why do the bloggers have a civic duty to reveal information concerning a contractual dispute? Is this another aspect of specific laws concering Trade Secrets I've missed?
Either way; a large part of my initial reaction to this story comes from the fact that information concerning release dates etc can be considered trade secrets, I really didn't think Trade Secrets could include this (and reading up on the definition of trade secrets on the UTSA (yes, I just googled for it:) shows that it certainly wasn't what the lawmakers had in mind atleast). I find it personally abhorrent(and extremely un-capitalistic) that somebody is under a law required to not divulge any random tidbit of information from someone breaching any randomly signed contract. Trade Secrets are even more of a sham than some patents.
I wasn't aware that breaking NDA's was considered a criminal matter in some places. For those places however, this should be a police matter, and apple should not be in charge of gathering evidence!
However, the root of the rest of your argument and your stolen property argument have one assumption I don't agree with; namely the assumption that information from coming from someone breaking a NDA is somehow unclean. The NDA is a personal contract, and I'm hard-pressed to see why it should carry any relevance anywhere, anytime whatsoever to a third party.
It is my duty as a citizen to ensure I'm not breaking any laws. Are there any laws against receiving information from someone breaking a NDA?
It is not my duty to ensure my friends don't break personal two-party contractual agreements. There should be no such thing as due diligence when there is no criminal arrangment involved.
As long as I have done no wrong, and as long as there are no criminal matters involved, why should I be required to share information with anybody?
You're both wrong. It's not about secrets, blogging, journalism, or free speech. It's about breaking conctractual agreements, and "contracts are promises that the law will enforce".
The blogger broke no contract.
Why should he be required to tell some 3.party details about his friends/life/work just because they suspect somebody else broke their contract (which is a civil matter, not a criminal offence).
Apple does not, and should never have the same rights available to investigate civil matters as the police have criminal matters. And as such, the question fast becomes a problem of 'free speech and privacy'.
Personally, I think Apple should go screw themselves. American Society seem already to be waaay to harsh on "whistleblowers" (or decent human beings which is a more fitting term imo), and this is not a step in the right direction.
It's an important issue that has been largely ignored by virtually every other major media organisation worldwide
I regurarly read a very leftist (by European standards) newspaper http://www.klassekampen.no/. They do seem to pick on these types of histories very early, and keep updates on them afterwards. (although they contain just as many pure lies and extremely opiniated articles as everything else, it's just not exclusevly "goverment/establishment" propaganda)
My point however, is twofold:
1. The only really intellectual media left seem to be leftist. The former intellectual rightist newspapers seem to be very economics-oriented and trapped in their own paradigm, and mainstream media is just rubbish. I mean, how many news-outlets repeating reuter do we need? If i want to know what Reuters is saying, I check their RSS-feeds.
2. While many things aren't videly reported, the information is out there. It's even readily available if you choose the right sources, most people however doesn't seem to like heavy news, and choose the easy-to-read media's which seems to have lead to a fairly scaring race-to-the-bottom situation.
I'm posting this from my dell inspirion 8200 laptop running Mandrake 10.1. Mandrake installed advanced power savings, sound, network (including wireless with a little extra work) and graphic card automatically no-hazzle. This is alot better than what the other distroes I've tried have managed. (and yes; I'm one of the funny people who prefer that things 'just work')
Debian; I never managed to get the ATI drivers to play nice with my card (and this wasn't for lack of trying)
Fedora didn't want to give me sound, nor did it give my laptop power-savings.
Suse I never tried, and compiling/Gentoo is out of the question.
I feel really really bad about pirating their games now.
Lately I've started buying a much larger share of the games I play, however I never got around to buying anything from Troika. As an avid fan of their work, I'd guess it wouldn't be too far from fair to say me and the likes of me caused their downfall.
Vampire The Masquerade; Bloodlines was an amazing game, with some of the best dialogue/script writing I've ever seen:
"Who are you talking to? I am not here. "
"Stop," , "No, you stop!" - conversing with a stop-sign
Why not censor left wing extremist "hate" sites? Then again, we don't want Germany to ban Slashdot.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but over here in Europe Slashdot most certainly falls pretty far to the right.. bordering right wing extremist in fact.
Right/Left wing are relative measures, and not set in the ground.. Kerry would most certainly have been to extreme for our primary right-wing party here in Norway atleast (høyre).
The UN faithfully delivered all suggested contracts to a commitee manned by 5 standard members of the council, several was marked as financially suspicious but none of these were investigated. The US did however block hundreds of other contracts for what they said was security reasons, the other 4 countries blocked none. This was [b]not[/b] a fault of the UN administration
Furthermore, the money involved in these contracts are dwarfed by both the amount of money mysteriously disappearing from Iraqui oilwells nowadays, and the amount of good old-fashioned smuggling out of Iraq pre-war.
The "genocide" in Yugoslavia is a fairly good example actually, because before NATO/US moved in, people on all sides were killing eachother pretty equally. It was war. However western media somehow(for what reasons? by whose decision?) misrepresented statistics and the whole situation blew up when NATO went in. To add insult to this, they never went in with ground fources to break things up. Europe(Germany? my memory fails me) premature approval of Kosovo didn't help much either. The UN tactic of waiting it out, and not arbitrerarily choosing one side to side with was prudent; and it's only our acute sense of stupidity that keeps us from seeing it.
Lastly, the world is a big place; listing the disasters of the world is not proof the UN is not working. They are not, and never were intended to be world police. They are not perfect, and they don't have a magic wand to remove problems. Problems often seem quite different depending on the perspective, and while I'm sure you're sure your perspective is right, I'm equally sure mine is right.
Oh, and sorry for not providing links, but I don't have them handy; and you're probably just as good at searching as I am:)
If, however, Gillette has used a copyright law to prevent people from making razor blades which will work in a Gillette razor, then your analogy is good.
Copyright law to protect razors? Coming right up just after I've finished applying sailboat-regulations concerning rudder-size to my suitcase!
On a more serious note, the commercial for the newest gillette razors here in Europe said their newest razors were protected by over 50 new patents, so I'd guess thats what they're using for lock-in, because honestly; they must be using something as I've never seen any replacement.
As an Oregonian I certainly welcome this, though I'm starting to wonder if I should get a bomb shelter should MS want to obliterate the competition in more ways than one.
Axes of evil, say welcome to Oregon; your newest member!
And the big one: we're overdue for the every-300-year Cascadian subduction zone tsunami event, which will roll right up the Columbia river. And there are dams both West and East of the Dalles...
You do know that every-300-year catastrophes actually don't happen every 300 years right?:)
Real logic would indicate that the longer since the last catastrophe, the lesser the chance of it happening.. else Norway would be in for one heeell of a heat-spell next summer
I certainly do see your point and partly agree with you and I do understand what you mean, even though my reply may not look like it:)
However, snide comments hurt nobody but the interviewer. I was impressed with how the subject managed to keep it civil. Points scored for subject, points lost for interviewer, no difference to me. Most people reading that interview will simply filter out the snide comments, and get to the interesting parts.. on the other hand, if he'd been too polite the whole interview would have turned out incredibly bland. I know which I prefer atleast..
You call for professionalism, in my experience this usually means not being blunt, not saying what you think because you stick to the script and most of all, avoid offending the subject... Is this really what you want in a slashdot interview? Keeping it real, and down-to-earth has it disadvantages certainly, but I think if the interviews here got more "professional" alot of people would stop reading them alltogether.
On the same note, you call for respectfullnes, and while I'm certain you want the good type of respectfullnes, in my experience respectfullness is measured in how good you are at tossing stupid friendly frazes at eachother("oooh, how good to see you Bob","oooh, it's marvelous to be here Charlie"), and avoiding asking any questions the subject doesn't want to answer. i don't want that here either.
This is one part of American society that has always dumbfounded me, why do you guys need to prove all this cheating? Could somebody be nice enough to explain it?
Over here, I think it goes something like 'you keep any property you can conclusivly prove you took into the marriage, everything else is split 50/50'. No judge would give a rats ass for the reasons you want a divorce.. you agreed the share everything, and if you now want to stop sharing everything that's your deal.
Slashdot Mirror
I did the same. The laws are the same all over Europe, and the euro is a damn nice currency imho (still not as good Norwegian kroners ofc, because that is *my* currency).
ISP's shouldn't read email, IM providers shouldn't read IM's. Telephone companies shouldn't listen in on phonecalls. Bus companies shouldn't record conversation on their busses. You shouldn't record your neighbours movements. You shouldn't stalk ugly women walking in circles around trees.
We don't have that stupid sales tax they have some places there too. I mean, why can't they just add the bloody thing to the prices, and nobody would notice, but nooo; they have to add it when you're checking out so it's 96% impossible to calculate how much you're going to spend and find the money before checking out (and when you spend about 5 minutes finding out which money is which that *is* quite annoying.. whoever decided to make all your money so damn similar should be shot too!)
Yeah, but this really is a potential gotch'ya.
What this means, is that if a disloyal employee at AOL uses his access to spy on somebody for whatever reason (industrial, personal, etc) he'll most certainly be breaking company rules, but you will have no case against him since AOL had the right to do this. Arbitrarely signing away rights for no reason is never a Good Thing.
Beware a company stating 'we will never do that! (but we reserve the right in-case we ever want to)'
Yes, I know, but under current EU/US trademark laws, they actually could be held liable, and that's what scares the shit out of me
But they are not allowed to withold evidence, that's a different thing entirely.
That is assuming there was a crime here. I'd hardly call breaking a contract a criminal, it ought to be purely civil matter. The right to not say something as important to free speech as the right to say something. Just because somebody wants to know, doesn't mean I should have to tell, and just because I signed a contract with somebody, doesn't mean both parties suddenly have the right to get court orders to investigate eachothers lives!
1. One would assume that one finding "trade secrets" and the UTSA unconstitutional wasn't all that keen on intellectual property in the first place, and most certainly would dismiss that it has anything to do with real property. This line of argueing is thus only valid if you agree with the conclusion in the first place.
2. Secondly; yes, free speech has always had ramifications. Somebody most certainly broke a non-disclure contract here, and they most certainly are liable by whatever stipulated there. The kicker is however, how does this pertain to third parties in poessesion of the 'illegal information'? A great many people find the prospect that they should be held liable for publishing information gotten legally (from their point of view that is) just because whoever they got it from brok a NDA ridicilous. Not everybody accepts the notion that some information can suddenly be flagged as secret, and that you have to go around pretending not to know it. Signing away your own free speech is one thing, signing away others' is a whole different slew!
3. Moreover, I also believe quitr alot of people would be against the notion that these bloggers have to give up their sources. A potential breach of a NDA should be treated as a contract dispute, and this shouldn't have anything to do with special tradelaws, and shouldn't involve courts/police at all! It ain't the governments job to create special provions for certain kind of contracts just because somebody crybabied themselves to it. This is just artificially plugging the market something it's perfectly able to fix itself (god forbid somebody actually had to try to keep their employees happy!)
American author. Make a wild guess!
"The rest of the world? Where is that?" :p
The citizens of Russia always had more rights than you do, just as you always have had more rights than them.
Did you have a right to a state-sponsored 2 week paid vacation to the sunny south every second year in the US in the 80's? Russian citizens had.
Did they have the right to express their own political opinions whenever they wanted without fear of reprecussions? No, they most certainly didn't, and by large, us in the west have.
A contract is a deal where people agree to exchange some of their rights, or to limit their freedom to use their rights.
Yes, but it can not limit someone else's rights. You can't include "oh, if you tell somebody this, they're not allowed to tell" (the specific laws concerning Trade secrets does seem to be doing a good job at this though, and I really didn't think of them at the time). My original point was that contract alone by itself is two-party, civil matter and shouldn't be any of the bloggers concern.
Either way, I'm holding to my opinion;
Apple has no civil dispute with the bloggers; the bloggers have never made any agreements with Apple and Apple has thus no grounds to do anything to the bloggers.
On the other hand, if this is s criminal matter, then it should be up to the police to investigate, and Apple should stay the hell out of the criminal matters.
That makes it the bloggers's civic duty to give the court the information it's asking for in Apple's civil suit, and to share any knowledge they have that might bring a group of criminal NDA violators to justice. But they didn't want to do that, so they claimed journalistic privilege instead, even though they haven't been acting like responsible journalists up to this point.
Here you're loosing me again. I thought this was a contractual dispute between two parties. Why do the bloggers have a civic duty to reveal information concerning a contractual dispute? Is this another aspect of specific laws concering Trade Secrets I've missed?
Either way; a large part of my initial reaction to this story comes from the fact that information concerning release dates etc can be considered trade secrets, I really didn't think Trade Secrets could include this (and reading up on the definition of trade secrets on the UTSA (yes, I just googled for it:) shows that it certainly wasn't what the lawmakers had in mind atleast). I find it personally abhorrent(and extremely un-capitalistic) that somebody is under a law required to not divulge any random tidbit of information from someone breaching any randomly signed contract. Trade Secrets are even more of a sham than some patents.
I'm moving to Canada!
However, the root of the rest of your argument and your stolen property argument have one assumption I don't agree with; namely the assumption that information from coming from someone breaking a NDA is somehow unclean. The NDA is a personal contract, and I'm hard-pressed to see why it should carry any relevance anywhere, anytime whatsoever to a third party.
It is my duty as a citizen to ensure I'm not breaking any laws. Are there any laws against receiving information from someone breaking a NDA?
It is not my duty to ensure my friends don't break personal two-party contractual agreements. There should be no such thing as due diligence when there is no criminal arrangment involved.
As long as I have done no wrong, and as long as there are no criminal matters involved, why should I be required to share information with anybody?
Sounds cool, know of any parties that supports this?
The blogger broke no contract.
Why should he be required to tell some 3.party details about his friends/life/work just because they suspect somebody else broke their contract (which is a civil matter, not a criminal offence).
Apple does not, and should never have the same rights available to investigate civil matters as the police have criminal matters. And as such, the question fast becomes a problem of 'free speech and privacy'.
Personally, I think Apple should go screw themselves. American Society seem already to be waaay to harsh on "whistleblowers" (or decent human beings which is a more fitting term imo), and this is not a step in the right direction.
I regurarly read a very leftist (by European standards) newspaper http://www.klassekampen.no/. They do seem to pick on these types of histories very early, and keep updates on them afterwards. (although they contain just as many pure lies and extremely opiniated articles as everything else, it's just not exclusevly "goverment/establishment" propaganda)
My point however, is twofold:
1. The only really intellectual media left seem to be leftist. The former intellectual rightist newspapers seem to be very economics-oriented and trapped in their own paradigm, and mainstream media is just rubbish. I mean, how many news-outlets repeating reuter do we need? If i want to know what Reuters is saying, I check their RSS-feeds. 2. While many things aren't videly reported, the information is out there. It's even readily available if you choose the right sources, most people however doesn't seem to like heavy news, and choose the easy-to-read media's which seems to have lead to a fairly scaring race-to-the-bottom situation.
Is socialist a swear word? You seem to be reacting like it is.
Debian; I never managed to get the ATI drivers to play nice with my card (and this wasn't for lack of trying)
Fedora didn't want to give me sound, nor did it give my laptop power-savings.
Suse I never tried, and compiling/Gentoo is out of the question.
Lately I've started buying a much larger share of the games I play, however I never got around to buying anything from Troika. As an avid fan of their work, I'd guess it wouldn't be too far from fair to say me and the likes of me caused their downfall.
Vampire The Masquerade; Bloodlines was an amazing game, with some of the best dialogue/script writing I've ever seen:
"Who are you talking to? I am not here. "
"Stop," , "No, you stop!" - conversing with a stop-sign
"The fleet-foothed God is broken!"
Sorry to burst your bubble, but over here in Europe Slashdot most certainly falls pretty far to the right.. bordering right wing extremist in fact.
Right/Left wing are relative measures, and not set in the ground.. Kerry would most certainly have been to extreme for our primary right-wing party here in Norway atleast (høyre).
The UN faithfully delivered all suggested contracts to a commitee manned by 5 standard members of the council, several was marked as financially suspicious but none of these were investigated. The US did however block hundreds of other contracts for what they said was security reasons, the other 4 countries blocked none. This was [b]not[/b] a fault of the UN administration
Furthermore, the money involved in these contracts are dwarfed by both the amount of money mysteriously disappearing from Iraqui oilwells nowadays, and the amount of good old-fashioned smuggling out of Iraq pre-war.
The "genocide" in Yugoslavia is a fairly good example actually, because before NATO/US moved in, people on all sides were killing eachother pretty equally. It was war. However western media somehow(for what reasons? by whose decision?) misrepresented statistics and the whole situation blew up when NATO went in. To add insult to this, they never went in with ground fources to break things up. Europe(Germany? my memory fails me) premature approval of Kosovo didn't help much either. The UN tactic of waiting it out, and not arbitrerarily choosing one side to side with was prudent; and it's only our acute sense of stupidity that keeps us from seeing it.
Lastly, the world is a big place; listing the disasters of the world is not proof the UN is not working. They are not, and never were intended to be world police. They are not perfect, and they don't have a magic wand to remove problems. Problems often seem quite different depending on the perspective, and while I'm sure you're sure your perspective is right, I'm equally sure mine is right.
Oh, and sorry for not providing links, but I don't have them handy; and you're probably just as good at searching as I am :)
Copyright law to protect razors? Coming right up just after I've finished applying sailboat-regulations concerning rudder-size to my suitcase!
On a more serious note, the commercial for the newest gillette razors here in Europe said their newest razors were protected by over 50 new patents, so I'd guess thats what they're using for lock-in, because honestly; they must be using something as I've never seen any replacement.
or rather; a-not-so-very-ancient-anymore legend warned them :)
Axes of evil, say welcome to Oregon; your newest member!
You do know that every-300-year catastrophes actually don't happen every 300 years right? :)
Real logic would indicate that the longer since the last catastrophe, the lesser the chance of it happening .. else Norway would be in for one heeell of a heat-spell next summer
I certainly do see your point and partly agree with you and I do understand what you mean, even though my reply may not look like it :)
However, snide comments hurt nobody but the interviewer. I was impressed with how the subject managed to keep it civil. Points scored for subject, points lost for interviewer, no difference to me. Most people reading that interview will simply filter out the snide comments, and get to the interesting parts.. on the other hand, if he'd been too polite the whole interview would have turned out incredibly bland. I know which I prefer atleast..
You call for professionalism, in my experience this usually means not being blunt, not saying what you think because you stick to the script and most of all, avoid offending the subject... Is this really what you want in a slashdot interview? Keeping it real, and down-to-earth has it disadvantages certainly, but I think if the interviews here got more "professional" alot of people would stop reading them alltogether.
On the same note, you call for respectfullnes, and while I'm certain you want the good type of respectfullnes, in my experience respectfullness is measured in how good you are at tossing stupid friendly frazes at eachother("oooh, how good to see you Bob","oooh, it's marvelous to be here Charlie"), and avoiding asking any questions the subject doesn't want to answer. i don't want that here either.
Over here, I think it goes something like 'you keep any property you can conclusivly prove you took into the marriage, everything else is split 50/50'. No judge would give a rats ass for the reasons you want a divorce.. you agreed the share everything, and if you now want to stop sharing everything that's your deal.