There are a lot more than 1.5% of us who didn't vote for the US government, starting with almost everyone outside the US, who the US Powers That Be don't much seem to care about alienating this week even if we're all "allies". This whole mess is exposing the fundamental problems of international legal frameworks when it comes to commercial and intelligence practice.

For example, it's now going to be very awkward for US businesses that deal with lots of personal information about people from Europe -- where data protection laws are much stronger than in the US -- to explain how they are both complying with those laws and complying with the US government harvesting data. Plenty of people have noticed the paradox in the past and turned a blind eye or left it to the EU bureaucrats to figure out how to deal with it quietly, but somehow I doubt that's going to fly for much longer at this point.

Things are about to get very awkward for any EU companies that send data over to US services covered by the Safe Harbor rules as well, because if it's clear that Safe Harbor doesn't really protect data to European standards because the US government freely admits it can get to it anyway, then almost by definition it's going to become illegal to use all those US-based services from the EU. If that actually became a real thing, the economic consequences would be... unpleasant.

Specifically, the European Court of Justice ruled last year on a case involving Oracle and UsedSoft, with the latter wanting to resell used Oracle software. The court found that licences could be resold, notwithstanding a claim to the contrary in Oracle's licence agreement. Interestingly, they also ruled that if Oracle was offering free maintenance updates to the original purchaser then they must continue to offer the same to the purchaser of the used software licence.

Obviously with any legal case you have to look at the specifics and not assume too much of a precedent, but still, this seems a clear shot across the bows of Big Software that they don't get to close down the used software market through either blunt legalese in the licence agreement or trying to tie related services to the original purchaser only.

For anyone wondering, yes, this ruling is sharply at odds with the US Ninth Circuit's view in the Autodesk case.

(I'm not a lawyer, just an interested observer, so don't read any legal technicalities into the above.)

This is a useful purpose, but one that could be served just as well by fining the companies in question real money and directing it to some constructive destination determined by the court. There is no need to allow for the blatant enrichment of lawyers as the primary beneficiaries of such cases, which from an outsider's point of view seems to be the norm in US class actions.

Perhaps it would be appropriate to require a failed defendant to compensate the individuals to a fair extent in any case. If the overheads of doing so are absurdly disproportionate, it will serve as a very practical punishment and a reminder of just how many people were harmed even in a small way.

I live just down the road from one of the UK's national reference libraries. I've read tons of research on the subject.

You, I'm guessing, haven't. For example, I just looked up the second paper you cited there. It is not primary research, mentions the term "agile" only once in its entire content, and cites only two other related sources.

Then I looked up the first of those two sources. It appears to be based on self-reported, subjective preferences rather than objective, quantified data; it relates to general trends rather than specific practices; it has obvious selection bias problems; and even then it is equivocal in its conclusions.

I gave up at that point. Maybe something buried elsewhere in what you cited would be interesting, but you obviously just looked up a couple of random papers and posted them in the hope that you'd look like you knew what you were talking about.

Doing serious research into software engineering practices is very hard. It is extremely unusual to have the chance to compare two parallel implementations of equivalent or very similar non-trivial projects using two different methods. This is certainly a real problem.

Depending on where you are, you might be able to send them a Subject Access Request or your local equivalent, forcing them to provide you with all the personal data they hold about you, give or take a bit of wriggling on their part, for a token amount of money.

As I said, I have yet to see convincing evidence that a lot of these trendy Agile processes are in fact measurably more successful than "older approaches".

I don't lack published papers. I've had an interest in this area for many years, and I've done much more than Googling. I've also looked through academic reference libraries, conference proceedings, subscription journals, and research from industrial R&D facilities, among other things.

And as I said, I have yet to find any significant amount of hard data collected using sound methodologies that supports these general claims about the superiority of various Agile methods. For example, a disturbing number of the "studies" are little more than watching a trivial coding exercise performed by a handful of undergraduate students, followed by completely unwarranted extrapolation to professional projects implemented by professional teams over extended timescales. TDD studies are a personal favourite of mine, where it seems to be almost universal to experiment with trivial CRUD applications that play to TDD's expected strengths, and where the control used for comparison is almost invariably having no testing at all rather than any of the numerous realistic alternatives.

To be clear, I am not arguing that none of the practices used by Agile is a good idea, nor that there is no evidence of any kind in favour of some of those practices. There is evidence that using automated unit tests reduces bug counts compared to not using them, for example. But if the kinds of unqualified blanket claims that Agile evangelists frequently make on forums like this one were really as clear-cut as they make out, the evidence of the superiority of methods like Scrum and XP ought to be overwhelming after this long, and it simply isn't.

I don't know, but since we're talking about software project management in large organisations, there are plenty of plausible explanations that have little, if anything, to do with Agile consistently achieving objectively better results for those organisations.

I'd love to see a citation for that study. I've been waiting a decade for someone to show me actual data that supports a claim that various Agile practices cause a measurable improvement in some useful way, and so far I've yet to find a paper where the methodology and/or conclusions couldn't be debunked literally in a few seconds.

Stop moving the goalposts. We were talking specifically about the UK's closest equivalent to US Miranda rights. The question was why the right to remain silent, even when being formally questioned with legal representation present, should be protected, and how allowing someone under those conditions to change their story in court later and suddenly remember things convenient to their defence is actually in the interests of justice.

You still haven't given anything resembling an actual argument in support of that position. All you're posting is fear-mongering about some hypothetical bogeymen, and a few allegations that are disproved every day by the way our system actually works, for real, in practice, here in the UK. I think you don't have any logical or evidence-based argument to make, and you're just defending a legal right that the US singles out for protection because of dogma.

If you have anything with any real substance, feel free to post it and maybe I'll reply again, but otherwise this thread doesn't seem to be going anywhere.

Yes, I think that's exactly what happens here in the UK, which is where we're talking about in this thread if you recall.

Sure. Most users aren't technical experts and will fall for a carefully constructed illusion.

But anyone who is using a computer on-line in a non-trivial way can be a victim of an attack. Zero-day exploits get found, and every major browser has been compromised, and every major OS has been compromised, and no amount of security software and hardware can make you completely immune to threats. You can do a lot to reduce the risk, but there's no such thing as perfect security in today's on-line world. The only way to avoid these attacks is not to enable on-line banking at all, which of course just creates other attack vectors instead because you need to do your banking somehow.

I think you're reading too much into what I wrote that isn't really there.

I am not talking about specific cases, I am talking about general principles and what the scope of patent protection should be. I have no problem with saying that, for example, patents should not apply to any information-based "invention" such as software, business methods, or scientific data. I also think it would be wise not to grant patents for any physical invention whose novelty is primarily or entirely in the information it embodies; for example, you can't just add "on a computer" to an otherwise information-based invention to overcome the intended exclusion.

It doesn't need one person to dictate that these things aren't patentable on a case-by-case basis. Just define what constitutes a patentable invention in a way that isn't absurdly broad. Clearly you can't dictate in advance which specific inventions are patentable, because you'd have to invent everything before it was invented, so you're going to need some sort of generic statement of the scope of patent protection whatever you do (unless you abolish patents altogether, which is a different question).

Once again that's a rather US-centric approach. To give a contrasting example again from here in the UK, there are plenty of times that the CPS (our public prosecution service) decide not to go ahead with a prosecution because they decide that it's not in the public interest.

Right, so as long as the questioning is taking place under caution and legal counsel is present, what's the problem?

Do these measures address arguably the most fundamental problem: too many things are patentable in the US and patents are awarded too easily in the first place?

Please stop putting words under my fingertips. I never said anything about governments never being bad, or about not protecting important rights. I just asked how protecting the specific "rights" we're talking about is in the interests of justice in modern society. And I notice that you still haven't even attempted to answer that question, and nor has anyone else in this thread.

And how many centuries ago was that?

There are a lot of things that weren't protected by other means in those days that would probably bring down governments if you tried to overturn them today, as for example women and anyone who isn't white can affirm.

So once more, I repeat the same fundamental question: How is protecting these "rights" in the interests of justice today?