2009-12-29

NDA

NDA, or Non Disclosure Agreements are useful in business. If you don't know, they are basically an agreement saying to can't leak confidential information that is shared with you for some specific project or purpose. They are usually mutual (two way). Basically, if you leak info then you can be sued for damages.

They are really useful to allow negotiations in private for something before it is published or launched.

Now, our favorite telco have NDAs as you would expect, but then they have a tendency to mark everything as confidential which means we can't tell anyone! This even applies when they tell us stuff specifically so that we can keep our customers informed. So we have a crazy situation that there may be some major planned works early 2010, but we cannot tell our customers about it or any details.

But, on a lighter note, for other stargate fans out there. Don't you just love the way they get civilians to sign an NDA. They make a big thing about it on many occasions. WTF???

What is the point of doing that?

(a) They are the government and so can almost certainly legally do far worse that sue you for breach of an NDA, and probably have specific laws covering military secrets (like we do in the UK) so the NDA is just silly.

(b) They have a stargate, tracking systems and beaming technology, so they can vanish you very effectively if you upset them and no way for any normal criminal investigation to trace it! They don't even have to kill you as such. You can't run and you can't hide. Surely that is a hugely more effective threat than any NDA.

(c) The only way to use an NDA is to sue for breach of the NDA, and I assume much the same in the US. Doing that means you have to confirm that what was disclosed was in fact confidential information, and hence true. You can never use an NDA without validating the disclosure. Yet what would be disclosed is so fantastic that it would be dismissed as crazy take anyway. So what is the point!

By the way, I an not under any NDA regarding any stargate! But I would say that wouldn't I :-)

Happy New Year

5 comments:

  1. So are we going to like these "works"?

    ReplyDelete
  2. This set off all kinds of thoughts about certain telecomms companies running a stargate system, and the effects of packet loss on people travelling through such a system.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Can you list every day when there are no planned works? They presumably haven't put that under NDA...

    ReplyDelete
  4. @Tony - you mean in the style of Brian Hanrahan's "I counted them all out and counted them all back"?

    ReplyDelete

Comments are moderated purely to filter out obvious spam, but it means they may not show immediately.

Hot tubbing...

I have a hot tub, it came with the house over 3 years ago. Managing a hot tub is complicated, and expensive. The expensive part is the power...