dead horse to flog

Just to drum the point about American influence home a little, here's an excerpt from an article in today's Irish Times:

Department to store data on citizens for four years

Detailed personal data on every Irish citizen's phone and mobile calls, faxes, and e-mail and Internet usage will be retained for up to four years under a new Department of Justice Bill, writes Karlin Lillington

[...]

Mr Brown [director of British policy for the Foundation for Information Policy Research (FIPR)] said Britain and the Republic have been under pressure from American surveillance agencies such as the CIA and FBI to loosen protections on data privacy.

scum of the earth

A friend of mine lost his job a few months back, and took the opportunity to start a company. He has a good product idea, and managed to get some government assistance and a few other lucky breaks. Long story short, he got to present his software to a company in the US who were interested in a distribution deal. NDAs were signed beforehand etc and he made his pitch and they said, yep, we can do this.

Then they called him and told him they were going out of business so the deal was off.

Now he's found out that far from going out of business, they've actually stolen his entire idea, including the presentation he'd provided them with to make sales pitches of his product (all under NDA, remember) and pitching "their" product to potential customers.

My friend has talked to his lawyers. It will cost $10,000 for him to get an injunction preventing this company from taking everything he's worked on for the last few months and making money off his idea, even though he's 100% in the right. And I'm guessing that they're banking on him not being able to come up with this money, so they get away with it.

Scum.