What have I got in my pocket?
Well the Coke recipe is locked up in a secret vault somewhere IIRC.
And overall they’re pretty much top-secret trade…well, secrets, right? It’s what gives them their competitive edge, that is that nobody knows them. If those secrets got out, it could very well destroy the company.
Sanders Harland patented in 1966 three ideas for cooking chicken. The FDA inspects the food and (manf.) plants that KFC uses.
That doesn’t mean they know anything useful. I’m sure that the process is so compartmentalized that no-one knows more than a fraction of the formula. Company A produces one part, Company B a second part, and they are mixed in a ratio known only to KFC with a final component. All the Patent Office would know about would be the pressure cookers, not the formula for the herbs and spices. Besides, several people have analyzed the stuff. There isn’t anything extraordinary in it at all.
Yes, but do the FDA or patent office hold that formula? If either one did, why would they let me have all the details necessary to make any pharmaceutical I wanted, for free, but not a soft drink?
It doesn’t make sense.
Aren’t patents, by their very nature, public documents?
Not much good if you spend $10,000,000 bringing something to market if another company then pulls out their super-secret patent and shuts down production. Secret patents would be a serious obstacle to innovation, no one would dare invest in anything new for fear that some patent farm held the IP rights.
Didn’t William Poundstone have KFC’s product analyzed to discover that the secret recipe was salt and pepper?
Alas, Amazon will let you “look inside” the book, but it stops before it gets to analysis.
Keeping the SDMB hamsters operating at full speed 24/7/365.
The President (or other HoS/HoG) wouldn’t be told the real names of foreign intelligence “assets” (such as MI6’s mole in the KGB, Oleg Gordievsky for example). The information from them would be laundered so as that there was almost no chance anyone could work out their identity from any reports.
shrugs No idea. I didn’t mention the FDA earlier, Will Repair did I think. I don’t think they would. The patent office might though, wouldn’t they? Wouldn’t they have to patent the recipe?
Geez, the can of worms I opened with a question. 
If you patent anything its details become public knowledge.
In regards to your current President, I’d say he doesn’t know about 99% of the content of a children’s encyclopaedia.
That’s my fervent hope. Simply being the President of the United States does not confer need-to-know, just as being the CEO of a corporation does not have the need to know everything that’s being classified and held as secret in their company.
Just as one example, our CEO does not have access to the mainframes, and they also don’t have free access to the data centers, or even an access badge to enter this building. He’s got no need to know or see any of this.
And that’s why KFC’s recipe is held as a trade secret. What sounds like paranoia in the form of having one company producing Part A and another company producing Part B, and the mystery of how much of each is really just what KFC needs to do in order to demonstrate that they’re serious about keeping it a secret.
So what if Part A might be no more than plain table salt and Part B is ground pepper? The company goes to significant effort to keep it secret, and has been doing so for years, so the recipe gains the legal status of a trade secret, meaning KFC can pummel anyone who claims to be selling the same spice blend, or selling fried chicken that tastes the same, even though the recipe is not patented, published or copyrighted.
An interesting, but unlikely scenario. Any cryptography that relies on keeping the *method * secret is bad news. It’s the *keys * that need to be kept secret.
Our encrpytion standards today (such as AES, DES, PGP and MD5) have been published and laid bare to inspection and dissection by countless mathematicians and cryptographers around the world in order to seek out any flaws in the method. Think of it as numeric proofreading.
Take the RSA algorithm as an example of this. RSA is a very strong encryption method, but its formula is so simple that it can be printed on a T-shirt. As a result, it’s been poked and prodded for weaknesses for years, and it’s still holding strong.
About ten years ago, there was an attempt by the government to produce a secret method of encryption that contained a “back door” for law enforcement access. It was called Skipjack, and within one year of its creation, it was found to contain so many flaws and broken so badly that it’s been entirely abandoned. So much for keeping things secret.
You guys are confusing trade secrets with patents. Patents are public documents. If you patent a process, it gives you exclusive rights to use that process for 17 years, after which it becomes public domain. This his how we get “generic” drugs. A company develops the drug, patents it (which includes publishing all the manufacturing details), and has exclusive right to produce the drug for 17 years. Anyone else who copies the process gets sued. After 17 years, anyone can copy the process and create their own version of the drug. Except since everyone can make it, profit margins on this type of drug are small. So if Harlan Sanders patented 3 methods of cooking chicken in 1966, those methods are now in public domain, anyone can copy them.
Trade secrets are different, because they are–you guessed it–secret. The exact blend of herbs and spices used isn’t patented, it’s just secret. If another company happened across the secret document, they would be free to use that exact blend the next day. Trade secrets are protected, but typically only the employees of the company have an obligation to keep their company’s trade secrets. If you are a KFC spiceologist and privy to the secret blend, you’ve signed a contract not to reveal the secret, and if you give the secret to Chick-fil-a, you’re gonna get sued.
So no, the president can’t call up the CEO of KFC and demand the secret recipe, any more than he can call you up and demand to know the exact dimensions of your genitalia.
Before patents, new discoveries were kept secret by guilds and such, and revealing the guild secrets marked you for revenge. But this meant that new discoveries spread very slowly, and many trade secrets were lost. Patents advance the useful arts and sciences by granting creators the exclusive right to exploit their creation for a limited time, then the idea is made available for public use.
So if you invent antigravity tomorrow, you could patent it and you’d be the exclusive purveyor of antigravity devices for 17 years. But you’d have to demonstrate how your invention worked and after 17 years your monopoly would be over. So you could keep it a secret, and keep your monopoly forever. Except, what if one of your competitors bought your antigravity pod, took it to the lab, and figured out how it works? Then they could build antigravity pods themselves, and you couldn’t do anything about it. Same with the secret blend of herbs and spices. If someone buys a bucket of chicken, and sits down and tastes it and figures out the blend through reverse engineering, then they can make chicken with that exact blend and KFC can’t stop them.
A good friend used to work for US Army Intelligence (no puns please, he already told me those). His security clearance was somewhere above Top Secret, which was well above what his CO had. My friend would often take a book and hide in the super-secrety room when he didn’t feel like having anyone tell him what to do. Your tax dollars at work (US citizens only). 
More to the point- President Truman was unaware of the Manhattan Project until he was actually President. It’s not hard to imagine that a system as large as the US gummint might have things going on that it doesn’t want known to anyone, including the Chief Executive.
Not that it would make any difference WHAT you told the current resident of the White House. :eek:
I thought I owned that book, and indeed I do. On page 21, the ingredients are listed from his lab analysis: chicken, cooking oil, skim milk, eggs, flour, salt, black pepper, monosodium glutamate, and lark’s vomit.
This is one of my related threads that I have linked to a few times. Ravenman in particular gave some good insights on how the President and the other bodies of federal government keep the CIA under control. The CIA has a very long history spanning decades of whacked out antics that would need a laugh track if they were put on TV. I would guess that the President wouldn’t want to know some of it and Congress couldn’t so that might create some big secrets but it works how it works.
Do the President and Congress know what the CIA is up to all the time?
I opened this thread mainly to mention the “ark of the covenant warehouse” in case somebody hadn’t mentioned it already.
But anyway, I recall reading that there were periods during the 1940s when NOBODY knew how many atomic bombs the U.S. had.
THIS president? They won’t even tell him who put the bomp in the bomp-a-bomp-a-bomp. Anything important goes to Cheney.