08.22.11

Links – Addiction Redefined, Microsoft Florian and Barbarous Trump.

Posted in Site News at 6:58 pm by Guest Editorial Team

Reader’s Picks

• Health/Nutrition

  • A Radical New Definition of Addiction Creates a Big Storm.
    

    The new definition leaves no doubt that all addictions—whether to alcohol, heroin or sex, say—are fundamentally the same. … The APA’s DSM will have a larger effect on public health policies that guide addiction treatment, largely because insurance companies are mandated by law to use the DSM diagnostic categories and criteria to decide which treatments they will pay for.

• Defence/Police/Aggression

  • 1,000 cameras ‘solve one crime’

    CCTV leads to massive expense and minimum effectiveness. It creates a huge intrusion on privacy, yet provides little or no improvement in security.

  • Donald Trump Warns Libyan Rebels Will Be ‘Richer’ Than Americans If We Don’t Steal Their Oil

    “You know, in the old days, when you won a war, to the victor go the spoils,” Trump said, “why don’t we take the oil?” … earlier this year, Trump advocated a similar policy proposal for Iraq. “We should just stay there and take the oil,” he said bluntly, adding that if we didn’t, our soldiers “would have died in vain.”

    I suppose Mr. Trump would not mind being mugged or held for ransom because in the good old days of barbarism that kind of thing was impossible to stop.

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • 3 Reasons Why the Tar Sands Pipeline Has to Be Stopped

  • The Music Industry Creates Tons of Waste Each Year—Here’s How Some Record Labels Are Going Green

    Physical mass media is wasteful but eliminating it is not mentioned in this article full of other good ideas. Pulp books, for example, are often destroyed if they don’t sell. Even though paper production is the fifth largest user of electricity in the US it’s hard for me to think of media as being dirtier than burning coal in the first place.

• Anti-Trust

  • Vacuum After the Explosion at HP

    When you look at the reasons why the PC business has such tight margins, of the order of 6% ($9.592billion revenue, $567million earnings), M$ is huge. Of the 15million PCs HP shipped in Q2, M$ got about $50 each, $750million total. Why does the guy who just gives permission to make a copy of software rake in more than the guy who designs, builds, sells and ships the PC? With FLOSS, HP would be making $1300million in earnings, 13.5%, and not considering selling the business.

    The revenue represents what the market will pay for Windows computers, which are unreliable and lack functionality available in free software. Margins in a free software business would be greater than Pogson estimates but volume and waste would be reduced. We see this emerging in the Android market.

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Microsoft Florian strikes again, Samsung Feigned Surprise Over Apple’s EU Injunction

    It’s true that Samsung wasn’t put on official notice and that there was no hearing in which Samsung could defend itself, but the company implied that it was completely blind-sided by the injunction, when in reality it had been working to pre-emptively stop the injunction almost a week in advance.

    Not only does Florian say an unscheduled hearing is not a blindside, he claims that Samsung’s saying so is a sign that Samsung’s case is weak and accuses Samsung’s lawyers of deception. “If Samsung wants to inspire confidence, it has to understand that half the truth is sometimes tantamount to a whole lie,” he said before part of the injunction was lifted. I’ve deliberately linked this note to a google search of his quote so anyone can see the 3,700 or so PR churn articles that uncritically quoted Florian.

• Censorship

  • Cisco sued by Chinese political prisoners

    An American lawyer is suing Cisco on behalf of Du Daobin, Zhou Yuanzhi, Liu Xianbin and 10 other unnamed Chinese political dissidents. They claim the company sells technology to China that enables the Chinese Communist Party to “monitor, censor and suppress the Chinese people,” and compare Cisco’s behavior to that of IBM in Nazi Germany.

    “Suppress” is a euphemism for threaten, jail, torture and murder.

• Privacy

  • It’s Not Just News Corp: Why Telecommunications Companies in the US May Be Spying on You Every Day

    It’s about time people understood and took measures to thwart the limitless invasion of privacy that happens when government contracts spying out to private companies that are not legally restrained. Legal remedies will be helpful but only a move to free software and end to end encryption will solve the problem.

• Civil Rights

  • UK police arrest water gun fight organizers.

    The unnamed man has been charged with “encouraging or assisting in the commission of an offence” under the 2007 Serious Crime Act, police said. He was arrested with another 20-year-old man the day the water fight was allegedly due to take place … A police spokesman declined to disclose whether Essex police had been monitoring the service [BlackBerry Messenger] since the riots. … This month a water fight attended by thousands of young Iranians attracted the attention of Tehran’s morality police and led to a series of arrests.

  • Insane US insurance billing practices make medicine impossible for uninsured people and ruinous for everyone.
    

    the hospital charged $38,064.95 for the [$6,300] treatment. It then discounted that amount by almost $25,000. … Why the sky-high charge and steep discount? Government-run insurance programs demanded reduced prices from healthcare providers decades ago. Private insurers insisted on equal treatment, and soon it became standard practice for medical bills to be heavily inflated to accommodate the contractual discounts.

    The final, out of pocket expense for the the patient was $2,624.67. A person with no insurance and ineligible government assistance would get a $38,000 bill. The reporter thinks that some kind of “blue book” with uniform prices for medical treatment would help, but insurance companies already have that and it does not work in anyone else’s interest.

  • How Wealthy CEOs Are Screwing Themselves Over by Squeezing Their Workers

    We’re slouching toward a double dip, and the stock market is imploding, because consumers – whose spending is 70 percent of the economy – have reached their limit. … Corporate earnings are the highest they’ve been relative to worker wages and benefits since just before the Great Depression. And the richest 1 percent of Americans are getting a higher percent of total income since just before the Great Depression.

  • $40 a Week? Guest Workers Paid Near-Slave Wages in Hershey Warehouse Stage Sit-Down Strike

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Microsoft’s patents claims against Motorola go to US International Trace Commission hearing next Monday and a decision should come a couple of weeks later.

    Given the track record so far, I don’t expect Microsoft to do well.

  • Federal Circuit Rules Beauregard Claims are Unpatentable

    The court next turned to claim 2, a Beauregard claim, directed to a computer readable medium that includes program instructions for performing a particular method. Such claims have been considered patentable subject matter since at least 1995 when the Federal Circuit issued its opinion In re Beauregard.

    PJ adds: Here’s a bit of background on what a Beauregard claim is, “a computer-readable medium claim”.

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