Reflections From a Murky Pond

Has it occurred to anyone that the prophesied Apocalypse might, due to Augmented Reality and the growth of portable – soon to be wearable – computing power, have a soundtrack?  While this is quite obviously unknowable, we can guess what format it would be in.

Will That Sooth The Savage Breast? … Sort Of.

Sadly, this means that the music of the End Times will take on a decidedly staccato tempo and lose a great deal of its bass. 😉

Don’t worry though; Steve Jobs or his successors at Apple probably won’t be releasing the iKill or iBurst for your End of Days listening pleasure. They don’t need to since a British firm has been marketing a MP3 player modification to the Kalashnikov (AK-47 series) since 2005!

AK-MP3 Jukebox – Rock and Roll, Boys and Girls!

So the question would be what’s your playlist for Armageddon? Or would you prefer an audio book?

The California Supreme Court ruled on Monday, January 3, 2011 that the police do not need to obtain a warrant prior to searching a cell phone owned by someone who is currently under arrest. Such searches were ruled legal under the prevailing legal precedents surrounding Searches Incident to Arrest.

Legally this was the right call and decision.

It’s also, however, a decision that has scared and angered a number of people, for variety of knee-jerk, self-serving, and some valid reasons respectively, since the shifts in technology have lured many people into storing vast amounts of private information within their mobile devices.

We granted review in this case to decide whether the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution permits law enforcement officers, approximately 90 minutes after lawfully arresting a suspect and transporting him to a detention facility, to conduct a warrantless search of the text message folder of a cell phone they take from his person after the arrest. We hold that, under the United States Supreme Court’s binding precedent, such a search is valid as being incident to a lawful custodial arrest. We affirm the Court of Appeal’s judgment.

— Supreme Court of California
The People v. Gregory Diaz (S166600)

The police have the legal right, as affirmed multiple times by the SCOTUS, to search anything on the person of- or in the immediate control of anyone that they arrest without the requirement of obtaining any form of warrant to do so. Any evidence found during such searches is admissible in court and is not limited to such as is pertinent to the charges that the arrestee was originally detained for.

The previous SCOTUS opinions on: Harris v. United States (1947), United States v. Rabinowitz (1950), and Chimel v. California (1969) even extend this right of search and seizure to the room in which the suspect is arrested within – Chimel being a limiting factor since the Court held that the seizure of the entire contents of a house and its removal to FBI offices 200 miles away for examination, pursuant to an arrest under warrant of one of the persons found in the house, was unreasonable.

None of this is new; this is settled law. What is new is the amount of type of data that people carry on their persons and which is therefor subject to warrantless search in the event of their arrest.

Dating and relationships have changed a great deal over the years, and this mutation has increased in frequency and amplitude in the wake of social media and online communities, many centered around Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games (MMORPGs).

We now have a growing number of people having online “relationships” where they’re “dating” people they’ve never even seen, much less met in person!

The Guild’s Do You Wanna Date My Avatar, featuring Felicia Day, sums up the disturbing situation with aplomb, style, and just the right amount, in my rarely humble opinion, of sarcasm-laced humor.

Do You Want To Date My Avatar? Gods! I Hope and Pray Not

Truly, this online dating 2.0 where the participants have never seen each other and conduct their “affairs” solely through the interactions between their avatars leaves me in the position of not knowing whether to laugh or bang my head against the wall.

And how much more bizarre is it going to get now that they’ve developed the Kinect!?! 😯

It’s a pretty good time in the fight against AIDS. A recent study showed that a daily pill, Gilead Science’s Truvada, which already on pharmacy shelves as a HIV treatment could actually help prevent new HIV infections.

The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine was conducted on 2499 men at 11 sites in six countries: Peru, Ecuador, Brazil, South Africa, Thailand and the United States.

Diligent use of the medication (90%+ daily usage) resulted in a 73% reduction in infection rates over the course of the year-long study. Quite surprisingly, even lackadaisical usage ( 50% daily usage) resulted in a 50% drop in infection rates among the men in the study.

It’s a fact of life, however, that such treatments and potential prophylactics come at a cost.

Associated Press via Yahoo News:

Because Truvada is already on the market, the CDC is rushing to develop guidelines for doctors who want to use it to prevent HIV, and urged people to wait until those are ready.

As a practical matter, price could limit use. The pills cost $5,000 to $14,000 a year in the United States, but roughly $140 a year in some poor countries where they are sold in generic form.

Whether insurers or government health programs should pay for them is one of the tough issues to be sorted out, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

So there’s a median cost of $10,000 per annum in America and $140 per annum in the Third World. That’s approximately a 7,150% variance in price between what Americans must pay for drug and what Third Worlders and/or the various institutions helping them in their fight against HIV / AIDS must pay!

Hellfire! In Uganda where’s there’s a shortage of Truvada, there’s a black market for the drug and, even at black market prices, the cost is only approximately $720 per annum ($2 / dose).

Why is there such a discrepancy and inequality in pricing for this drug? Why is it that Americans with HIV already have to pay such comparatively high prices for Truvada as a treatment?

Big Pharma’s Greed

Is the inequality of costs based upon the greed of the pharmaceutical companies? That’s a seductively easy answer, and one that anyone who studied healthcare costs during the battles over ObamaCare would have to say is not totally without merit.

Yet that would fully explain the degree of inequality in pricing. Given US foreign aid and American based NGOs continued widespread assistance to the Third World’s struggle against HIV /AIDS, one would reasonably expect higher prices than what are being experienced. “Charge all that the market will bear” is an axiom but the market would not, in truth, be the Third World; it would still be America in the form of our federal government and our various charities.

Eating The Rich

An alternative theory would be that the inequality in pricing is based upon some form of ethnoguiltism- and/or oikophobia-driven class warfare which causes our own people to be charged what seems to exorbitant amounts of money in order to subsidize the nearly free care provided to the the Third World.

This is not as easy or pat an answer as corporate greed, but it’s not, in any way shape or form, without merit. We’ve seen this neo-Socialist mindset many times before – in the details of the AGW movement, in ObamaCare itself, in most things billed as “Social Justice,” and in just about anything involving “spreading the wealth.”

Intellectual Miscegenation

A third and, to my mind, more probable hypothesis is, “Why Chose?” I find it likely that the reasons for this disparity between what Americans must pay for treatment vs. what the populace of  the Third World must pay is based upon some misborn hybridization – mongrelization really – of the first two possibilities.

Gilead Science, the makers of Truvada, and the other pharmaceutical companies are private sector firms and, hence, profit-driven. Their investors and shareholders are expecting and demanding positive returns on their investments from these companies. When you factor in the broad use of health insurance, it would be – or should be – expected that they would maximize their returns by charging Americans as much as they could manage to do.

At the same time they well might feel the moral and/or – yes, it could be both – public relations need to provide very low-cost medicine for the rest of the world’s poor.

This would cause an intrinsic conflict with their investors and stockholders who want and/or need these companies to focus on profits and market cap so as to maximize the  investors’ returns. Charity and profits rarely go hand in hand after all.

Therefor, somebody has to pay for this charity, and who better to pay than the American people? After all, we’re all wealthy and we all owe restitution and reparations to the Third World for that fact – or so those of a common mindset keep claiming.

My Thoughts On The Matter

I care about the reason why there’s such a discrepancy and inequality in the pricing of Truvada only insofar as discovering those reasons would be the first step towards correcting what I see as a problem. I don’t even care that much in particular about Truvada or any other of the antiretroviral drug cocktails used to combat HIV / AIDS; the disease doesn’t, despite it’s being an ongoing cause celebre,  affect near as many people – by whole orders of magnitude – than other, less “popular” diseases.

Yet, Truvada’s pricing model is indicative of the entirety of current medical science and technology, especially pharmaceutical science. Americans, rich and poor alike, pay far higher costs than what is charged to the Third World and that just doesn’t seem right.

NOTE: Don’t bother coming here and ranting about how it’s the fault of America’s for-profit health insurance industry; I’ve little tolerance for foolishness and even less for the fools themselves.

The costs of the medicines and procedures are the costs the medicines and procedures. Health insurance, whether it be private, public, or single-payer only spreads out those costs among a pool of payers; it doesn’t positively change the costs themselves.

The paucity of women in the IT sector of the workplace hit the news again recently when Michael Arrington from TechCrunch posted an article asking women to stop blaming the men for that stark gender disparity. As expected, Feminists came out of the woodwork to “comment” on the article and verbally assault the regular patrons of the site.

Mr. Arrington is very, very right; women shouldn’t blame men – at least the men in IT – for the fact that there are few women in the various technology fields. We want more women in IT!

The morale boost and improvement to the work atmosphere alone makes having more women it IT something that we crave. 😉

Nice Racks! We Do So Need More Women In IT

That would be a damn sight – literally – better than the ugly, ugly truth of life and lifeforms in the data center.

Reality Is Often Unpleasant, Especially In IT

So please, ladies – and you Feminists too – don’t blame the men in IT for you’re not being well-represented in technology fields. We want you!

As it stands now, we’re so isolated from women that many IT types who read this post will likely look at the beautiful, half-naked women in the first set of images for a moment and then go on study in-depth and comment upon the actual racks, cable management, and using FreeBSD vs other operating systems They will likely even notice whether or not the ladies are wearing anti-static clips and cables.

Yeah, it’s that bad!