An extremely bad medical patent is before the SCOTUS

The summary from Slashdot says it so well.

"A case before the U.S. Supreme Court Wednesday addressed the legality of medical patents. From the article: 'The case focuses on a patent that covers the concept of adjusting the dosage of a drug, thiopurine, based on the concentration of a particular chemical (called a metabolite) in the patient's blood. The patent does not cover the drug itself—that patent expired years ago—nor does it cover any specific machine or procedure for measuring the metabolite level. Rather, it covers the idea that particular levels of the chemical "indicate a need" to raise or lower the drug dosage. The patent holder, Prometheus Labs, offers a thiopurine testing product. It sued the Mayo Clinic when the latter announced it would offer its own, competing thiopurine test. But Prometheus claims much more than its specific testing process. It claims a physician administering thiopurine to a patient can infringe its patent merely by being aware of the scientific correlation disclosed in the patent—even if the doctor doesn't act on the patent's recommendations.'"

http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/12/08/041253/supreme-court-legitimizing-medical-patents

I think I'll patent the process that if you're hot, you might need to take some clothes off or go to a cooler location.

The Justice Dept. begins investigating eBook price fixing by publishers

"The U.S. Justice Department's antitrust arm said it was looking into potentially unfair pricing practices by electronic booksellers, joining European regulators and state attorneys general in a widening probe of large U.S. and international e-book publishers. A Justice Department spokeswoman confirmed that the probe involved the possibility of 'anti-competitive practices involving e-book sales.' Attorneys general in Connecticut and, reportedly, Texas, have also begun inquiries into the way electronic booksellers price their wares, and whether companies such as Apple and Amazon have set up pricing practices that are ultimately harmful to consumers."

Yes, the publishing industry is an expensive one to maintain. Those presses, the paper stock commitments, the remaindering and pulping. People costs are high: editors, layout people, I doubt those press operators are cheap, etc. eBooks scare publishers because it totally upsets their economic modeling since most of their physical production is rendered irrelevant. Their production costs drop dramatically even though they add technical people for producing the various eBook formats, their distribution paths change dramatically, and it's an old industry that, like all old industries and most industries period, don't like change. It would be chaotic, and you can't make an economic model of chaos.

The basic problem goes deeper than that, according to some. People aren't reading books as much. We consume more content online, and that's not always books. A recent article that I didn't capture said that television sales declined last year, the second year (not consecutively I think) since TV became available. Just look at the failure of Borders, though there were lots of reasons for that, one factor was people not reading as much. My wife and I have books piled everywhere, and a lot of those come from Amazon because it's not practical to drive 100 miles to get to good new and used bookstores, so eBooks are increasingly attractive.

But eBooks sell. Amazon now sells more eBooks than paperbacks, if I recall the numbers correctly.

Myself, I think eBooks are waaaay too expensive. I will never pay nearly as much as a hardback for an electronic copy. Get the price down below $10 and I'll consider them, if I don't consider the DRM too onerous or find a way to easily strip it out.

http://apple.slashdot.org/story/11/12/08/0315216/doj-investigates-ebook-price-fixing

DNS Encryption

DNS, the Domain Name System, is a database lookup that translates a domain name entered into a browser or other program into an IP address. You type www.google.com, DNS does a lookup and finds that Google's IP address is 74.125.227.83. Simplifies things all around.

Usually your default DNS provider is configured by your ISP which looks upstream to heftier DNS servers for their information. You can configure your computer to use any DNS server that you like, but you could be potentially violating terms of service of your ISP or the other server.

The problem is that the DNS lookup process happens in plain text, meaning that you are potentially vulnerable to man-in-the-middle snooping and possible alteration. There have been a lot of effort over the last couple of years to make DNS more secure, including encryption. And now an encrypted DNS system is available!

The DNS service provider OpenDNS is providing encrypted lookups to its DNS servers for Mac clients. A Windows version is promised, and since the source code is available on GitHub, I'm sure a *nix version will be available soon.

http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/DNSCrypt-a-tool-to-encrypt-all-DNS-traffic-1392283.html