unethical business practices

Putting fuel in my truck was the last place I expected to get into a confrontation.

Especially concerning Free Open Source Software. I mean, come on...

It was one of "those vans".

You know, the brightly colored ones that promises to propel a computer tech or two as it goes down the road? The one that pulls up in front of houses with people who have broken their computers?

...

I could now see through the windshield of the van at the pump and there was another person sitting in the passenger seat...a person I had not seen earlier. The guy I talked to was behind the steering wheel and he rotated between jabbing his finger in my direction and then turning his head sharply back toward the other person in the van as he spoke. It did not seem to be a tranquil conversation. As I came within ten steps of my Rodeo, the driver got out of his van and approached me.

It wasn't a friendly approach.

We made contact just under the edge of the canopy. I say "we" made contact...the initial contact was his right index finger stabbing into my chest.

"It's _____ ________ hippy freaks like you that are costing us our jobs. You got any idea how many people are getting pink slips because of your b_________? Every time you put that ____ on someone's computer, some guy trying to feed his family has to go home and tell his wife that he lost his job. How about I snatch that silly little ponytail and give you a tour of the parking lot?"

The veins in his temples were at critical mass and he physically spit as he screamed at me in front of his van. This is where the narrative is going to stop, and it's going to stop for two reasons. First, there's no good way to tell the rest of the story. Second, it's because that's when any verbal communication between him and I stopped. He made first hostile contact and I didn't do anything but react. In the end it was no big deal...but of the two of us...

I am the only one of the two that did not involuntarily leave his feet that day.

Besides, that "silly little ponytail" represents all the hair I have left. Just protectin' the real estate.

The guy in the passenger seat came streaking out of the van with a laptop in one hand and a cell phone in the other. A small crowd had semi-gathered to watch the show but it was over as quickly as it began.

As I spoke with the other guy, it turned out that he was the crew chief of that team and a salaried member of that company's Field Management. The driver had used the truck laptop to go to our website and blog. It didn't take him long to figure out I am an Open Source/Linux Advocate. From talking with the supervisor, I found out that their store location had taken a beating from November of last year until the present. "Memos" had been circulated amongst the management teams, giving advice and training on how best to deal with the "Open Source Threat."

And are you curious as to the machine that is creaming their laptop AND desktop sales?

The Dell Mini 9. It's killin' 'em.

Also I didn't know, the fewer machines they sell with Windows, the fewer positions in the field they can justify. And he said it so I didn't have to.

"We schedule a technician visit for six months in the future with every home visit. Both they and we know their registries and computers will be messed up again by then."

That I did not know.

So what I learned is that "Microsoft Technicians" from this company actually help the particular store project sales and profit in six month blocks, for their "call-out" business that is.

Interesting.

That lead me to think about an entire nation of computer techs. Do they "project" their profits based on the duality between the customer's computer ignorance and the product's inherent insecurity and instability? Do they project their frustration and anger at self-serve gas stations? Geez...how many of them do you imagine there are?

IDEAS: What isn't straightforward about orange juice?

HAMILTON: It's a heavily processed product. It's heavily engineered as well. In the process of pasteurizing, juice is heated and stripped of oxygen, a process called deaeration, so it doesn't oxidize. Then it's put in huge storage tanks where it can be kept for upwards of a year. It gets stripped of flavor-providing chemicals, which are volatile. When it's ready for packaging, companies such as Tropicana hire flavor companies such as Firmenich to engineer flavor packs to make it taste fresh. People think not-from-concentrate is a fresher product, but it also sits in storage for quite a long time.

IDEAS: What goes into these flavor packs?

HAMILTON: They're technically made from orange-derived substances, essence and oils. Flavor companies break down the essence and oils into individual chemicals and recombine them. I spoke to many people in the industry at Firmenich, different flavorists, and at Tropicana, and what you're getting looks nothing like the original substance. To call it natural at this point is a real stretch.

Forget the big deal over the packaging, I don't think I'm ever going to buy their orange juice ever again. It looks like I need to start juicing my own fruit.

AMERICANS enter the New Year in a strange new role: financial lunatics. We've been viewed by the wider world with mistrust and suspicion on other matters, but on the subject of money even our harshest critics have been inclined to believe that we knew what we were doing. They watched our investment bankers and emulated them: for a long time now half the planet's college graduates seemed to want nothing more out of life than a job on Wall Street.

This is one reason the collapse of our financial system has inspired not merely a national but a global crisis of confidence. Good God, the world seems to be saying, if they don't know what they are doing with money, who does?

Incredibly, intelligent people the world over remain willing to lend us money and even listen to our advice; they appear not to have realized the full extent of our madness. We have at least a brief chance to cure ourselves. But first we need to ask: of what?

To that end consider the strange story of Harry Markopolos. Mr. Markopolos is the former investment officer with Rampart Investment Management in Boston who, for nine years, tried to explain to the Securities and Exchange Commission that Bernard L. Madoff couldn't be anything other than a fraud. Mr. Madoff's investment performance, given his stated strategy, was not merely improbable but mathematically impossible. And so, Mr. Markopolos reasoned, Bernard Madoff must be doing something other than what he said he was doing.

In his devastatingly persuasive 17-page letter to the S.E.C., Mr. Markopolos saw two possible scenarios. In the "Unlikely" scenario: Mr. Madoff, who acted as a broker as well as an investor, was "front-running" his brokerage customers. A customer might submit an order to Madoff Securities to buy shares in I.B.M. at a certain price, for example, and Madoff Securities instantly would buy I.B.M. shares for its own portfolio ahead of the customer order. If I.B.M.'s shares rose, Mr. Madoff kept them; if they fell he fobbed them off onto the poor customer.

In the "Highly Likely" scenario, wrote Mr. Markopolos, "Madoff Securities is the world's largest Ponzi Scheme." Which, as we now know, it was.

Harry Markopolos sent his report to the S.E.C. on Nov. 7, 2005 -- more than three years before Mr. Madoff was finally exposed -- but he had been trying to explain the fraud to them since 1999. He had no direct financial interest in exposing Mr. Madoff -- he wasn't an unhappy investor or a disgruntled employee. There was no way to short shares in Madoff Securities, and so Mr. Markopolos could not have made money directly from Mr. Madoff's failure. To judge from his letter, Harry Markopolos anticipated mainly downsides for himself: he declined to put his name on it for fear of what might happen to him and his family if anyone found out he had written it. And yet the S.E.C.'s cursory investigation of Mr. Madoff pronounced him free of fraud.

...

How does this happen? How can the person in charge of assessing Wall Street firms not have the tools to understand them? Is the S.E.C. that inept? Perhaps, but the problem inside the commission is far worse -- because inept people can be replaced. The problem is systemic. The new director of risk assessment was no more likely to grasp the risk of Bernard Madoff than the old director of risk assessment because the new guy's thoughts and beliefs were guided by the same incentives: the need to curry favor with the politically influential and the desire to keep sweet the Wall Street elite.

And here's the most incredible thing of all: 18 months into the most spectacular man-made financial calamity in modern experience, nothing has been done to change that, or any of the other bad incentives that led us here in the first place.

Say what you will about our government's approach to the financial crisis, you cannot accuse it of wasting its energy being consistent or trying to win over the masses. In the past year there have been at least seven different bailouts, and six different strategies. And none of them seem to have pleased anyone except a handful of financiers.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc., which got $10 billion and debt guarantees from the U.S. government in October, expects to pay $14 million in taxes worldwide for 2008 compared with $6 billion in 2007.

The company's effective income tax rate dropped to 1 percent from 34.1 percent, New York-based Goldman Sachs said today in a statement. The firm reported a $2.3 billion profit for the year after paying $10.9 billion in employee compensation and benefits.

Goldman Sachs, which today reported its first quarterly loss since going public in 1999, lowered its rate with more tax credits as a percentage of earnings and because of "changes in geographic earnings mix," the company said.

The rate decline looks "a little extreme," said Robert Willens, president and chief executive officer of tax and accounting advisory firm Robert Willens LLC.

"I was definitely taken aback," Willens said. "Clearly they have taken steps to ensure that a lot of their income is earned in lower-tax jurisdictions."

Funny how those with the most money get the most write offs and get to pay the least in taxes.

According to reports, there may be a back door built into Skype, which allows connections to be bugged. The company has declined to expressly deny the allegations. At a meeting with representatives of ISPs and the Austrian regulator on lawful interception of IP based services held on 25th June, high-ranking officials at the Austrian interior ministry revealed that it is not a problem for them to listen in on Skype conversations.

The poop is hitting the fan over tax breaks given to ratings giant Nielsen Co., which pocketed millions in Florida jobs-creation tax concessions but has turned around and dismissed hundreds of local workers after inking a $1.2B outsourcing deal with Tata Consultancy Services of Mumbai. Lou Dobbs is on the case. Lou may go even more ballistic once he sees the Nielsen-Tata pact, which assures Nielsen that OT worries are a thing of the past ('there shall be no additional charge for overtime work'), allows Nielsen to have unsatisfactory Tata hires replaced within 4 weeks of starting with no charge for the original or re-performed work, gives Nielsen up to 6 man-weeks of free labor when a Tata worker is replaced, and allows Nielsen to make 'any TCS Resource' disappear with no more than 5 days notice if their presence 'is not in the best interests of Nielsen.' Nielsen execs have launched a PR counter-attack, pledging not to bully 85 year-old ladies in future layoffs. In a Letter to the Citizens, Nielsen CEO David L. Calhoun explained that Tata won a 'rigorous competition' to get the job, failing to mention that Tata was also tapped by Nielsen EVP Mitchell Habib in his CIO roles at both GE and Citigroup.

I wouldn't object to the outsourcing and as for the issue of deserved tax breaks, well corporations don't deserve them at all from my point of view. If there were no tax breaks given, this would be a non-issue.

In 1992, three surgeons at a major hospital here that specializes in organ transplants met in the hospital's cafeteria to informally discuss the California Legislature's effort to enact a mandatory motorcycle helmet law.

"This looks like it might pass," one doctor said. The others nodded. "This could have serious consequences for the hospital."

"How so?" asked the doctor sitting closest to him.

"Motorcycle fatalities are not only our No. 1 source of organs, they are also the highest quality source of organs because donors are usually young, healthy people with no other traumatic injuries to the body, except to the head," the first doctor answered. "Studies have shown that when helmet laws are enacted, motorcycle deaths significantly decrease. The hospital already has serious financial issues to deal with. This could put us out of business -- or at least the business of organ transplants."

...

Just then the third doctor stood up and said: "I'm a member of the hospital's ethics committee, and I can tell you, as physicians, we can't even have this conversation." With that, she left the room.

On June 18, Esmin Green, 49, was involuntarily admitted to the psychiatric emergency department of Kings County Hospital Center on June 18 for what the hospital describes as "agitation and psychosis."

Upon her admission, Green waited nearly 24 hours for treatment, said the New York Civil Liberties Union, which on Tuesday released surveillance camera video of the incident.

The surveillance camera video shows the woman rolling off a waiting room chair, landing face-down on the floor and convulsing. Her collapse came at 5:32 a.m. June 19, the NYCLU said, and she stopped moving at 6:07 a.m. During that time, the organization said, workers at the hospital ignored her.

At 6:35 a.m., the tape shows a hospital employee approaching and nudging Green with her foot, the group said. Help was summoned three minutes later.

In addition, the organization said, hospital staff falsified Green's records to cover up the time she had lain there without assistance.

Microsoft on Wednesday announced that Circuit City will be the first to offer a new Office subscription service, first known by its Albany code name and now dubbed Equipt.

The idea behind the subscription service is to convert more new PC buyers into Office buyers. It plays on the fact that although most people don't buy Office at the same time as a computer, many do purchase a security software subscription.

Microsoft is trying to tap into the fact that while many people would rather find a copy of Office that they don't have to pay for (either an older version or a pirated copy) they are willing to pay for security software. "Security is basically the No. 1 thing that gets attached with a PC," said Microsoft group product manager Bryson Gordon.

What Microsoft should do is realize that Windows is far from perfect (or good for that matter) and offer a secure version of their operating system without cost to their customers, instead of bundling it on.

Instead they're basically saying "Oh, you want Windows, OK, well that will cost you $100." ($200 if you're not upgrading.) And then you say to them "but Billy G, I've got all these viruses and popups in my internet explorer" only to be told "Oh, well, if you don't want that, pay us an extra $70 per year."

It's as if it is in their best interest to not only write crappy software so you constantly have to buy new (not for new features, no, you should buy new to fix older problems) but also so they can see you the software subscription that fixes the software that you bought last year.

Multiple sites reported a while ago that Comcast was using Sandvine to do tcp packet resets to throttle BitTorrent connections of their users. This practice may be a thing of the past as it’s been found a simple rule in the Linux firewall, iptables, can simply just block their reset packets, returning your BitTorrent back to normal speeds and allowing you to once again connect to all your seeds and peer. So, if you are tired of Sandvine (the application used by Comcast to throttle Bit Torrent with fake TCP packet resets) screwing with your BitTorrent and a user of GNU/Linux, then this is for you. I will tell you how to take your bandwidth back.