According to China Labor Watch, up to four thousand workers at Foxconn’s Zhengzhou factory have gone on strike. The workers are protesting the “overly strict demands on product quality without worker training” that has led to fights between general workers and the quality control team. Even worse, supervisors ignored the complaints from both workers and quality control.

The catalyst for the strike appears to be the strict new quality guidelines that Apple has put into place. The company now expects workers to turn out devices with indentations of 0.2mm and that not a single scratch be present on frames and back covers. The workers were already having a tough time meeting Apple’s demands, but they soon found that they would not receive a vacation during the holiday.

The quality control workers have gone on strike to protest the harsh treatment they have received from workers. A fight broke out between the workers and the quality control team that led to injuries and some hospitalizations. Their strike has prevented the general workers from being able to contine with assembly, and multiple production lines have been stopped as a result.

The iPhone 5 is a truly marvelous device. That being said, people must remember the actual human effort that went into making the device. The consumer may appreciate Apple’s high standards, but those same high standards are causing undue stress on the Chinese workers that assemble and inspect the devices.

Apple has repeatedly said that they are committed to improving the working conditions at Foxconn’s factories, but it’s looking like their efforts aren’t doing much to stem the tide of riots and protests.

At the end of March union members at the Communications Workers of America (CWA) authorized the organization to call a strike if new contracts cannot be negotiated. The vote was overwhelmingly in favor of a strike with 93.5% of the unions voting members approving. Four separate contracts are at stake, all of which expire April 7 at midnight.

The CWA claims AT&T is attempting to block a proposal to include benefits into employee’s core contracts. These benefits include health care costs, guaranteed weekends off, day after Thanksgiving holiday, carry over vacation time, sick pay, changing schedules and canceling hours without notice.

The CWA represents only 16% of AT&T’s 256,000 workers, though over half of the company is represented by a union in one form or another, including the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. The contracts of over 120,000 employees are due to expire this year, so the results of this contract negotiation could set the standard for negotiations later in the year.

“Even in these difficult economic times, in a constantly changing industry, AT&T is a very successful and profitable company. CWA believes that AT&T West has a responsibility to support our communities by being a leader for economic growth. That means continuing to provide good, middle class jobs and not taking the low road of outsourcing, layoffs and cost shifting in order to meet competitive challenges,” said CWA District 9 Vice President Jim Weitkamp.

AT&T has recorded profits of $20 billion for the last two consecutive years. That’s each year, $40 billion total.

The plan is viewed as unfair by the professionals because it gives private pharmacists preference for new licenses. These pill processors are focusing on Viagra because of its popularity and the fact that if it were denied to consumers their health would not be at risk.

In the United States, more than 5 million men have used Viagra to improve their sexual function — including Rush Limbaugh.

Rush Limbaugh took a vacation to the Dominican Republic, known for its sex-tourism, with a bottle of Viagra that was not registered to him. He got busted and was detained by drug enforcement at the Palm Beach International Airport in June of 2006.

Limbaugh told customs officials that the pills were blue M&Ms that he got from the Clinton Library and joked about his brush with the law on his radio show, “I had a great time in the Dominican Republic. Wish I could tell you about it.”

Limbaugh’s current and fourth wife, Kathryn Rogers, is 26 years younger than Rush. Hope he can keep up.

Most recently, some American women now think a sex strike could make a difference in the political battle over women’s reproductive rights. Liberal Ladies Who Lunch, a social and political group founded in Austin, TX has launched a movement dubbed the “NO ACCESS SEX STRIKE” to encourage women to cut off sex with their male partners for one week, April 28 – May 5, 2012, to make their point. “If our reproductive choices are denied, so are yours”

“Access to affordable family planning is key to a woman’s liberty,” says Annette Maxberry-Carrara, the founder of Liberal Ladies Who Lunch. “But this is also an important issue for men. American men enjoy the benefits of women making their own choices about when to get pregnant. Men get the advantage of free, easy access sex with young women of child-bearing age. It wasn’t like that sixty years ago. If women can’t get reliable birth control, they will just have to keep their legs crossed to prevent pregnancy–even married women. I don’t think anyone wants that.”

Objections to the strike from men are expected, but Maxberry-Carrara was surprised by the women who have voiced their disagreement. “You would think I had asked them to abstain from sex for years. Women are screaming at me that their men support their reproductive rights, and they don’t want to deny them sex. So don’t. Nobody is forcing anyone to stop having sex. It’s a choice.” She continued, “But if you can’t avoid pregnancy or you have to give birth to a child you don’t want or can’t afford, then you don’t have that choice. That’s the point. The very outrage of these women proves that we have sex for pleasure. It’s not just a biological act for reproduction.”

The group encourages women to join their public event on Facebook, here’s the reaction on Twitter…

No official link between those two events has been made; we cite them as they happened chronologically. However, we have noticed CBS pulling a little sleight of hand with this unhappy change.

On December 14th, the former production team posted this message on StarTrek.com’s News section:

Goodbye from the STARTREK.COM Team

Sadly, we must report that CBS Interactive organization is being restructured, and the production team that brings you the STARTREK.COM site has been eliminated. Effective immediately.

We don’t know the ultimate fate of this site, which has served millions of Star Trek fans for the last thirteen years.

If you have comments, please send them to editor @ startrek.com – we hope someone at CBS will read them.

Thank you for your loyal fandom over the years. It has been a pleasure to serve you.

When we contacted CBS for a comment about this change, we received a statement about the changes being planned within StarTrek.com by CBS Interactive. The text of the statement also appears on StarTrek.com at this link.

The URL from that link is the same URL that contained the farewell message from the production team, the message we reproduced earlier. That earlier post has been cached in Yahoo’s search engine, and we have kept a copy too.

CBS Interactive has full rights to do as it wishes with its site and its employees. The right to do something doesn’t always fully consider the wisdom of doing so.

It’s obvious from the earlier post the entire team had been fired on short notice. Was Strike Trek the catalyst for this change?

People tend to not burn bridges in Hollywood, so we’ll likely never know. Unless they post something in the comments below (hint hint).

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The writers who craft screenplays for studios may be seeing today as the time to explore the Internet’s potential. Los Angeles Times scribe Patrick Goldstein called this dawning future the time of the writer-entrepreneur.

He cited some of the biggest names in film – George Lucas, Peter Jackson, Steven Spielberg, John Lasseter – as people who built filmmaking companies around themselves and their visions. Hollywood screenwriters could be the people who follow in those footsteps, as their strike continues.

One of those writers, Tony Gilroy, may be at the vanguard of those progressing from walking the picket lines to working as Writer Studio Inc. Goldstein cited Gilroy’s nod to the Internet as a way for writers to free themselves:

Gilroy is now a convert. “The studios have got to be hoping that this idea about being entrepreneurs doesn’t sweep over the TV show runners, because once you start seeing really good production values on the Internet, I mean, what does Larry David really need HBO for? This is all everybody is talking about on the line. They’re not talking about healthcare. They’re going, ‘Wow, is there a different way to get our movies and TV shows made?’ “

Before you, the aspiring screenwriter, go to your boss’s office and tell him you’re off to pursue your cinema dreams, keep in mind Gilroy has what you probably don’t: family contacts, a string of big name film credits (Gilroy penned the Bourne movies that star Matt Damon), and George Clooney’s phone number.

It could be the big names like Gilroy, writers who make six-figures for scripts, who crack Hollywood open like a steamed clam with the help of the Internet. Once they do it, and deliver suitable returns for their investors as Gilroy’s “Michael Clayton” seems likely to do, that’s when more investors will look for writers with ideas that will light up Cannes and Sundance like a marquee.

Then it will be ok to tell the boss to take a hike. Just don’t do it until the financing has been delivered.

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I especially enjoyed the detail Stephen Falk is providing:

Chet came by for a spell and joined us, and at one point we got in trouble with the cops for working the Walk button too hard, which is a pretty silly offense; no matter how much Michael Tabb wanted to go for the guy’s gun and tell him to get back in his car and drive away, Michael complied and laid off the button. (Hey, that last sentence fragment could have been a stage direction from an episode of Lost! They’re rubbing off on me.)

If this were fiction, you’d commend him for some excellent metaphors: "working the Walk button"; the apt use of "laid off."

Anyway, back to the topics in the lede, where I’m supposed to be (WARNING: The rest of this will be very stream-of-consciousness). It’s hard not to sympathize – I’m a writer myself, existing on a plane where the majority of writers exist, providing the content for a (hopefully fair) slice of the pie.

But the pie is converging to make a much bigger pie, and this band of writers is quite aware of that. Our own David Utter already pointed out Viacom’s hypocrisy, suing YouTube for an astronomical billion dollars while saying there’s no money to be made on the Internet. It’s either one or the other, right?

And it’s definitely the other. NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox, they all know that, or they wouldn’t bother establishing presences on the Web. Hulu, anyone? It’s been coming for a while now, and Internet sales are becoming meaningful.

But soon (I don’t know, five or ten years down the line), TV and Internet will be one. AT&T’s U-Verse is the first step on the early road to this. Verizon’s fiber-to-the-premises connections is the next. Soon, just as everyone finishing complaining about how slow their DSL and FiOS are compared to the blistering speeds and available in Hong Kong and Japan and Norway, the floodgates will be opened up and no one will have to worry about bandwidth or the prioritization of data packets.

Those things will join the Model T, the Victrola, and the pliers we used to turn the dial on the TV. So don’t let the Verizons and the Comcasts of the world act like they’re in a real pickle when it comes to capacity.

Truth be told, those arguments are as BS as the arguments the networks are using to screw their writers out of fair compensation, because there is greed at the center of them.

And how does the homogenization of American culture fit in with this overarching chorus of greed? Easy, the telecommunications and cable industries want to do the same thing they’ve done with television and mobile phone service to the Internet. It’s all about standardization, predictability, and profitability.

How do you do that? Make it all the same. Make it scalable. Make it a commodity. Remember when there used to be something good on A&E and Bravo? Stuff you couldn’t find on other channels? Now what’s there? The same homogenized crap the other channels are selling, with a side of dumbing-down for everybody.

So where we are with the Internet right now is exactly chaotic enough that the big players want to settle it down to its most predictable and profitable. Right now there are millions of voices in all different forms of media, reachable by search engine.

That’s because we have a neutral network, where everybody is treated the same. Internet service providers are aware there’s less profitability in chaos. Take all that content, squeeze into nice digestible chunks via channels or portals, and charge for every step along the way.

Charge to connect. Charge to visit. Charge to deliver content. Charge for premium packages on both sides of the pipe. Charge, charge, charge, charge, charge. And then redirect so that everybody’s less fragmented, until everybody’s watching the same thing again, just like the good old days.

Fewer writers to pay, and many, many more ways to get people to pay you.

Net Neutrality, therefore, becomes more than a complex concept only understood and desired by a few geeks that know what’s going on. It affects everybody, especially everybody that’s quite tired of 300 channels of the same crap. 

Writers have been rebuffed in their negotiations. Michael Eisner has claimed it’s too soon to demand revenue from an unproven business model.

“For a writer to give up today’s money for a nonexistent piece of the future — they should do it in three years, shouldn’t be doing it now — they are misguided they should not have gone on the strike. I’ve seen stupid strikes, I’ve seen less stupid strikes, and this strike is just a stupid strike,” chided the former Disney honcho.

However, as Boing Boing noted in a post by Cory Doctorow, Viacom patriarch Sumner Redstone has a pretty good idea. A video of Daily Show writer Jason Rothman pointing out Viacom’s billion-dollar lawsuit against Google for alleged copyright infringement on YouTube painted Redstone as a hypocrite on the issue.

The video also zinged Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman over a statement he made this summer: “Viacom will exceed $500 million in digital revenue this year.” Web media is part of that revenue projection.

Either digital content has an identified value, or it does not. Viacom, at least, thinks both conditions can be true. The writers disagree.

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The contract between the 12,000-member Writers Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers lapsed on October 31. Negotiations that started this summer did not make much progress on the writer’s request for a larger portion of DVD profits and revenue from the distribution of films and TV shows on the Internet.

Writers and producers met for negotiations Sunday at the request of a federal mediator. The two parties were in talks for close to 11 hours before East Coast members of the writers union said via their Web site that the strike had started for their 4,000 members. Producers said writers turned down a request to "stop the clock" on the strike while negotiations continued. Producers called the writer’s decision to strike unfortunate and irresponsible.

Writers said they dropped a proposal requesting a larger share of revenue from the sale of DVDs that had been an issue for producers. They added that proposals by producers about the Internet reuse of TV episodes and films were not acceptable. "The AMPTP made no response to any of the other proposals that the WGA has made since July," writers said.

This is the first strike by writers since 1988. That strike lasted 22 weeks and cost the industry over $500 million.

Programming that will be immediately affected are talk shows like "Late Night with David Letterman" and "The Tonight Show Starring Jay Leno" which will begin airing reruns today. Next to feel the impact would be sitcoms and soap operas, followed by dramas.

Movies will not feel the impact of the strike for several months, but the strike could stall production for movies that are scheduled to be released in 2008.

The agreement will allow LGE to use Microsoft patented products, including Linux-based embedded devices. Microsoft will be able to use LGE’s patents and will license other patents by LGE that are owned by MicroConnect Group. Financial terms have not been disclosed.

Microsoft will be making a net balancing payment to LGE and MicroConnect for patents involving operating systems and computer systems. LGE will be making payments to Microsoft for Microsoft patents that deal with Linux- based embedded devices that LGE makes.

"This agreement and our good relationship with Microsoft enable LGE to provide improved telecommunications solutions to our customers," said Jeong Hwan Lee, executive vice president of the Intellectual Property Center at LGE.

"We believe that the license arrangement with Microsoft provides appropriate recognition of the value of LGE’s computer system-related patents, which includes patents directed to computer architecture utilized in game consoles and other products."

Microsoft has made similar agreements with Xandros, Fuji Xerox Co. Ltd., NEC Corp., Nortel Networls, Novell Inc., Samsung and Seiko Epson Corp.