The Island : Ewan McGregor
(See online!)

The best movies in my view are the ones that make you think and expand your mind. This one is about what it means to be human and what you can do to people who "don't count". There's little I can say without giving it away so:

Spoilers below! You've been warned!

I'll try to keep the examples brief, but here are some quick takes from the movie (and the concepts they raise):

Surveillance society

A smart-toilet analyzes a man's morning pee and determines he has been eating too much salt. Later in the lunchroom, he's denied his beloved bacon for breakfast. Another man gets angry and hits a wall and security instantly appears to have a "chat" with him about his outburst. A man and women start to get close, but security steps in to remind them to keep a "proper" distance.

Racial Superiority

The hundreds of employees that run the facility know about the abuse of the residents, but do nothing (supposedly having bought into the "they're not real people" pitch). Trigger warning: there is a scene where they birth a baby then kill the mother because they were just using her for the birth and didn't care about the "lessor human".

In summary

Anyway, it's a good movie with plenty of action and it accurately portrays the horror that could occur if we increase our technology and forget humanity along the way.

(Image used under: Creative Commons 3.0 [SRC])

Drug companies make so much money off their medicine, it's no leap to think that there's a vast amount of corruption in the industry.

(Image is in the Public Domain)

Seattle pediatrician Rupin Thakkar's first inkling that the pharmaceutical industry was peering over his shoulder and into his prescription pad came in a letter from a drug representative about the generic drops Thakkar prescribes to treat infectious pinkeye. In the letter, the salesperson wrote that Thakkar was causing his patients to miss more days of school than they would if he put them on Vigamox, a more expensive brand-name medicine made by Alcon Laboratories. "My initial thought was 'How does she know what I'm prescribing?' " Thakkar said. "It feels intrusive. . . . I just feel strongly that medical encounters need to be private."

It appears that several drug marketers have been tracking what physicians have been prescribing in order to custom tailor their marketing pitches.