What Republicans say: The 12-year-old's family is too rich to deserve public assistance.

What Republicans mean: The health-care profiteers ought to have first dibs at stripping this family from its hard earned modest assets before they are eligible for help.

This is sick, and points to the fundamental flaw in our health care system: It is predicated on profiting from people's misfortune and in denying care to maximize profits. To call health insurance companies "insurers" is a deliberate misrepresentation of the term "insurance" because the premise of real insurance is to spread risk equitably, whereas what these guys do is to maximize profit by cherry-picking the insured base, leaving the highest risk individuals to the government or to their own devices.

The only real solution is a universal single-payer system. Then the insured base truly does represent actual risk, and this risk is spread fairly amongst all users.

A note to those who fear government paperwork and red tape: The reason current US government systems have high administrative overhead is three-fold (and has nothing to do with "government inefficiency"):

• Medicare and Medicaid are left to insure the most risky individuals, while the private sector gets to choose the healthiest and lowest risk individuals for their pool of insured.
• Congress has artificially restricted the government from using its considerable bargaining position to obtain cheaper pharmaceuticals, thus using the force of law to legalize one special interest group's business model.
• Most paperwork stems from efforts to avoid abuse and fraud. A primary motivation of fraud and abuse is to make oneself appear eligible for a programme that one is not eligible for. If everyone is eligible the chief reason for fraud, and thus paperwork, is eliminated.

This is borne out by the experiences of nations who have instituted universal, single-payer systems and allow their governments to bargain for better pharmaceutical prices. Their per-capita health-care costs are typically one half of ours.

I use Firefox a lot, but not really by choice. On Linux it is the sensible default. But it eats memory, has annoying delays in the UI, gets slower the more tabs I open, and renders some web pages rather poorly. In Windows, FF works better than in Linux, but IE7 looks better, starts faster, and renders web pages better. But it crashes more. And I'm not holding my breath until there is a Firefox for my Palm V device.

There is no really good browser out there that I know of. Perhaps I'll try Opera again. So FF feels more like a hotel room to me rather than home: Temporary quarters until I can find something better.

I was recently at the US Senate web site to write to my senator, Mr. Rockefeller, to tell him that his amnesty law stinks. I was greeted by the following banner:

"We The People"

Celebrating the Constitution

What he and his ilk are doing is despicable. But Glenn's column leads me to a question:

Is such an amnesty law not indeed unconstitutional, on the grounds that it violates the separation of powers by granting retroactive immunity and thus undermining the authority of the judicial branch?

I think that the good-faith answer is "Yes", but I'd like to hear from the lawyers amongst us.

This is just the latest of many unsavory revelations about Apple.

A while back, Andrew Leonard on his blog described how Apple own employees referred to their Chinese manufacturing facilities as "Mordor".

And today, you can take a hop, skip and a jump over to Glenn Greenwald's blog (or read today's Washington Post) and see how telecons--Apple's bedside partner AT&T, exclusive provider of the cell phone network of the iPhone, chief among them--have bent over backwards to enable our government to spy on us, in clear violation of the law and of the contracts they have with their customers, and now are seeking immunity from their numerous felonies thanks to the good senators they own, my own Sen. Rockefeller being one of them.

I don't need any toy that badly. It is high time we ditched our given roles as consumers, ready to go into a frenzy and worship companies for giving us the latest status symbols, and reclaimed our roles as critical and informed citizens of this country.

So, requiring a digital signer is "open"? Since when?

One thing I can do with my Palm V device is to write my own software for it, using freely available development kits. How would I do this with an iPhone? Would I have to send my app to Apple for its official Okey-Dokey before I could use my own software on my own device?

No thanks. What makes my Clie so useful to me is that I can put whatever I want on it, without any restrictions. Because of this, my device can diagnose my car's ills, control my astronomical telescope, keep track of my work hours, play my OGG format tunes, surf the web, show pictures and videos, and much, much more; all because it is a true open system.

The bottom line: If it ain't open, it ain't really yours.