Interesting. For years my computers have been telling me whenever I plug in a USB device. This little balloon in the lower right corner of the screen always pops up saying something like "Device detected." I guess the NSA has taken over my computer!

The whole thing is so that if you want to include ads, they have some hooks on the SDK so that it's easy for the developer.

The whole thing is so that if you want to include ads, Apple gets 40% of your revenue. They wrap this up in marketing so it looks like it's great for developers. The only real feature is that now the user can view ads and come right back to where they were in the app! Great! And in exchange for giving the iPhone this minimal level of reasonable functionality, 40% of all of your revenue. The Apple-provided hosting is not a feature, but an enforcement mechanism.

What is with all the focus on tort reform? This is complete nonsense. Tort reform will do nothing to reduce long-term cost growth and next-to-nothing to reduce current costs. Malpractice insurance premiums amount to less than 1% of all medical spending. Thus, there is no way that tort reform could reduce current medical spending by more than 1%. Likewise, there is no way that the costs associated with malpractice insurance are responsible for the consistently large annual increases in health insurance premiums. There's a full order of magnitude separating the two! The tort reform battle cry is a masterpiece of propaganda. It serves only to satisfy the greed of already wealthy doctors by appealing to common American sensibilities that abhor the "greed" of malpractice victims!

The principles of the health bill in congress are fairly straightforward, but for some reason nobody here seems to get them. It's a three-legged stool, and you just can't remove one leg without the plan failing:
1) Outlaw rescission practices and coverage denial for pre-existing conditions.
2) Decrease risk by increasing the risk pool through an insurance mandate, else part 1) will lead to people gaming the system by waiting until they get sick to sign up.
3) Subsidize insurance for the poorest Americans so that they can pay for insurance, otherwise part 2) falls apart.

If you have insurance, the only thing that changes is the cost to you goes down, and so you may elect to get even better coverage than you have now! If you don't have insurance, chances are that the reason you don't is because it isn't affordable, not because you don't want it. Well, this bill fixes that.

From above:

- Streamline the regulatory environments so that insurance can be bought across state lines.

If you believe that allowing insurance to be purchased across state lines will reduce costs instead of just allowing the worst insurance company behaviors to become more prevalent, well, I have some beach-front property in a state with lax consumer protection laws to sell you.