Editorial.

Wired: “If we're still in the race in a few months, I think you'll see a tremendous amount of development.”

Wouldn't it be great if Dean and Clark went after Viacom, ClearChannel and Time-Warner, instead of the tiny companies that make blogging and social networking tools.

I find myself hoping they get their asses kicked, hard. I don't expect much of Bush, but I doubt seriously that he would undermine the mostly American software industry by competing with it with free software. Makes the Dems' pitch about exporting American high-tech jobs to India fairly hollow (NH is a high-tech state, so it has been an issue).

One of the reasons American programmers aren't competing here (in America) is that users expect to get software for free, and in that environment little new stuff gets created, and we have to keep creating to justify the greater amount of money we make (over Indians). But if all we make are commodities, then Indians working for low pay beat Americans working for free. (People who work for free have no incentive to please users, or even create usable software.)

How sad to see two leading Democrats fall for, even feed the lie that they can create user-oriented software for free. Shame on both Dean and Clark. They went after the little guy. Who wants a president who does that. Not me. Still looking for someone worth supporting.

Latest Theory on Iraqi WMDs. British officials are circulating a story that Saddam Hussein may have been hoodwinked into believing that Iraq really did possess weapons of mass destruction.

The theory, which is doing the rounds in the upper reaches of Whitehall, is the result of an attempt to find what one official source called a “logical reason” why no chemical and biological weapons had been found in Iraq.

According to the theory, Saddam and his senior advisers and commanders were told by lower-ranking Iraqi officers that his forces were equipped with usable chemical and biological weapons.

The officers did not want to tell their superiors that the weapons were either destroyed or no longer usable.

NY Times: “The federal government said this evening that the first suspected case of so-called mad cow disease had been discovered in the United States.”

A new Manila macro, available only on Harvard's server (for now) is a clone of the Radio macro that displays recent blog posts.

Lessig: “Enough already!”

Bryan Bell's viral marketing scheme for the Central California Falcon Club.

Yes — Health Savings Accounts.

The new year will bring something of a revolution in American health care. Insurance companies such as Golden Rule, Fortis and Aetna will soon be marketing Health Savings Accounts, which promise a new era of individual choice for health insurance.

HSAs, the saving grace of the Medicare prescription drug bill, are the new and improved version of Medical Savings Accounts. They promise individuals and employers relief from spiraling health costs, and without the need for restrictive HMOs.

The basic idea is to pair an inexpensive insurance policy that has a high deductible — $1,000 or more for an individual, $2,000 for a family — with a tax-free savings account. Individuals would thus be covered in case of serious injury or illness. But they would also have an incentive to consume basic health services wisely, since any unspent account balance could be rolled over from year to year. Such accounts could grow to be substantial over a lifetime — a good thing, since health expenses tend to increase with age, and everyone knows Medicare isn't sustainable in its current form.

The Treasury Department announced rules for new HSA policies yesterday, and private insurers are already jumping into the market. A glimpse of their market potential is provided by South Africa, of all places. After the Mandela government deregulated South Africa's private insurance market in 1994, HSA-type plans quickly captured about two-thirds of it.

Update at 4:30PM. First the good news. Shanti Braford responded to my emails. It's not a denial-of-service attack, it's just a buggy bot. The bad news — the flood continues unabated. About five requests per second. A huge waste of bandwidth and money.

Kevin Werbach: “A thorough mess perhaps, but a necessary one. The DMCA is so clearly out of step with reality that reopining it is inevitable. However, I won't dismiss the possiblity that the “reopening” process will lead to something worse.”

Tech IPOs Will Be Back with a Vengeance in 2004 (Reuters). Reuters – Investors, brace yourselves — 2004 is gearing up to be the year of the technology IPO.