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An insurance company using a pre-existing conditions clause to deny a claim is nothing new; but classifying a victim of domestic violence as having a pre-existing condition is. Half of the largest insurance companies have used domestic violence as a factor when deciding whether to extend coverage. I look forward to a time when I can spend my days perfectly still, inside a box of packing peanuts to avoid higher insurance premiums.

Anders Schneiderman asks: "I'm involved in a project that's planning to create open source toys for educating people around complicated policy questions (e.g., policy on prescription drugs). We'd really like to use Flash as our main language, but we're concerned about the fact that the major Flash development tools cost $500--more than some of the community group folks we want to involve can afford. I took a look at Sourceforge, and while there are plenty of projects that offer ways to create Flash for free, there didn't seem to be any v.1 general development tools. Did I miss something? If you want to build Flash and you don't want to pay $500, how do you do it (aside from copying somebody else's, which as Bill Gates told us is just bad, bad, bad)? And if there aren't any powerful open source tools for it, any thoughts on why?"