Cash patients have to wait longer for specialist appointments - because we have a two-tier healthcare system.
Archive 1. April 2008
Norway seeks to reverse Open XML vote at ISO - "Reports of the voting process surfaced on Friday at Computerworld Norge. In a translation of the article at Groklaw, participants said that representatives from Microsoft and Statoilhydro on the Standards Norge committee voted for approval of Open XML. But the other members of the committee were opposed because their comments on the specification were not addressed. Yet the overall vote changed from changed from No to Yes."
OOXML: Waiting for the ISO Decision - if Microsoft's garbage heap (sorry, a "standard" with thousands of pages of explanations and thousands of critical notes and corrections and counter-corrections is simply a garbage heap) were to actually become a standard in the "Fast Track" procedure, the entire ISO procedure would have made itself completely ridiculous and it would be time to find a functioning alternative to this farce. If technical standards are now decided solely on the basis of political intrigues and economic interests, and in a way that clearly and unequivocally ignores the established regulations of the ISO ("Fast Track" is not intended for standards that require extensive discussion), then ISO is simply worthless.
Python processing - the threading API built on fork processes. Very interesting because it allows for better utilization of multi-core systems (since processes - unlike threads - do not suffer from the global interpreter lock). However, this naturally comes with the overhead of system processes. Could still be very interesting for e.g. TooFPy.
Turkey: President and Prime Minister must go to court - cute, how the EU is now supporting the nationalists and religion-close (too close?) AKP people. Probably Erdogan seems controllable and usable for their own power games. People just never learn. State and religion must be strictly separated. But as long as this is not implemented in Germany, we should not be surprised by reactions like the one from the EU ...