The ABC news reports that a wheelchair-bound Australian citizen was refused treatment for throat cancer at the Royal Darwin Hospital as he wasn’t eligible for Medicare.
The reason for this death sentence? He’s lived in the Phillipines for over 5 years and thus became ineligible for Medicare and couldn’t afford treatment there.
A spokesperson for federal Health Minister Tony Abbott says the Medicare rules are clear and Mr Cooper is not eligible for treatment.
I’ve been asked if I’d like to speak at the LCA 2005 pre-main conference Linux Clustering Mini-Conference about VPAC’s experience with clustering.
I’ve agreed. Now I just need to conquer my terror of public speaking!
The sad news is that Jef Raskin, the creator of the original Apple Macintosh has died. His website has the announcement.
User Friendly has a tribute cartoon.
The Japanese Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper is reporting that the Japanese Fair Trade Commission will find that Intel is in violation of the Antimonopoly Law for its method of selling central processing units to computer makers because it offers discounted prices to companies that limit their purchases of competitors CPUs.
There are more reports via Google news.
Groklaw is reporting that the European Commission has managed to force through the Software Patents Directive as an “uncontested” A item despite various countries attempts to contest it and European Parliament (the bit that people get to vote for) voting for it to be completely restarted.
If the European Parliament doesn’t throw it out then it will become law in 12 months and allow monopolists a new tool to stifle European innovation. 🙁
There’s a further twist to the S.A. MP story being reported by the ABC news and others..
It used to be that the ABC News RSS feeds were only available by subscription, but it looks now like they’ve groked the RSS mindset and made them publically available here for non-commercial use. The reason that I’ve said they’re the official ones is that some folks got fed up at waiting for the ABC to "get it" and made their own via screen scraping.
I’ve added their breaking news RSS feed as a block just below the BBC news feed on the left.
Jan Englend, the UN’s emergency relief coordinator, has called for nations to support the peace deal in Sudan by delivering the estimated $500 million needed for the rebuilding. So far only 5% of this, $24 million, has been paid for a region where the average life expectancy is 42.
He is quoted as saying that "I fear the world is making a historic mistake here in southern Sudan", referring to the lack of support for returning refugees and for those who remained during the recent conflict.
ZDNet has a blog entry about who is the leader of open source which makes a good fist of explaining why there is no leader and that this is a good thing.
I couldn’t resist drawing the following comparison (posted on ZDNet here).
The inability of some sections of the population to grasp how Open Source doesn’t have a leader reminds me of Monty Python and the Holy Grail where King Arthur has a similar problem..
ARTHUR: Then who is your lord?
WOMAN: We don’t have a lord.
ARTHUR: What?
DENNIS: I told you. We’re an anarcho-syndicalist commune. We take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week,…
This lack of a single focal point is actually a strength, there is, as you put it, no single person who can fall under that hypothetical bus and whose loss will render the movement powerless. Of course we would mourn the loss of any of them, but there’ll always be plenty to stand up and take their place.
We’d have to put up a giant penguin statue if Linus bit the dust though.. 🙂
There’s quite a bit of reporting that a study on the incidence of autism in Yokohama found that after the MMR was withdrawn across Japan in 1993 the rate of Autism doubled, meaning that there cannot be a causal link between the MMR and the large rise in cases of Autism.
Of course, this does not say that there cannot be individual cases caused by MMR, perhaps due to an underlying immune condition that means the body cannot cope with it!