"Ted Byers" writes:
This presupposes there are doctors available who are taking on new patients.
My diabetes is being taken care of by the specialist who made the diagnosis
yeas ago because I have yet to find a doctor in this area who is taking on
new patients.

Norway is a bit easier in that respect. There is an abundance of
doctors (good ones seem to be hard to find, though), and seeing a
general practitioner costs something on the order of $15 for the first
consultation - the doc gets more money from the state for having you
on "his list". After you spend a couple of hundred this way, the state
foots the rest of the bill. A number of drugs that are judged to be
essential are also included in this sum - insulin is one of them.

Hospitals are free, but you have to wait your turn. This can take a
while.

The tax rates are a bit higher than would be feasible in the US, and
there is a significant amount of money from the petroleum industry
that goes into providing this service.

required 20,000+ LOC, while 100,000 is more typical. You must have had
quite the library to be able to do something with so little code! Come to

It is amazing what you can cram into a line of Perl. If you search for
"obfuscated perl contest Gisle Aas" you will find an entry made by a
guy I have worked with. Luckily, his production code is beautiful.

Our problem was more a - compact - data model. Hashes of arrays are
fun only in limited amounts, and the free-form syntax of Perl gives
you new and unexpected ways of shooting yourself in the foot. "perl
-w" gives only so much aid.

Alas, my options are limited. I like VBScript and JScript even less than
VB. And ActiveX controls in a web page are problematic since so many of
them introduce major security risks. What else is there for client side
processing? While I don't LIKE the idea, I see no opton other than to test

Nothing. I just said I am glad I am not you.

date. At least with Java, I don't have to worry about whether or not the
user is running Windows or Linux or something else.

I don't think this is true. Our friends over at Redmond usually manage
to put subtle features in their browsers which make it necessary to
put adaptations into code that should run within the browser
environment.

If you find a way to do applets reliably without having duplicate test
platforms, please tell me.

Geir