"Shipping costs would also be prohibitive."

no it's not. jam them in as tight as possible into a $5.95 flat rate box.

What if this pile of crap is the *only* surviving archive after 200 years?

Nice, I will try that! How many do you have to hang up (per tree) for it to be effective?

Well if you want to factor in risks:
- risks of condom failure are very low, specially when used properly (it possible to learn to use them properly).

- there is also a thing called an emergency treatment. If started soon enough (= in the few hours after an incident, the sooner, the better the results, useless after 36 hours) risks of HIV transmission are dramatically reduced.
Basically it's an intensive anti-retroviral therapy that one needs to take either for a certain time until safe, or until the results come back and the partner of the incident is proved safe.

So yes, a condom can break. But you can also react quickly and fix those situations too.

(Note: works also in case of blood contact, like a nurse working in a hospital pricking a finger on a contaminated needle. That's the situation these emergency therapies were developed for).

(Still it's an intensive treatment, with secondary effect. Instead of everyone counting on it and the whole sexually active population popping pills like candy - which would be both a big cost and a big risk that somebody got problems because of the meds - it's better that everyone wears proper protection and the few failure cases be handled on a case by case basis depending on specific risk).
  It is much safer not to point that gun at a person, even if you're sure the safety is on and the gun unloaded

Well, more or less. The blood isn't exactly "lyophilized" as you mean it: it's not reduced to a powder.
The blood is dried: meaning that the liquid part is separated from the cells. (and in fact the different types of cells are also separated: you save separately pool of blod, pools of platelets, etc.). You still need the cells intact for a transfusion to work.

(Otherwise you'd overload the patient's liver. The liver is in charge of processing the haemoglobin that remain after a red blood cell has died. If you don't inject fresh blood cells but just haemoglobin you wouldn't be helping. Instead you'd be dumping a big load of garbage that the liver needs to process. The liver gets overloaded and can't process everything. Your patient gets jaundice and turn yellow - i.e.: accumulates un processed by products of haemoglobin)

Also the sample are indeed treated some way or another to reduce the risks of infection. But that only *reduces* the risks of pathogen. It doesn't guarantee that they're eliminated, you're not completely sterilizing the bad of blood cells (you wouldn't want to destroy them. Unless you like you patients yellow).

The main reason that modern blood is clean is that:
- donors and batches are screen against all known blood borne diseases.
- donors are screened for any activity that could result in increased risk of transmission of blood borne diseases (so you can have even a chance to protect from new infections that are unknown and not tested for yet).

First: HIV is quite resilient. For a virus at least. Of course, on a human scale it still degrades quickly outside of the body. But given proper conditions (protected from direct light, in a moist place that doesn't risk drying up, etc.) it quite survives for an impressive time when you compare to other viruses.

Now, the main problem is that you need to keep your red blood cells usable, thus you DO need to keep conditions (not drying them up, etc.) which will also benefit a potential virus. So even if a VIH virus should degrade relatively quickly outside the body, it can survive for some time in a pocket of blood.

Also there are other risk you need to protect from. Other blood borne disease like mad cow. And due to its nature (a Prion is only simply a protein with a weird shape) that shit is incredibly resilient. One need to cook^H^H^H^H burn it at high temperature. I say, we nuke it from orbit. Only way to be sure.

Given *that* kind of risks, screening / testing is the better option.

Read again my previous title: 2015
And you're citing people how died approximately ~25 years ago (and thus probably caught the virus at the end of the 80s).

I'm speaking about the current state of AIDS in HIV as of today. Not past history.
Do you really think that they still accept in the blood bank any blood of dubious source without running any test on it?
Quite the opposite: In fact they have extremely stringent criteria about accepting blood donors.
Donors are systematically checked against known infections, they are even checked for travel destination or activities that might carry a slightly increased risk of blood-borne disease. (e.g.: here, having a piercing more or less bans you from giving blood for quite a long time).

Blood stocks in the bank are also re-tested as testing method improve.

The risks of finding an infected blood batch in the bank are as near to zero as possible.

Arthur Ashe and Asimov could get it from a blood transfusion back in the late 80s. Nowaday in 2015, its almost impossible.

(earlier the logic used to be completely different regarding blood transfusion. It used to go along the lines of: "A patient needing blood would die otherwise. Transfuse whatever (compatible) you have, if you hurry enough, you might save the patient. You'll have plenty of time treat anything that was hidden in the blood once the patient is saved and stable." - probably using penicillin against syphilis was the main idea).

Also, to go back to my post: my whole discussion was about what a /. troll could to to avoid infection instead of completely isolating HIV-positive people.
The subject of blood-borne transmission is useless:
- the troll doesn't need to do anything, hospitals are already doing all the possible to avoid transfusion-caused infections. it's already being avoided without anyone needing to do anything. (you won't get HIV, you won't get mad cow, you won't get anything else known, and given the stringent criteria you are probably also protected against several potential blood borne diseases which aren't known yet)
- again, unless you're swapping used syringes - as I've mentionned - you can leave pretty close to a HIV-positive patient without risk. You could be roommates together, and you won't catch it by blood.
- in 2015, sex is the main risk of transmission for HIV. And the whole thing is easily controlled simply with a condom.

So, no. In 2015, there's absolutely no need to cast away HIV positive people on an isolated island.

Not even lasers. Hackers have been doing this with freaking LED's for long range networking.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...

Short of really massive weather conditions they are reliable as hell and dont require clearing all the trees out of the frenel area in front of the dish.

Just use the frigging dark fiber that is already running between them.

I fully support requiring the use of 50% grey boards with 50% grey chalk to support Unity and fairness!

So there's eight or ten clients for android that support some sort of editing, which is precisely why I asked. Which of them actually has a usable interface for simply and quickly adding POI's?

I'm not going to go through the trouble of installing almost a dozen clients just to answer this question.

I know I'm feeding a Troll, but...

Welcome to 2015.
- A period of time when HIV can be prevented from propagating during sex using an extremely sophisticated method called a "condom".
- A period of time when, at least for the developed world, drugs have advanced to the point where a sick person can be treated and kept alive more or less indefinitely. (although it costs money, and the treatement is a heavy one with some displeasing secondary effect. I would not recommend anyone glossing over "meh, not a problem if I catch HIV, I'll be treated". But I would certainly consider that in the developed world, HIV isn't a deadly disease, merly a chronic one) (that's for the developed world. Poorer region suffer from the fact that drugs cost prohibitively expensive for them and aren't widely available. And also pharma-companies aren't interested in developing cheaper alternatives because they're currently happy with their current earnings, whereas developing cheaper drung doesn't make sens economically to them because they won't recoup the necessary cost from the poorer region).
- A period of time when the drugs have so advanced and are so efficient that, undersome circumstances, it might be possible to reduce the viral load so low that it is almost irrelevant. (These people aren't curred per se. The viral count stay low because they are taking meds. If they stop the virus would rise again. But as long as they keep taking theire meds, virus levels are so low, that from the outside it looks more or less like any random person - including the risks) (again, that's not an excuse to completely forget condoms for ever. But that means, for example, that a man infected by HIV but with a virus level kept low enough, can father a child without risking infecting the mother. And given the preceeding paragraph, that also means that he'll get to see the child birth and see the child grow).

Right thing on *their* own? You know *YOU* can put a condoms on your dick/a femidom inside your pussy (depending on your sex) if you're so much afraid of catching HIV.

Or you know, maybe encourage *you* to but a condom.

Or you know, you could just put a condom on and forget about whole "dying" story.
(Also, you're not going to die of it as of 2015. You'll be on a lot of meds, costing substantial money. But still alive)

Don't engage irresponsible behaviour, use proper protection under all circumstance (except when all people involved have been tested and are known clean).

Depending on availability, either put a condom on (or in, depending on which sets of reproductive organs you happen to be equipped with)
or, when no protection is available, refrain from stick you dick into the pussy (or other similar combination of organs, depending on sex of the person involved) each human being has approximately 2m^2 of skin. Even with only 2 partners, that gives ton of possible combination. Using a bit of imagination, you're bound to find one which doesn't carry an infectious risk and still brings satisfaction to all parties involved.

Also remember: before HIV and AIDS were discovered, nobody knew about risks of AIDS (well, obviously).
But those who used protection (condoms, etc.) where already protected from it even if they didn't knew about it yet. (Maybe they though about avoiding syphilis or ghono. Still that *also* protected them from the yet-unnamed-AIDS).
Same situation now: maybe the person you think engaging sex with hasn't HIV as you think, but maybe the person has some new emerging yet to be formally discovered sexually transmitted disease. If you wear a condom at that moment (on the principle of "always wear one, except with you regular partner once you've both tested") you get automatically protected from the disease even if nobody knows about it yet and no doctor has put a name on it.

A condom is a protection not only against current HIV but against all future STD that might evolve in the future.

And by the way: "keep the people with HIV away to avoid catching AIDS" in practice boils down to "don't stick you penis inside their pussy" (or other combination of sexual orrifices) and don't mix blood (e.g.: by exchanging used syringes).
That enough to avoid transmitting HIV.
You can eat dinner together, you can drink together, you can work together in the same workplace, ... all 0% risk of VIH infection.

(Well, unless your workplace involves that each work meeting must end up as a giant sex orgy)
(In which case I would totally agree to protect you from your fears and switch jobs with you).

On a slightly related note: I wanted to add minor resources like bike repair stations and water fountains in my city, and figured there MUST be an android app that would make this about as simple as "hold your phone over it for a bit to get an averaged position, now click this and then "water fountain".

Nothing that I could see was remotely this simple? Even the web editor is a nightmare of trying to figure out exactly how to do things...and the wiki didn't help much, either, with poor documentation on the various properties one can assign to an object.

Only if you follow the "Austrian School" line of thinking, and then it becomes largely a matter of definitions and values. Even the article you link to admits that: "What is objected to here is not that the free market has flaws, but that the term “market failure” is a persuasive definition (see How to Think Straight, para 5.47), seeming to say more than it really does by improperly applying the emotive word failure.". They recognize the phenomenon but object to the chosen label.

Not that I agree with that article. Another quote: "Market failure, if the term is to mean anything useful, must mean that there are fundamental defects in the nature of human ability to achieve certain goods through voluntary, as opposed to coercive, institutions. With this definition, the case for market failure is synonymous with the case for government intervention.". Economists like Friedman argue against this line of thinking, and even many statists recognize that where market failure exists, state intervention isn't always the solution and may make matters worse.

That's market failure caused by government failure. Why do you think those laws to limit competition were put in place?

I think that government should not try and compete in a functioning market, but they definitely should have the right (and the inclination) to step in when the market fails. Set a reasonable minimum service, e.g. allow muni broadband if there are less than 3 market players having offered a plan with x Mb/s with an allowance of y GB/month for at most €z/month in the last 12 months or whatever. The incumbent telcos then have a choice to join the 21st century, or compete against the municipality.

Also, if local government is using public funds to run fiber, allow other telcos the use of that fiber at cost. Same as many countries forced the incumbent, formerly state owned telcos to open up part of their infra to newcomers on the market.