You would think so, and you'd be right. Except that politicians beg (or rather: insist) to differ. Same here in NL, downloading was made illegal but the taxes remained in place. Over here they even renamed it to the "home copy levy". There's a levy on all storage media (hard disks, blank DVDs), which is for "compensating authors and artists for copies made of music and movies from legal sources for private use". And since downloading stuff from the internet is now illegal, this means that this fee is levied solely on CDs and DVDs that you already own. Fuckers.

Yep, a few years ago I used to send a LOT of CDR's and DVDR's to friends in Canada I would trade for Cuban Cigars.

I say we take the Politicians money first. That would be the ultimate in honest.

Or, simply configure the pumps to have different IP addresses. Does his boss pour gasoline on him and set him on fire if he changes their IP addresses?

Which is why it should be tied to the car value.

Driving a Bugatti Veyron? you pay $22.50 per mile for the tax.
Driving a 1995 Civic? $0.05 per mile.

Very simple to do, which means the government will completely fuck it up.

We're doing poorly even by European standards:
* €1.70 / l (about $7.20 / gallon)
* About €800 - €1200 in road tax per year (regardless of milage, and this is per vehicle; we own several. There are some special exemptions for old-timers though)
* VAT (21%) + a special car "CO2" tax on purchase of new cars. For some cars, the VAT + CO2 tax exceeds the factory price of the car.


We may be a small and densely populated country, but as one clever blogger remarked: "We do not have too many cars in this country, but too many people who hate them". That's also reflected in the fact that our roads, though generally in good condition, take ages to build. Between planning a road and the ground being broken, there's zoning, environmental impact studies, protests, court cases, etc. One case: a very short extension on one highway that will provide tremendous relief in congestion and pollition around a major city, is oonly now being built after planners decided to go ahead... over 40 *years* ago.

I think we should be able to trust our government with such data under a few conditions:
1) There should be a reasonable balance between the privacy intrusion and the benefits derived thereof
2) Data security and access restrictions to that data should be in line with the sensitivity of that data
3) The data should in principle only be used in ways for which it was collected, with a few limited and explicitly stipulated exceptions (such as law enforcement having access to subsets of the data with a court order). And always: not compelled by law to share means *forbidden* to share, no data may ever be volunteered.
4) Data retention should not be longer than needed for the purpose for which the data was collected.
5) There must be appropriate oversight to enforce these rules, with trustworthy audits and real consequences for those responsible in case of transgressions.

In many cases I do not in principle have issues with the goverment obtaining certain private data about me. However, in almost all cases, the reasonable conditions listed above are not met. In most cases, *none* of them are met.

In any case, you ought to be happy that your government at least set some limits on how and when this data can be used. When my country's government proposed a similar road pricing scheme, privacy was not addressed at all, on the contrary. No limits, any government agency would be allowed to use the data, and retention was pretty much forever. Politicians were already floating some alternative uses for the data: the police could use it to track suspicious movement, and the tax office could use it to catch fraudsters (such as catching people making private use of a company car and not declaring the milage, the way they recently did by requesting and receiving data from pay-by-smartphone parking providers). If our government sees no issue in buying data that was stolen from Swiss banks in order to catch undeclared offshore savings, they will certainly not stop short of abusing data they already own.

What are you talking about? Trumped? What is the connection - how does women getting killed by their husbands relate to child custody. Are these not unrelated issues?

"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.