how else are they going to pay for the grass and hookers?

If you have the latest 4.11.08 baseband, there is (to the best of my knowledge) no way to un-SIMlock it.

My wife is travelling in Australia and China and wanted to use her iPhone there. Rooting and unlocking my Samsung Galaxy S took about 10 minutes, but there is no way to unlock the iPhone 4 if you upgraded to iOS 5. We could have paid Rogers (Canada) $60 to do it, but we didn't think of it until we left for Australia and it was cheaper to just buy a cheap nokia prepaid burn phone and then only use her iPhone on WiFi.

You are willfully ignorant. None of the common drug resistant bacteria originate in the third world. Most are drug resistant strains of bacteria that everyone carries every day. Antibiotics are expensive and in short supply in most of the third world, so it would be difficult for drug resistant strains of 3rd world bacteria to evolve to threaten Europe. You can't blame this one on the non-arians.

I'm not sure exactly where this line of thought is going.

Plague is not a good comparison for drug resistance. Because of its infrequence and high mortality rate, it SHOULD be treated aggressively with antibiotics. Unfortunately, where plague and other infectious diseases are more frequent, antibiotics are neither cheap nor available. It is only due to plague's history of pandemics that it gets such a high priority from public health agencies. Air travel and globalization is more of a benefit for treating plague as it allows the WHO, CDC, etc. to rapidly identify and respond to a localized outbreak.

MRSA (Staphylococcus) is not an external threat, an exotic third world doomsday bug for which we have to call in Dustin Hoffman, Rene Ruso and Morgan Freeman. It's home grown. We are all covered in Staphylococcus and it's western medical practices that have created the drug resistance.

I guess you could say, in this respect, the developed world's problem is overuse of antibiotics. The developing world's problem is a lack of antibiotics. Neither situation, in this case, is significantly impacted by the ease of air travel. The same can not be said for all pathogens.

"No, it's not cut and dry, but it IS known that not finishing the regimes is the largest impact in creating the superbug. SO large in fact that all other ways are trivial by comparison"

You are right that it's not cut and dried. There are other significant causes of drug resistant bacterial. Hospitals (where finishing regimes is probably the highest) are notorious for contamination, cross contamination and re-contamination. Hospitals (and nursing homes) are full of people with compromised or weakened immune systems, chronic incontinence / diarrhea, catheters, diabetes, poor circulation, bad teeth and gums, bed sores, fragile skin, etc. which all encourage persistent, difficult to treat infections. Many, with weakened kidney function can not take Sulfonamides - another class of drugs used to combat bacterial infections, so have had recurring and persistent infections and often multiple cycles of targeted and broad spectrum antibiotics. Daycares are also disease factories.

Even outside of hospitals, nursing homes and daycares, even the most clean and healthy of us are cover with and full of bacteria. Simply by shaking hands, opening a door, touching a faucet, borrowing a pen (how many people have you seen chew on pens/pencils) etc. we transfer bacteria which can transfer drug resistance from person to person.

Okay - yeah, the guy said virus rather than bacteria. Got it.

First of all, antibiotics, even when taken appropriately and in full dosage/cycle, do not wipe out all of, and only, the targeted bacteria. Certain classes of antibiotic work best against certain broad classes of of bacteria. Some (bactericidal) antibiotics directly kill bacteria, other (bacteriostatic) antibiotics only prevent the multiplication (growth) of the bacteria. No ingested or injected antibiotic is so specific that it ONLY effects the targeted strain or body system, and short of dosing to eradicate the beneficial "flora" in your body, most antibiotics destroy the bacteria to the point where your immune system can finish the job. Drugs targeted to UTIs, ear infections or respiratory infections will also kill beneficial bacteria in your gut. As a result, even following the most rigorous dosage of antibiotics, we remain covered with and full of bacteria, most of which (beneficial, benign and toxic) have now been exposed an antibiotic and the evolutionary selective process begins. This is obviously exacerbated with physicians prescribe antibiotics for viral infections. Even when it is a bacterial infection, without a sample/culture, it is only an experienced / educated guess at the specific strain, so often they prescribe more broad spectrum antibiotics.

You are right that the issue with antibiotics in cattle is the filthy, over crowded feedlot environment. A concentrated, high energy grain such as corn makes densely packed feedlots possible. Large feedlots would not be possible of cattle were fed prairie grasses.

Corn is massively subsidized in the US - in the form of direct payments, crop insurance subsidies, price supports, various counter cyclical programs and market loss assistance, which total anywhere from $3B to $10B annually. Approximately 40% of corn production is for animal feed. Corn is also fed to chickens (who exist in similar crowded, antibiotic infused environments) and "poultry litter" is then fed to feedlot cattle.

Corn subsidies -> cheap corn -> high energy, concentrated animal feed -> requires less (or no) pasture -> enables crowded feedlots -> increases spread of disease -> requires antibiotics.

The Black Death was pandemic and in fact there were multiple pandemics. The first recorded outbreak was in the 6th century (Plague of Justinian). Cycles of plague continued up until the 18th century (in China and India). The Black Death however is usually associated with the plagues of the 13th and 14th centuries in Europe and the Middle East.

The Black Death / Black Plague - which was probably a mix of bubonic and pneumonic plagues, maybe other diseases as well, was "beaten" primarily because it had an extremely high mortality rate, tended to reverse urbanization and many infected communities were quarantined. Cities and towns gradually improved the level of sanitation. Other factors that mitigated later outbreaks include the dominance of different species of rats in some areas and the surviving human population developing some resistance. Also - after killing anywhere from 40% to 90% of the local population, it simply ran its course.

Modern outbreaks of plague tend to be rural (where closer contact with animals, animal feed, rats, etc. is common) which tends to isolate the outbreak, and yes, antibiotics can quickly, locally, eradicated the outbreak. In cities with modern sanitation it is extremely rare. Air travel and mixing of populations is not a big issue for plague, but at some point, it will be for the next pandemic (virus, bacteria, prion, what ever).

Do you drink milk?

Nursing has changed a lot since WWII. It's silly to have university trained nurses emptying bed pans, changing linens and cleaning. However what is called a "nurse" in many different jurisdictions varies quite greatly from glorified maids to highly skilled health practitioners.

Also outsourcing non-clinical functions in hospitals need not be an issue. The problem is that many outsourcing agreement are very poorly written and have incentives to reduce costs, but not improve performance. There is no reason that most food preparation, laundry services and cleaning can't be outsourced. However the contractors need oversight, performance metrics and continuous improvement. Administrators who oversee contracts also need oversight and performance incentives. In many cases the problem is not the contract, but the person overseeing the contract is too cosy with the contractor (having been winded and dined).

Here in British Columbia, in one Health Authority, the Hospital Employees Unions had bizarre agency issues as they represented everyone from cafeteria and custodial workers to lab technicians. The non-skilled staff wanted job security and protection from outsourcing while the para-clinical / technical staff wanted better wages, benefits and professional development. Food service workers wanted to protect their over paid burger flippers (actually mushy vegetables and over cooked, bland meal makers) while lab techs wanted pay commensurate with private labs. The union went to the wall for the burger flippers because the health authority wanted to outsource most food and laundry services.

Light flew United. Nutrinos took SouthWest.