Anyone having 750 sexual partners over 3 years is a walking petri dish for all sorts of venereal diseases. It's no surprise that AIDS took hold in the gay community if it's true that that level of promiscuity was commonplace.
In the 1970's San Francisco had a male population of 345,680 (http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/counties/SanFranciscoCounty70.htm) of whom 6.2% were gay (http://time.com/3752220/lgbt-san-francisco/). That works out to a male gay population of 21432 people.
According to the CDC, the transmission rate for AIDS is about 1.4% per exposure. (http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/risk/estimates/riskbehaviors.html). Patient 0 acknowledged having 750 partners. I would imagine he had intercourse with each partner a few times (guesstimating 3 times each). The results in 750 * 3 = 2250 exposures. With a transmission rate of 1.4%, he caused an additional 31 new AIDS cases over those 3 years. Since the article itself stated that this level of sexual activity was commonplace, it's easy to see how this horrible epidemic exploded in such a short time. If you have a couple thousand very promiscuous people, and each one of those thousands of people go on to infect 31 others over a few years, it's easy to see why this happened in the way that it did.
Over the course of human existence, I suspect this pattern of behavior has been the cause of numerous epidemics. In olden times, people did not understand why new diseases emerge, but on occasion, they did correlate disease with excessive promiscuity. Thus various taboos have been established as societies sought to protect themselves. Over time, memories fade and we forget the original reason for a particular taboo, but I bet at least some taboos have a very good reason for existing.
What slippery slope? We have a significant portion of the population that deliberately aborts unwanted pregnancies. If someday we benefit from the use of their medical waste to cure Parkinson's or Alzheimer's or even just slow down plain ol' ageing - Good for me, good for you, good for everyone!
I had a similar problem with BB & T. They only supported IE and Netscape 4.7. So I used Mozilla's User Agent Switcher to report that I was really using Netscape. Why Netscape? Because I didn't want to artificially inflate IE's percentages, of course.:-)
For the record, BB & T's website worked perfectly with Mozilla...
Next, I called up BB & T's help line to complain about the lack of support for Mozilla. The first person I spoke to hadn't even heard of Mozilla. I then got transferred to their online banking support help and spoke with someone clueful. (At least, he's heard of Mozilla.) He logged my complaint and said they'd look into it, but couldn't promise anything.
Now, several months later, Mozilla is officially supported. I don't know if my phone call made any differance, but its nice to think that even large banks listen to their customers at least one in a while.
I know from recent, personal experience that going to windowsupdate.com can be dangerous to your PC's health.
My computer's C drive decided that last week was a good time to die. So I brought a new 200GB disk & proceeded to reinstall Windows XP Profession (a legal copy, I might add). Previously, I had been using MicroTrend's PC-Cillin as my anti-virus software which I had downloaded from their website about 6 months earlier. Of course, I didn't make a backup of the PC-Cillin installer.:-(
Now, my home network is connected to the net via a cable & has a hardware firewall, so I thought it should be reasonably safe to connect to windowsupdate.com to install all the necessary patches. Not one of my better ideas as you will see.
Once I had a completely patched up XP box, I thought I'd go to PC-Cillin's website to get their tech support phone number. I called them up & gave them my sob story. They let me re-download PC-Cillin & gave me the unlock key right over the phone. (By the way, PC-Cillin's tech support rocks. After pushing '1' for tech support, the phone rang twice and a real native English-speaking person answered. By the time I got off the phone with her two minutes later, I had downloaded, installed and was running PC-Cillin).
Unfortunately, PC-Cillin immediately found a worm on my system which it promptly removed. Now, I'm a little perplexed about how I managed to pick up this little beasty, but the Internet is no place for an unpatched XP box...
I'm sorry if you think I'm hypocritical because the BBC shows on National Public Radio spend a good deal of time on soccer and cricket. It is a fact though. You are probably right that those shows are geared to the expat community.
I know that British folk have other cares, but it isn't properly reflected in the news programming carried on Public Radio. CSpan, a cable network that covers Congressional meetings live, does carry the Prime Minister's Question Time periodically. Now that's a show: it's enlightening, animated and amusing- all at the same time....
Now, to your second point. The obvious answer is that Board of Education races don't get much news coverage because 99.9% of the time, reasonable people get elected. Newspapers don't typically bother asking candidates about their religious views and how they would effect their policy decisions. Likewise, many other local races don't get much attention either: Clerk of the Court, Judge of the Orphan's Court, etc...
If a group of Creationists want to pack the Board of Education, they could simply run a dozen candidates and have a decent chance of succeeding. Keep in mind that most people have never heard of any of the candidates; they might pick the first six candidates on the ballet or pick using the enny-meeny-miney-mo method. Sure its a crap shoot. We ought to be better informed, but usually we get decent, well-meaning Boards of Education. The alternative to having a democratically elected School Board is to have an appointed School Board. Some jurisdictions in this country do exactly that. Personally, I'd rather retain the right to elect my local school board than let the State of Maryland or the Federal Government decide for me.
Bad election outcomes are news because they are rare. If this kind of thing were more common, then you can be damn sure there would be better vetting of the candidates prior to the election. Furthermore, if a Board of Election pushes Creationism, that Board will be rediculed, won't be reelected and may even be recalled.
As an American Catholic, I'm a little annoyed when Creationism gets taught in science class in our Public Schools. However, I'm more annoyed by your fundmentalistic Anti-Americanism. Have you spent any time in this country?
I often listen to foreign news sources on National Public Radio late at night (CBC, BBC, Deutsche Welle (sp?) and others) The Canadians have some insightful things to say about Americans. The Brits spend most of their airtime on Soccer and Cricket (what's the deal with cricket anyway). Finally the German media seems completely clueless. They are as self-righteous and condescending as the worst Creationists here.
Now, for you Europeans who don't understand how us Americans can be so stupid as to teach Creationism in Science class, here's a quick civics lesson.
1) Public schools in America are under the control of a locally elected school board.
2) On election day, you are asked to select around 6 names for the Board of Education from a list of about 20. Usually, the people that run are retired school teachers & they generally do a pretty good job. However, folks running for the Board of Education do not have the same name recognition as candidates for Governor, Senator, President....
3) If your Board of Education has 6 members, it only takes 4 Creationists to push through their agenda.
4) Rest assured, that those four Board of Education member will have *huge* negative name recognition for the next election. These problems come, and they do go away at the next election cycle.
5) This country is really, really big. We have thousands of individual Boards of Education. That we only have problems in 0.1% of those Boards is telling. The sky is not falling.
By the way, I used to work in the Nuclear industry developing Nuclear Power Plant training simulators. The last ones I worked on were for several German utilities. I've heard that Germany is decommissioning all of their Nuke plants because of the Greens. WTF! I thought you guys cared about Global Warming?
The Palo Verde Nuclear Power Plant sits about an hour outside of the Phoenix Metropolitan area. This plant gets its water from a surprising source. They use recycled wastewater (sewage) from Phoenix to provide cooling water for the reactor. Waste water from Phoenix flows downhill to Palo Verde. It is cleaned up then sent to a large pond. Water from the pond is continuously reused to cool the plant. Of course, a percentage of the water is released from the cooling towers into the atmosphere as steam. So long as they recycle Phoenix's wastewaster faster then the cooling towers evaporate it, they're golden.
It's debatable whether government run power plants would be any better, but it scares the hell out of me that our reactors in the USA are run as cheaply as they can possibly get away with. Capitalism is great, but you just can't try to undercut safety.
I used to work for a company that developed full-scope nuclear power plant simulators. I've personally worked on simulators for at least 30% of all power plants in the United States. I've also worked on simulators for Austria, Bulgaria, Germany, the Slovak Republic, Taiwan, and the Soviet Union (at the time). So, I think I can speak with some authority about the ethics and business practices of the guys who actually run these plants.
At every American and Western European power plant I've worked at, nothing is more important than Health and Safety of the Public. (I can't personally vouch for the Eastern Europe / Far East plants. I didn't work close enough with them to form an opinion.) Every decision that gets made is viewed through this lens. Each reactor operator knows that his family lives 20 miles downwind. Nobody is going to risk their family's lives or health to save a few bucks.
Your corporate types also aren't going to do something stupid to save even millions of dollars because they are aware that one more Three Mile Island will destroy the industry's $100 billion plus investment overnight.
In case you were wondering, yes there really is a Scram button. Trust me, it's a lot of fun pushing it (on the simulator, of course). Working on a simulator beats the heck out of any video game. My favorite training scenario:
LOCA: Loss of Coolant Accident
Stuck control rods with faulty control rod position indication
HPSI (High Pressure Safety Injection) failure
Loss of Offsite Power (just for kicks)
It may not be the most realistic failure, but nothing sets of more alarms. Plus the 3D core temperature display get interesting pretty quickly.:-)
The parent has no clue what he's talking about. My wife was a hospital nurse until she "fleed" nursing when our first child was born. Nurses are overworked. A typical shift is nominally 7am - 7pm, but usually lasts at least an hour longer. (Got to finish the paperwork.) Did I mention no breaks for lunch or dinner?
Staffing levels suck. It's not uncommon to have 1 nurse to 10 patients. That isn't supposed to happen, but it is commonplace. My wife was very frustrated by the level of care that she was able to provide her patients. When she first started nursing, life was much better. She had the time to actually talk to her patients, get to know them, make sure they were as comfortable as possible, etc... In other words, be a good nurse. With the shortage that now exists, there is simply no time for anything but the bare minimium.
How about the hazardous working conditions. One of my wife's coworker contracted TB (while she was pregnant) from a patient. Sometimes, it is not immediately clear who's carrying dangerous diseases. Speaking of which, I think all patients should be tested for blood-borne pathogens like Hepatitis and HIV. Nurses are exposed to patient's blood all the time. Accidental needle sticks, bleeding IV sites, oozing wounds, patients vomitting blood onto nurses (yes, that happened to another coworker while she was checking for lung sounds). Unfortunately, patient confidentiality overrides a nurse's right to know what she's dealing with. I know you're supposed to use universal precautions with all patients, but if you know that little old lady acquired HIV through a blood transfusion you will certainly be more careful around her.
Changing career paths isn't quite so simple either. My wife wanted to become a lactation consult, however that requires an additional two years of schooling plus several thousand hours of experience in the area. This would have required a detour to working in a labor and delivery floor for a couple years before trying to become an LC.
My wife worked on a Respiratory floor, an old person's zone. Basically, you see a patient off and on for a couple years before they die. It can be rather depressing never having long-term good outcomes. By the way, nurses are the ones that have to break the news to the family. Doctor's typically don't see that 10 year old girl crying because her nana just passed away.
I'm a software developer & make over 3 times what my wife earned. Frankly, that's just screwed up. Software development is a well-compensated walk in the park in comparsion.
Look at USA again with its outrageous media conglomerates like Fox. Just because the press is free does not mean that the information is better, just more voluminous.
While we're at it, how about CBS News... Dan Rather won't let the truth get in the way of a good Anti-Bush story.
You're right. We are voting for President, but John Kerry comments make him look like an altar boy. I just wanted to point out that he likes to talk the talk, but never walks the walk.
I wouldn't call the sacrifices our servicemen & women have made unnecessary. Saddam is history. He certainly acted like he had WMDs. He won't kill again.
The UN sanctions against Iraq have been lifted. According to Unicef , those sanctions are partially responsible for 500,000 deaths among children between 1991 and 1999. That's about 5000 kids a month. At that rate, our involvement in Iraq has saved over 90000 Iraqi children. For each soldier lost, we have saved 90 kids. That's not a sacrifice made in vain.
I know I can kiss my karma goodbye, but I firmly believe this needs to be said...
Senator John Kerry Responds:
"Teresa Heinz Kerry and I are practicing and believing Catholics. If you're a person of faith as I am, faith is your guidepost, your moral compass."
Excuse me, Senator Kerry. If you really are a practicing and believing Catholic, you would be against abortion. The Roman Catholic Church teaches that Life begins at conception. Respect for Life is one of the most important principals in Catholism. You can't pick and choose which of the Church's teachings you will ignore simply because its politically expensive to be Pro-Life. Abortion kills unborn babies. You know that, I know that. Anyone who doubts that fact ought to see a fetal ultrasound or listen to a baby's heartbeat on a doppler heartbeat monitor. I saw my unborn son suck his thumb on an ultrasound monitor. He's 4 years old now and still sucks his thumb on occasion. This is a habit he's had since before birth. I defy anyone to claim he wasn't a person 4 1/2 years ago.
Millions of babies have been killed in a Holocaust of unrivaled proportions. Supporters of abortion rights say that our unborn children are not human, they are just fetuses, so it is OK to terminate them.
My friends, if you want to kill someone (or some group), you must dehumanize them. We have seen this happen many times in our Western culture:
In the Dred Scott decision, the Supreme Court ruled that Dred Scott, a slave, didn't have standing to bring a lawsuit challenging his enslavement to court because African slaves weren't legally people.
In Nazi Germany, after an orchestrated campaign painted all Jewish people as a subhuman people, they were systematically killed by the millions.
In Bosnia, Moslems were ruthlessly massacred by the Serbs for much the same reasons.
Even today in this country, a group of people, the most helpless in society can be killed for no good reason, simply because some people call them fetuses.
President Bush has had the courage to speak up for our nation's unborn children. Senator Kerry, a believing Catholic would use his/her moral compass to proclaim to the world that this horror must stop. Don't let President Bush be the better Catholic.
As a software developer, I was dismayed to hear about Kodak's decision to sue Sun based upon some bogus software patients. Most software developers think these kinds of patents are causing great harm to the American software developer. Any new feature (even obvious ideas) added to a piece of code could potentially be infringing on someone's intentionally vague software patient. I just read the 3 patents which Kodak has accused Sun of violating. Honestly, I have no idea just what you are claiming to have invented. Of course, that's probably the point.
In addition, Kodak seeks over $1 billion in damages from Sun. This is obscene. Through Java, Sun has revitalized the software industry. You are causing great harm to a company that has done wonderful things for both developers and consumers alike.
In response, I have decided to avoid Kodak products forever more. No more Kodak 35mm film, photo paper or film processing for me. By the way, my next camera will probably be a Canon digital camera. In short, you've sold your last Kodak product to me ever.
I know that my personal boycott of your products will have no measurable effect on Kodak's bottom line, however you have just annoyed over one million Java developers. We take this stuff seriously. I suggest Kodak visit SlashDot, a news site read 3 million times every day to get a feeling for the damage you have inflicted upon yourselves.
Before Kodak reinvents itself as a Intellectual Property (IP) holding company whose business model is to simply sue everyone in sight, I suggest that you investigate another company that has gone down that road before you. SCO, formerly a well respected Unix vendor, has basically given up Unix development and now focuses on very shaking IP lawsuits against vendors (IBM, RedHat) and users of the Linux operating system. With their software patent action, SCO (stock symbol: scox) has lost the goodwill of software developers worldwide. Their stock price has dropped from about $150/share five years ago and now trading at $3.70/share. In short, SCO is on the verge of collapse.
Be smart, don't be a SCO. Develop great products, not bogus IP lawsuits and you may yet avoid SCO's fate.
How about BB & T Bank. Once you log into their Online Banking section https://online.bbandt.com/online/servlet/efs/login bbt1.html, it boots you out unless you're using IE, Netscape 4.x or AOL. I called up BB & T's tech support number to complain about their lack of Mozilla support. The woman on the phone said,
Mozilla, never heard of it. I'll make a note of it.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone having 750 sexual partners over 3 years is a walking petri dish for all sorts of venereal diseases. It's no surprise that AIDS took hold in the gay community if it's true that that level of promiscuity was commonplace.
In the 1970's San Francisco had a male population of 345,680 (http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/counties/SanFranciscoCounty70.htm) of whom 6.2% were gay (http://time.com/3752220/lgbt-san-francisco/). That works out to a male gay population of 21432 people.
According to the CDC, the transmission rate for AIDS is about 1.4% per exposure. (http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/risk/estimates/riskbehaviors.html). Patient 0 acknowledged having 750 partners. I would imagine he had intercourse with each partner a few times (guesstimating 3 times each). The results in 750 * 3 = 2250 exposures. With a transmission rate of 1.4%, he caused an additional 31 new AIDS cases over those 3 years. Since the article itself stated that this level of sexual activity was commonplace, it's easy to see how this horrible epidemic exploded in such a short time. If you have a couple thousand very promiscuous people, and each one of those thousands of people go on to infect 31 others over a few years, it's easy to see why this happened in the way that it did.
Over the course of human existence, I suspect this pattern of behavior has been the cause of numerous epidemics. In olden times, people did not understand why new diseases emerge, but on occasion, they did correlate disease with excessive promiscuity. Thus various taboos have been established as societies sought to protect themselves. Over time, memories fade and we forget the original reason for a particular taboo, but I bet at least some taboos have a very good reason for existing.
Everyone except for the said fetus, that is.
I had a similar problem with BB & T. They only supported IE and Netscape 4.7. So I used Mozilla's User Agent Switcher to report that I was really using Netscape. Why Netscape? Because I didn't want to artificially inflate IE's percentages, of course. :-)
For the record, BB & T's website worked perfectly with Mozilla...
Next, I called up BB & T's help line to complain about the lack of support for Mozilla. The first person I spoke to hadn't even heard of Mozilla. I then got transferred to their online banking support help and spoke with someone clueful. (At least, he's heard of Mozilla.) He logged my complaint and said they'd look into it, but couldn't promise anything.
Now, several months later, Mozilla is officially supported. I don't know if my phone call made any differance, but its nice to think that even large banks listen to their customers at least one in a while.
And how exactly is this not stealing?
I know from recent, personal experience that going to windowsupdate.com can be dangerous to your PC's health.
:-(
My computer's C drive decided that last week was a good time to die. So I brought a new 200GB disk & proceeded to reinstall Windows XP Profession (a legal copy, I might add). Previously, I had been using MicroTrend's PC-Cillin as my anti-virus software which I had downloaded from their website about 6 months earlier. Of course, I didn't make a backup of the PC-Cillin installer.
Now, my home network is connected to the net via a cable & has a hardware firewall, so I thought it should be reasonably safe to connect to windowsupdate.com to install all the necessary patches. Not one of my better ideas as you will see.
Once I had a completely patched up XP box, I thought I'd go to PC-Cillin's website to get their tech support phone number. I called them up & gave them my sob story. They let me re-download PC-Cillin & gave me the unlock key right over the phone. (By the way, PC-Cillin's tech support rocks. After pushing '1' for tech support, the phone rang twice and a real native English-speaking person answered. By the time I got off the phone with her two minutes later, I had downloaded, installed and was running PC-Cillin).
Unfortunately, PC-Cillin immediately found a worm on my system which it promptly removed. Now, I'm a little perplexed about how I managed to pick up this little beasty, but the Internet is no place for an unpatched XP box...
I'm sorry if you think I'm hypocritical because the BBC shows on National Public Radio spend a good deal of time on soccer and cricket. It is a fact though. You are probably right that those shows are geared to the expat community.
I know that British folk have other cares, but it isn't properly reflected in the news programming carried on Public Radio. CSpan, a cable network that covers Congressional meetings live, does carry the Prime Minister's Question Time periodically. Now that's a show: it's enlightening, animated and amusing- all at the same time....
Now, to your second point. The obvious answer is that Board of Education races don't get much news coverage because 99.9% of the time, reasonable people get elected. Newspapers don't typically bother asking candidates about their religious views and how they would effect their policy decisions. Likewise, many other local races don't get much attention either: Clerk of the Court, Judge of the Orphan's Court, etc...
If a group of Creationists want to pack the Board of Education, they could simply run a dozen candidates and have a decent chance of succeeding. Keep in mind that most people have never heard of any of the candidates; they might pick the first six candidates on the ballet or pick using the enny-meeny-miney-mo method. Sure its a crap shoot. We ought to be better informed, but usually we get decent, well-meaning Boards of Education. The alternative to having a democratically elected School Board is to have an appointed School Board. Some jurisdictions in this country do exactly that. Personally, I'd rather retain the right to elect my local school board than let the State of Maryland or the Federal Government decide for me.
Bad election outcomes are news because they are rare. If this kind of thing were more common, then you can be damn sure there would be better vetting of the candidates prior to the election. Furthermore, if a Board of Election pushes Creationism, that Board will be rediculed, won't be reelected and may even be recalled.
As an American Catholic, I'm a little annoyed when Creationism gets taught in science class in our Public Schools. However, I'm more annoyed by your fundmentalistic Anti-Americanism. Have you spent any time in this country?
I often listen to foreign news sources on National Public Radio late at night (CBC, BBC, Deutsche Welle (sp?) and others) The Canadians have some insightful things to say about Americans. The Brits spend most of their airtime on Soccer and Cricket (what's the deal with cricket anyway). Finally the German media seems completely clueless. They are as self-righteous and condescending as the worst Creationists here.
Now, for you Europeans who don't understand how us Americans can be so stupid as to teach Creationism in Science class, here's a quick civics lesson.
1) Public schools in America are under the control of a locally elected school board.
2) On election day, you are asked to select around 6 names for the Board of Education from a list of about 20. Usually, the people that run are retired school teachers & they generally do a pretty good job. However, folks running for the Board of Education do not have the same name recognition as candidates for Governor, Senator, President....
3) If your Board of Education has 6 members, it only takes 4 Creationists to push through their agenda.
4) Rest assured, that those four Board of Education member will have *huge* negative name recognition for the next election. These problems come, and they do go away at the next election cycle.
5) This country is really, really big. We have thousands of individual Boards of Education. That we only have problems in 0.1% of those Boards is telling. The sky is not falling.
By the way, I used to work in the Nuclear industry developing Nuclear Power Plant training simulators. The last ones I worked on were for several German utilities. I've heard that Germany is decommissioning all of their Nuke plants because of the Greens. WTF! I thought you guys cared about Global Warming?
The Palo Verde Nuclear Power Plant sits about an hour outside of the Phoenix Metropolitan area. This plant gets its water from a surprising source. They use recycled wastewater (sewage) from Phoenix to provide cooling water for the reactor. Waste water from Phoenix flows downhill to Palo Verde. It is cleaned up then sent to a large pond. Water from the pond is continuously reused to cool the plant. Of course, a percentage of the water is released from the cooling towers into the atmosphere as steam. So long as they recycle Phoenix's wastewaster faster then the cooling towers evaporate it, they're golden.
It's debatable whether government run power plants would be any better, but it scares the hell out of me that our reactors in the USA are run as cheaply as they can possibly get away with. Capitalism is great, but you just can't try to undercut safety.
:-)
I used to work for a company that developed full-scope nuclear power plant simulators. I've personally worked on simulators for at least 30% of all power plants in the United States. I've also worked on simulators for Austria, Bulgaria, Germany, the Slovak Republic, Taiwan, and the Soviet Union (at the time). So, I think I can speak with some authority about the ethics and business practices of the guys who actually run these plants.
At every American and Western European power plant I've worked at, nothing is more important than Health and Safety of the Public . (I can't personally vouch for the Eastern Europe / Far East plants. I didn't work close enough with them to form an opinion.) Every decision that gets made is viewed through this lens. Each reactor operator knows that his family lives 20 miles downwind. Nobody is going to risk their family's lives or health to save a few bucks.
Your corporate types also aren't going to do something stupid to save even millions of dollars because they are aware that one more Three Mile Island will destroy the industry's $100 billion plus investment overnight.
In case you were wondering, yes there really is a Scram button. Trust me, it's a lot of fun pushing it (on the simulator, of course). Working on a simulator beats the heck out of any video game. My favorite training scenario:
LOCA: Loss of Coolant Accident
Stuck control rods with faulty control rod position indication
HPSI (High Pressure Safety Injection) failure
Loss of Offsite Power (just for kicks)
It may not be the most realistic failure, but nothing sets of more alarms. Plus the 3D core temperature display get interesting pretty quickly.
The parent has no clue what he's talking about. My wife was a hospital nurse until she "fleed" nursing when our first child was born. Nurses are overworked. A typical shift is nominally 7am - 7pm, but usually lasts at least an hour longer. (Got to finish the paperwork.) Did I mention no breaks for lunch or dinner?
Staffing levels suck. It's not uncommon to have 1 nurse to 10 patients. That isn't supposed to happen, but it is commonplace. My wife was very frustrated by the level of care that she was able to provide her patients. When she first started nursing, life was much better. She had the time to actually talk to her patients, get to know them, make sure they were as comfortable as possible, etc... In other words, be a good nurse. With the shortage that now exists, there is simply no time for anything but the bare minimium.
How about the hazardous working conditions. One of my wife's coworker contracted TB (while she was pregnant) from a patient. Sometimes, it is not immediately clear who's carrying dangerous diseases. Speaking of which, I think all patients should be tested for blood-borne pathogens like Hepatitis and HIV. Nurses are exposed to patient's blood all the time. Accidental needle sticks, bleeding IV sites, oozing wounds, patients vomitting blood onto nurses (yes, that happened to another coworker while she was checking for lung sounds). Unfortunately, patient confidentiality overrides a nurse's right to know what she's dealing with. I know you're supposed to use universal precautions with all patients, but if you know that little old lady acquired HIV through a blood transfusion you will certainly be more careful around her.
Changing career paths isn't quite so simple either. My wife wanted to become a lactation consult, however that requires an additional two years of schooling plus several thousand hours of experience in the area. This would have required a detour to working in a labor and delivery floor for a couple years before trying to become an LC.
My wife worked on a Respiratory floor, an old person's zone. Basically, you see a patient off and on for a couple years before they die. It can be rather depressing never having long-term good outcomes. By the way, nurses are the ones that have to break the news to the family. Doctor's typically don't see that 10 year old girl crying because her nana just passed away.
I'm a software developer & make over 3 times what my wife earned. Frankly, that's just screwed up. Software development is a well-compensated walk in the park in comparsion.
The Jini Pumpkin as posted to the Jini User's Group. By the way Steve if your server gets slashdotted, sorry about that. ;-)
But really, you've got to expect this kind of thing when you hand out Dum-Dums to the Trick-or-Treaters on Halloween....
Look at USA again with its outrageous media conglomerates like Fox. Just because the press is free does not mean that the information is better, just more voluminous.
While we're at it, how about CBS News... Dan Rather won't let the truth get in the way of a good Anti-Bush story.
You're right. We are voting for President, but John Kerry comments make him look like an altar boy. I just wanted to point out that he likes to talk the talk, but never walks the walk.
I wouldn't call the sacrifices our servicemen & women have made unnecessary. Saddam is history. He certainly acted like he had WMDs. He won't kill again.
The UN sanctions against Iraq have been lifted. According to Unicef , those sanctions are partially responsible for 500,000 deaths among children between 1991 and 1999. That's about 5000 kids a month. At that rate, our involvement in Iraq has saved over 90000 Iraqi children. For each soldier lost, we have saved 90 kids. That's not a sacrifice made in vain.
Senator John Kerry Responds:
"Teresa Heinz Kerry and I are practicing and believing Catholics. If you're a person of faith as I am, faith is your guidepost, your moral compass."
Excuse me, Senator Kerry. If you really are a practicing and believing Catholic, you would be against abortion. The Roman Catholic Church teaches that Life begins at conception. Respect for Life is one of the most important principals in Catholism. You can't pick and choose which of the Church's teachings you will ignore simply because its politically expensive to be Pro-Life. Abortion kills unborn babies. You know that, I know that. Anyone who doubts that fact ought to see a fetal ultrasound or listen to a baby's heartbeat on a doppler heartbeat monitor. I saw my unborn son suck his thumb on an ultrasound monitor. He's 4 years old now and still sucks his thumb on occasion. This is a habit he's had since before birth. I defy anyone to claim he wasn't a person 4 1/2 years ago.
Millions of babies have been killed in a Holocaust of unrivaled proportions. Supporters of abortion rights say that our unborn children are not human, they are just fetuses, so it is OK to terminate them.
My friends, if you want to kill someone (or some group), you must dehumanize them. We have seen this happen many times in our Western culture:
President Bush has had the courage to speak up for our nation's unborn children. Senator Kerry, a believing Catholic would use his/her moral compass to proclaim to the world that this horror must stop. Don't let President Bush be the better Catholic.
Use Kodak's Contact Form to let them what you think. I did:
As a software developer, I was dismayed to hear about Kodak's decision to sue Sun based upon some bogus software patients. Most software developers think these kinds of patents are causing great harm to the American software developer. Any new feature (even obvious ideas) added to a piece of code could potentially be infringing on someone's intentionally vague software patient. I just read the 3 patents which Kodak has accused Sun of violating. Honestly, I have no idea just what you are claiming to have invented. Of course, that's probably the point.
In addition, Kodak seeks over $1 billion in damages from Sun. This is obscene. Through Java, Sun has revitalized the software industry. You are causing great harm to a company that has done wonderful things for both developers and consumers alike.
In response, I have decided to avoid Kodak products forever more. No more Kodak 35mm film, photo paper or film processing for me. By the way, my next camera will probably be a Canon digital camera. In short, you've sold your last Kodak product to me ever.
I know that my personal boycott of your products will have no measurable effect on Kodak's bottom line, however you have just annoyed over one million Java developers. We take this stuff seriously. I suggest Kodak visit SlashDot, a news site read 3 million times every day to get a feeling for the damage you have inflicted upon yourselves.
Before Kodak reinvents itself as a Intellectual Property (IP) holding company whose business model is to simply sue everyone in sight, I suggest that you investigate another company that has gone down that road before you. SCO, formerly a well respected Unix vendor, has basically given up Unix development and now focuses on very shaking IP lawsuits against vendors (IBM, RedHat) and users of the Linux operating system. With their software patent action, SCO (stock symbol: scox) has lost the goodwill of software developers worldwide. Their stock price has dropped from about $150/share five years ago and now trading at $3.70/share. In short, SCO is on the verge of collapse.
Be smart, don't be a SCO. Develop great products, not bogus IP lawsuits and you may yet avoid SCO's fate.
Once you log into their Online Banking section https://online.bbandt.com/online/servlet/efs/logi
That was several months ago. Of course, you can always lie about who you are with the User Agent Switcher (http://update.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.ph