A bit of sleuthing came up with more details on the study. It was tested only on HIV patients, but it seemed to stimulate immune response, so perhaps it could be useful for those in high-risk groums who are not yet infected:
Name of project IMMUNOTHERAPY OF HIV-INFECTED PATIENTS (CTN B-HIV-1/99)
Short name of project: HIV Immunotherapy
Relevant keywords describing the project: Immunisation, therapeutic vaccine, Phase I study, HIV, p24, peptides
Principal investigator Name: Nina Langeland Title/Position: Prof. Dr.med. Telephone (work): +47 55 97 29 61 Fax number (work): +47 55 97 49 79 E-mail: nina.langeland@haukeland.no
Principal institution Name: Haukeland University Hopital Street name: Haukeland sykehus P.O.Box: Postal code: NO-5021 City: Bergen Country: Norway
Project duration Start of project period January , 2000 End of project period December , 2000
Names and institution of participating senior scientists Dr. med. Nina Langeland (Haukeland Hospital), Dr. med. Birgitta Aasjoe (Haukeland Hospital), Dr. med. Vidar Lehmann (Haukeland Hospital) Dr. Ingebjoerg Baksaas (Mericon AS), Dr. Knut Dahl (Mericon AS) Birger Soerensen (Bionor AS), Dr. Jorgen Nyhus (Bionor AS) -----
Brief project description ( background, aims and results so far ) Background A clinical trial was conducted and completed at Haukeland University Hospital, Bergen, Norway during 2000-2001. The study was approved by the Norwegian Medicines Control Authority and by the Ethics Committee of Health Region III in Norway. Study design The study was an open, single centre, phase I, uncontrolled study. 11 patients were enrolled. All had been HIV positive for several years. Nine patients were on HAART treatment, two patients received no specific HIV treatment. Primary Objectives The primary objective of the study was to determine safety and toxicity of immunisation with the Vacc-4x peptide mixture based on blood tests and adverse events reporting. Secondary Objectives The secondary objectives were to monitor immune response in terms of delayed type hypersensitivity (DTH) skin reaction, CD4 and CD8 cell counts, viral load, T-cell responses to individual synthetic p24 peptides and native analogues, and antibody responses to individual peptides and recombinant p24. Safety results No signs of toxicity and no clinically important adverse events following the Vacc-4x immunisation were observed. The adverse reactions reported were all of mild to moderate severity. No patients withdrew due to treatment-related adverse events or toxicological reactions. Painful injection was the most frequently reported adverse event, reported by 64% of the patients. Fatigue/vertigo or influenza-like symptom was reported after immunisation by 5 patients (45%). The results indicated that the therapeutic vaccine is safe and was well tolerated by all 11 enrolled patients. Immunological responses A positive DTH was measured for all patients indicating an activation of Th1 cells. An early and sustained increase in CD4 count for some patients on HAART was observed. The ELISPOT responses to synthetic and native peptides indicate production of new and virus specific CTLs that show cross reactivity back to native HIV proteins. No change observed in antibody production indicates that only cellular immunity has been activated, as expected.
At Internet access places travellers use, I've found that many if not most have Internet Explorer's "Use Autocomplete for usernames and passwords on forms" option selected.
I always deselect it. It's under Tools/Internet Options/Content/Autocomplete.
It may just be accidental, but these computers are logging everyone's usernames and passwords, which is, needless to say, a big security issue.
The only Internet Access chain I've found that has real verifiable security is Easy Everything (run by the same people as EasyJet). When you log off, their system actually wipes the hard drive and then downloads a new boot image off their network, so nothing at all is saved between sessions. This not only proves that they're not logging things (at least not unless they log them over the network), but prevents anyone from installing any software (such as key loggers) on their systems.
It's the way to go, but no one else I know of does it.
Vignette is a rather trivial hack which was developed at C|Net and licensed to Vignette. It basically just writes out static pages, nothing fancy.
As soon as Vignette licensed it, they were able to claim C|Net as a "Big Customer", which of course was a fib. This let them sell loads of software to organizations that didn't know any better.
Moral of the story? Static pages are a great idea. If you can't do static easily, put a cache in front of your dynamic pages and decide how dynamic you really need them (Is 15 minutes delayed OK for you or is each page totally dynamic?). You don't need to spend $250K for Vignette to get this to work. In fact, you can do it with free software quite easily.
Web caching and optimization is a big topic but in general the more clever you can be the less money you have to spend on big iron.
In 1998 I was working at a startup and we served Olympics news to Excite.com, which was one of the very largest sites on the web back then. Excite linked to pages on our server which were at some URL like olympics.excite.com that pointed to us.
What they didn't know was that we were serving all this off of ONE Sun Ultra 1 workstation on my desk (which was all we could afford at the time). I had it set up with Squid so everything was coming out of memory.
It worked fine, even at peak times everything popped up about as fast as any other page on Excite.
Moral: if you need speed and the page doesn't really have to be dynamic make it static or cache it.
Since they're planning to require a licensing fee on this new standard, it doesn't look to me like they're really interested in open source as much they are in taking market share away from foreign vendors and then getting people to pay them instead.
I think they'd rather be a new Microsoft than a new Open Software Foundation.
The problem with the idea of selling songs for 50 cents or something is that it's not economically viable for a small company.
Typically the credit card processors charge 25-35 cents per transaction plus about 2-3% of the amount. So if you sell something for 50 cents, you end up getting about 14-24 cents. That's a pretty huge overhead.
For this reason, I assume that they are planning to sell a complete album. I know everyone would like to pick and choose tracks to purchase, but that's only feasible in a giant download service with a subscription that bills monthly for all the tunes you buy, or some variation thereof.
I was always taught that if a flag was soiled it had to be disposed of by burning.
In fact, in 176. Respect for flag, it states:
(k) The flag, when it is in such condition that it is no longer a fitting emblem for display, should be destroyed in a dignified way, preferably by burning.
So how is it that people were put in jail for buring flags?
Well, that's because of 700. Desecration of the flag of the United States; penalties
(a)(1) Whoever knowingly mutilates, defaces, physically defiles, burns, maintains on the floor or ground, or tramples upon any flag of the United States shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for not more than one year, or both.
Hmm... so if I want to respect the flag, I should dispose of it "preferably by burning" it, but if I burn it I desecrate it, and get put in jail for a year.
For disposable dishes, these are probably the most ecologically sound.
They are made from leaves which are pressed into the shape of dishes or bowls. Not only are they biodegradable, but they require hardly any energy for their production, unlike plastics made from corn, which require lots of energy in production.
I have actually used these plates, and they seem to work at least as well as paper plates.
One of the requirements for a valid patent is that the patent must disclose sufficient information so that someone well-versed in the "prior art" can actually construct the device.
If the device he has patented can't be constructed yet, the patent is invalid, since it's obvious that he hasn't disclosed sufficient information to allow it to be constructed.
Someone can try to patent stuff that isn't realizable for years and years, but they don't end up with a valid patent. This is one of the (few) patent regulations that actually make sense.
Yes, they talked about the 3M computer: 1000 pixels by 1000 pixels on the screen and 1000 bytes of RAM, with a graphical interface and a mouse.
The Alto was the first computer that met that design goal.
That same year, Xerox came out with the first laser printer and an ethernet network that connected the printer and workstations. The original network ran at 3Mbps.
Amazon has seen how successful Yahoo has been with the Yahoo Store concept -- offering shopping cart hosting for some monthly fee, then taking a percentage (3.5% in Yahoo's case) of gross sales for all sales which come through searches of Yahoo shopping.
This latter tithe is optional, but is the chief attraction of Yahoo Store -- your products automatically and instantly show up in a popular searchable directory (Yahoo Shopping, not Yahoo Directory). Other advantages:
- customers can use "yahoo wallet" to purchase items - stores can participate in a ratings service which allows them to earn stars based on customer feedback surveys
This is a powerful model (though the feedback mechanism isn't as powerful as Ebay's), and one which makes Yahoo lots o' cash.
I think Amazon wants to do something similar and being able to register domains is just the tip of this iceberg.
For my first real job in programming, I had a choice of a banking consulting job for $17K a year or a military computing job for $26K a year.
I took the banking job.
Now some people might say "well, banking is evil too, who are you trying to fool?" and that may very well have some truth in it. But at least my code isn't controlling a missile or otherwise directly killing people.
Back in the early 80's I knew a guy who designed the guidance control software for the MX missile. He was the mellowest character ever. I asked him "how can you write code whose purpose is to direct nuclear warheads to different places to kill people?" and he said "it's a really interesting problem... all these warheads, you're up there in space, you have to compensate for all this stuff, they all go different directions... really interesting. They're never gonna use 'em anyway". Which again, I thought was a cop-out. Maybe they'll use 'em and maybe not. But if they DO, it's YOUR code helping to kill people.
What's my point? Just this: I WILL NOT write code that could be used to wage war. I think there are many who feel the way I do.
How about a modification of GPL with a 'mechanisms of war' exclusion, so that pacifists can contribute code and be assured it can't be legally used to wage war.
Sure, this could 'hurt linux' and slow its adoption by goverments. You know what? I don't care. Peace is more important than anything, including linux. And somehow, I don't think that linux would die if the government didn't design it into weaponry.
Let's leave the weaponry to Windows. At least then there's a better chance the software will die (in a blue screen of death) instead of people dying.
Of course if they *could* generate running binaries from the windows source, you could also say that they plan to put back doors in it, then let it be distributed on pirate boards and on pirate CD-ROMs.
Slashdot Mirror
A bit of sleuthing came up with more details on the study. It was tested only on HIV patients, but it seemed to stimulate immune response, so perhaps it could be useful for those in high-risk groums who are not yet infected:
Name of project
IMMUNOTHERAPY OF HIV-INFECTED PATIENTS (CTN B-HIV-1/99)
Short name of project:
HIV Immunotherapy
Relevant keywords describing the project:
Immunisation, therapeutic vaccine, Phase I study, HIV, p24, peptides
Principal investigator
Name: Nina Langeland
Title/Position: Prof. Dr.med.
Telephone (work): +47 55 97 29 61
Fax number (work): +47 55 97 49 79
E-mail: nina.langeland@haukeland.no
Principal institution
Name: Haukeland University Hopital
Street name: Haukeland sykehus
P.O.Box:
Postal code: NO-5021
City: Bergen
Country: Norway
Project duration
Start of project period January , 2000
End of project period December , 2000
Names and institution of participating senior scientists
Dr. med. Nina Langeland (Haukeland Hospital), Dr. med. Birgitta Aasjoe (Haukeland Hospital), Dr. med. Vidar Lehmann (Haukeland Hospital)
Dr. Ingebjoerg Baksaas (Mericon AS), Dr. Knut Dahl (Mericon AS)
Birger Soerensen (Bionor AS), Dr. Jorgen Nyhus (Bionor AS)
-----
Main sponsors
Bionor AS, P.O.Box 1868 Gulset, NO-3703 SKIEN, Norway
-----
Brief project description ( background, aims and results so far )
Background A clinical trial was conducted and completed at Haukeland University Hospital, Bergen, Norway during 2000-2001. The study was approved by the Norwegian Medicines Control Authority and by the Ethics Committee of Health Region III in Norway. Study design The study was an open, single centre, phase I, uncontrolled study. 11 patients were enrolled. All had been HIV positive for several years. Nine patients were on HAART treatment, two patients received no specific HIV treatment. Primary Objectives The primary objective of the study was to determine safety and toxicity of immunisation with the Vacc-4x peptide mixture based on blood tests and adverse events reporting. Secondary Objectives The secondary objectives were to monitor immune response in terms of delayed type hypersensitivity (DTH) skin reaction, CD4 and CD8 cell counts, viral load, T-cell responses to individual synthetic p24 peptides and native analogues, and antibody responses to individual peptides and recombinant p24. Safety results No signs of toxicity and no clinically important adverse events following the Vacc-4x immunisation were observed. The adverse reactions reported were all of mild to moderate severity. No patients withdrew due to treatment-related adverse events or toxicological reactions. Painful injection was the most frequently reported adverse event, reported by 64% of the patients. Fatigue/vertigo or influenza-like symptom was reported after immunisation by 5 patients (45%). The results indicated that the therapeutic vaccine is safe and was well tolerated by all 11 enrolled patients. Immunological responses A positive DTH was measured for all patients indicating an activation of Th1 cells. An early and sustained increase in CD4 count for some patients on HAART was observed. The ELISPOT responses to synthetic and native peptides indicate production of new and virus specific CTLs that show cross reactivity back to native HIV proteins. No change observed in antibody production indicates that only cellular immunity has been activated, as expected.
At Internet access places travellers use, I've found that many if not most have Internet Explorer's "Use Autocomplete for usernames and passwords on forms" option selected.
I always deselect it. It's under Tools/Internet Options/Content/Autocomplete.
It may just be accidental, but these computers are logging everyone's usernames and passwords, which is, needless to say, a big security issue.
The only Internet Access chain I've found that has real verifiable security is Easy Everything (run by the same people as EasyJet). When you log off, their system actually wipes the hard drive and then downloads a new boot image off their network, so nothing at all is saved between sessions. This not only proves that they're not logging things (at least not unless they log them over the network), but prevents anyone from installing any software (such as key loggers) on their systems.
It's the way to go, but no one else I know of does it.
Actually AFAIK, C|NET never did implement Vignette. They stuck with their old stuff and kept developing it.
Vignette was a fork that C|Net ignored cuz it didn't do what they needed it to do.
Vignette is a rather trivial hack which was developed at C|Net and licensed to Vignette. It basically just writes out static pages, nothing fancy.
As soon as Vignette licensed it, they were able to claim C|Net as a "Big Customer", which of course was a fib. This let them sell loads of software to organizations that didn't know any better.
Moral of the story? Static pages are a great idea. If you can't do static easily, put a cache in front of your dynamic pages and decide how dynamic you really need them (Is 15 minutes delayed OK for you or is each page totally dynamic?). You don't need to spend $250K for Vignette to get this to work. In fact, you can do it with free software quite easily.
Web caching and optimization is a big topic but in general the more clever you can be the less money you have to spend on big iron.
Static content is right.
In 1998 I was working at a startup and we served Olympics news to Excite.com, which was one of the very largest sites on the web back then. Excite linked to pages on our server which were at some URL like olympics.excite.com that pointed to us.
What they didn't know was that we were serving all this off of ONE Sun Ultra 1 workstation on my desk (which was all we could afford at the time). I had it set up with Squid so everything was coming out of memory.
It worked fine, even at peak times everything popped up about as fast as any other page on Excite.
Moral: if you need speed and the page doesn't really have to be dynamic make it static or cache it.
Since they're planning to require a licensing fee on this new standard, it doesn't look to me like they're really interested in open source as much they are in taking market share away from foreign vendors and then getting people to pay them instead.
I think they'd rather be a new Microsoft than a new Open Software Foundation.
Mod parent up!
This post covers the topic in DEPTH!
The problem with the idea of selling songs for 50 cents or something is that it's not economically viable for a small company.
Typically the credit card processors charge 25-35 cents per transaction plus about 2-3% of the amount. So if you sell something for 50 cents, you end up getting about 14-24 cents. That's a pretty huge overhead.
For this reason, I assume that they are planning to sell a complete album. I know everyone would like to pick and choose tracks to purchase, but that's only feasible in a giant download service with a subscription that bills monthly for all the tunes you buy, or some variation thereof.
Uh... sorry. Chopsticks have been in use for well over 1000 years, and probably longer.
Look here for some information about the history of chopsticks.
This is what I've never understood.
I was always taught that if a flag was soiled it had to be disposed of by burning.
In fact, in 176. Respect for flag, it states:
(k) The flag, when it is in such condition that it is no longer a fitting emblem for display, should be destroyed in a dignified way, preferably by burning.
So how is it that people were put in jail for buring flags?
Well, that's because of 700. Desecration of the flag of the United States; penalties
(a)(1) Whoever knowingly mutilates, defaces, physically defiles, burns, maintains on the floor or ground, or tramples upon any flag of the United States shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for not more than one year, or both.
Hmm... so if I want to respect the flag, I should dispose of it "preferably by burning" it, but if I burn it I desecrate it, and get put in jail for a year.
Makes sense to me!
Your "lanes" idea is a good one.
Also an old one.
This exact method of transportation is found in the Isaac Asimov novel "Caves of Steel", published in 1954.
In that book (if memory serves me correctly), the fast lanes go at highway speed and have limited access on and off points.
For those not initiated into the wonders of Chairman Mao's Little Red Book, the original quote is:
"Let A Hundred Flowers Bloom and A Hundred Schools of Thoughts Contend"
More information can be found here in section 2.
(note: the author of this post is not and never has been a Maoist)
Oops.. that is, they filed in Sept. 1997, and I was using Squid before that.
Here's much of the early revision history of Squid.
Version 1.0beta1 was April 19, 1996, and that was based on Harvest which was even earlier.
This is clearly an invalid patent.
The application date is in 1999. I was using Squid in 1997 and I'm sure it's at least a year or two older than that.
Can you say "prior art"?
Gore never said he "invented" the internet. That was a creation of the republican campaign.
What he said was he "took the initiative in creating the Internet", and this is true, as Vint Cerf and others agree.
For disposable dishes, these are probably the most ecologically sound.
They are made from leaves which are pressed into the shape of dishes or bowls. Not only are they biodegradable, but they require hardly any energy for their production, unlike plastics made from corn, which require lots of energy in production.
I have actually used these plates, and they seem to work at least as well as paper plates.
What article did you guys read, and why are people modding these as "insightful"?
THERE IS NO ARTICLE LINKED TO IN THIS NEWS ITEM.
In fact the link goes to a place you can post questions which may be asked in a chat which has not yet taken place.
C'mon mods... at least read the news story and links before modding troll posts like this.
One of the requirements for a valid patent is that the patent must disclose sufficient information so that someone well-versed in the "prior art" can actually construct the device.
If the device he has patented can't be constructed yet, the patent is invalid, since it's obvious that he hasn't disclosed sufficient information to allow it to be constructed.
Someone can try to patent stuff that isn't realizable for years and years, but they don't end up with a valid patent. This is one of the (few) patent regulations that actually make sense.
Yes, they talked about the 3M computer: 1000 pixels by 1000 pixels on the screen and 1000 bytes of RAM, with a graphical interface and a mouse.
The Alto was the first computer that met that design goal.
That same year, Xerox came out with the first laser printer and an ethernet network that connected the printer and workstations. The original network ran at 3Mbps.
See PARC's History page
Here is my prediction:
Amazon has seen how successful Yahoo has been with the Yahoo Store concept -- offering shopping cart hosting for some monthly fee, then taking a percentage (3.5% in Yahoo's case) of gross sales for all sales which come through searches of Yahoo shopping.
This latter tithe is optional, but is the chief attraction of Yahoo Store -- your products automatically and instantly show up in a popular searchable directory (Yahoo Shopping, not Yahoo Directory). Other advantages:
- customers can use "yahoo wallet" to purchase items
- stores can participate in a ratings service which allows them to earn stars based on customer feedback surveys
This is a powerful model (though the feedback mechanism isn't as powerful as Ebay's), and one which makes Yahoo lots o' cash.
I think Amazon wants to do something similar and being able to register domains is just the tip of this iceberg.
For my first real job in programming, I had a choice of a banking consulting job for $17K a year or a military computing job for $26K a year.
I took the banking job.
Now some people might say "well, banking is evil too, who are you trying to fool?" and that may very well have some truth in it. But at least my code isn't controlling a missile or otherwise directly killing people.
Back in the early 80's I knew a guy who designed the guidance control software for the MX missile. He was the mellowest character ever. I asked him "how can you write code whose purpose is to direct nuclear warheads to different places to kill people?" and he said "it's a really interesting problem... all these warheads, you're up there in space, you have to compensate for all this stuff, they all go different directions... really interesting. They're never gonna use 'em anyway". Which again, I thought was a cop-out. Maybe they'll use 'em and maybe not. But if they DO, it's YOUR code helping to kill people.
What's my point? Just this: I WILL NOT write code that could be used to wage war. I think there are many who feel the way I do.
How about a modification of GPL with a 'mechanisms of war' exclusion, so that pacifists can contribute code and be assured it can't be legally used to wage war.
Sure, this could 'hurt linux' and slow its adoption by goverments. You know what? I don't care. Peace is more important than anything, including linux. And somehow, I don't think that linux would die if the government didn't design it into weaponry.
Let's leave the weaponry to Windows. At least then there's a better chance the software will die (in a blue screen of death) instead of people dying.
Of course if they *could* generate running binaries from the windows source, you could also say that they plan to put back doors in it, then let it be distributed on pirate boards and on pirate CD-ROMs.
The solution to this?
Open source.
Actually, it would appear to be faster for many applications.
here are some benchmarks.
Nokia N-Gage: First Impressions
Apparently you have to remove the back and take out the battery to switch games. Not very clever.
I've always been sceptical of the RocketGuy, but at least he has this part down and is distilling his own peroxide fuel (to 90% purity).
Of course he does have to buy it (at 50% purity), so maybe that's a problem now too.