Well, if they do any bioengineering to it at all (i.e., insert different genetic material to generate a different protene, for example), they can then patent that...
For one, you can patent a process that can make them in bioreactors in clinically significant quantities, and for another, you can patent the process of using them as a specific medical treatment.
The patent isn't on the virus, but on the method of injecting the virus to treat cancer cells. I would argue, though, that the phage (viruses that typically infect and kill bacteria in a very targeted fashion) treatments used in Russia/Eastern Europe for bacterial infections might constitute prior art, at least in that part of the world. Articles have been written in various paper magazines about this, how Russian scientists, at least, actively pursue them, but because they're essentially unpatentable in the US and western Europe, they get scant attention.
Oops, I should add that my dad isn't being treated, basically for one of the reasons stated by the GP. Attempting to treat now could skew his body into unintentionally accentuating the growth of the acute bad cells. Until his blood cell counts change dramatically (indicating it's changing to an acute phase), this is the rational approach...
Good points, but are the limiting cases (AIDS and other immunocompromised) a large majority of cancer victims? Probably not.
i think that using this therapy alone may be a way of selecting for cancers which do not depend completely on the activated ras pathway for propagation.
At least cancer cells do not get propagated outside of the patients' bodies, unlike drug-resistant bacteria etc., so this could be a slight red herring. Yes, I know and realize (my dad has a very low-grade non-acute lymphoma that is barely on the oncology register, and yes, his type of lymphoma consists of many different types of cancerous cells, some of which are generally associated with the acute flavor of the disease, even in low-grade chronic cases), and that most cancers are a mixture of cells that tend to be affected differently by available treatments, which is why a multiple-course treatment is now given (i.e., chemo, radiation, etc) for many.
As far as using this reovirus as you describe, we know even less about so-called nanoparticles and how they interact in the human body. You say that you can target uptake of these nanoparticles in given cells, but you won't ever really be sure that maybe they'll accumulate in unintended areas or not get flushed from the body effectively, eventually be recognized as foreign particles, thus possibly unleashing a very unintended immunoresponse or delivery of medicine in an unintended location...
New medicine treatments, more or less, are an excercise in trading the devil you know for the devil you may not even know is around the corner or choosing from Door #3 in exchange for the hope of a better day tomorrow.
But it won't stop all the vitamin and herbal remedy people from picking them up and selling them, albeit without the mantle of the FDA saying that they are useful for anything or as part of any treatment.
Research *will* be done on these folk remedies, and any glimmer of efficacy revealed by these small-scale studies will be trounced upon by the herbal remedy companies as facts that the stuff is "good" for something.
Just because Abbott Laboratories, Glaxo, Lilly, Novaris, et al. don't pick up on them, doesn't mean that someone won't.
And, if a compound in some herbal remedy is finally isolated that actually does do things well, if a company like the above can make a synthetic analogue which it can patent (the process to make it and derivatives, not necessarily the compound in and of itself), it will invest the $$$ to run traditional medical trials and get an FDA-approved product.
Basically, if it's a useful compound like digitoxin or curare, it will eventually be used when a "legitimate" pharma makes it and it becomes FDA-approved in a given treatment protocol.
After all, Wrigley Gum doesn't make Nicorette (even though it easily could. They'd just have to source out the nicotine used in it), but one of the Pharmas does, because Nicorette is a drug delivery device..
If someone figured out how to put a pediatric medicine into Pez tablets, do you think the candy company that makes Pez would make it? Nope. One of the Pharmas would (it'd be a drug delivery device).
But what if you're Islamic, and are tired of Hindu anti-Islamists coming into your town and raising hell?
Until Pat Robertson and the like declare all-out physical war (not just rhetorical war) in the US, the US doesn't have anything really similar right now (60's and segregation probably were close to it).
He may have been in an academic environment, but I would bet that his family life was not one of cooperation and sharing...
Besides, in India, if you're of the wrong caste, good luck. If the "upper" castes buy into the Microsoft Way, then it really will be, "let Them use vi and dot-matrix printers" for most of India.
If you start off busting your ass 14 hrs a day, and then come to the US where you can make 10x money that to an American that pays even less than minimum wage (try to pick up sheep shearing...) but is far less work than you are used to, and it's a golden opportunity, and the US is full of them.
The only thing I wish this "foreign investment" carried would be a requirement that India make its borders as open to US workers choosing to work over there for a time, much like Indians have been able to do in a variety of ways for...oh, quite a while.
But it's not that way. Would I personally get rich working in India in US terms, with an eye of eventually coming back to the US? Maybe, but probably not. Alas, it's not a free labor market.
But you should also look around and find the people who seem to work harder than anyone else around them, and yet they can barely keep their boat afloat, as they're constantly bailing water from one wave sweeping over the gunwales after another. They could be flippin' brilliant, but you'd never know just by watching them.
If "it's not what you are given that determines your success. It is what you do with it. And that means work" were really true, most of the people in the world would probably feel like they should have the life of Donald Trump. Could we have asked John Henry (of the song) this question, he probably would have popped you a good one when the railroad crew boss wasn't around.
But...has anyone looked into how this exact same scenario would affect asp.net, which essentially does the same exact thing that AJAX uses (server side components that spit Javascript code to client, which executes the Javascript code to communicate bidirectionally with the server, essentially "out of band" of the original HTML stream)?
This is a private institution enacting disciplinary action on a member who directly insulted other members and staff of said instutition ina public forum.
No, the student made sweeping generalizations about some of his costudents, and other comments about a professor, but no one was named. You cannot directly insult someone without also naming them. Sure, some who read it probably knew the prof in question. Everyone bitches and moans about their fellow students and profs at some point or another.
Maybe the asshat who was running the kangaroo court was the faculty member in question in the blog...
Most bicycle commuters tend to also own cars, unless they're riding a bike because the Court took away their driving privileges or vehicles or can't afford one in the first place, or they're kids.
The plus side to bike lanes? The road is wider.
In rural areas, it's actually nice having a little extra runoff room, especially on windy roads. Having driven on some of the rural roads outside of Fredericksburg, VA, with what seems to be 9'-wide lanes and 0 shoulder, and 55 mph speed limits, compared to most other areas where at least there tends to be a few inches of pavement or at least gravel on the edges of the roads, it does test one's nerves...
Well, Illinois tried this out as well. Personally, lowering the state gas tax seems stupid.
What is stupid about the GPS-based tax is that it assumes that all vehicles "use" the roadways the same per mile driven. A Honda Insight, Toyota Echo, etc. does not use up the road surface like an H2, Ford Excursion or Cadillac Escalade (but the true road eaters are semi-trucks and buses).
And even in Portland, how many more minivans, SUVs and trucks (i.e., F250, Dodge 2500, etc) do you see compared to Toyota Prius or Honda Insights? What are the sales volumes of these two different classes of vehicles?
They should raise the fuel tax (or go back to a car value-based registration fee, instead of flat per-vehicle registration fee).
Neither are "fair", but they are probably the least unfair to the largest number of people, especially regarding the ability to abuse the data gathered by the states and the costs to implement.
Well, I would argue, then, that every piece of "made in China" stuff you own supports chinese censorship as well. Most of those chinese companies are one way or another run by those same evil oppressive Chinese Communist Party bastards.
Since it is virtually impossible to live in a modern society (like, use a computer) w/o owning *something* that wasn't made or sourced from China these days, your argument is a red herring.
Would China be changing (China now is different than China in 1972) without it being involved in the world economy?
Forget China. Compare and contrast Vietnam and Cuba instead.
The fact is that the vast majority of businesses aren't evil, Microsoft included. They might do some bad things, but no reasonable person could say they are overall evil. Now Enron, and Worldcom could be considered evil, but there are the rare exceptions in American society, not the rule.
Hmm... I'll disagree, but their evilness comes out when they think you're trying to suck money out of them, whether it be insisting that their service sucked and you want your money back, that the product they sold to you sucks and you want your money back, that they did not deliver what goods/service they said they would, that their sales team pitched you x and y but you didn't get it in writing (sucka) and now the company never heard of those sales employees in the first place, etc.
There are evil people in every company. How close they are to the top of the org chart reflects how evil the company is probably percieved, and whether the evil people are in customer-facing or employee-facing groups.
The MS employees I've known are not evil. But the actions of MS' legal team, SteveB and BillG certainly do have a lot of arrogant evilness in them, and because they are a big part of the customer-facing part of MS, affect the perceived image of Microsoft.
Yes, especially as how they're still being made and developed in Russia (or Ukraine), who are more than happy to sell them to whomever is willing to pay them, and they continue to develop them. They now make several different (and suprising...) models, including one that has an IR seeker head (hint: Blackhawk Down). I wouldn't be suprised that there aren't a few former Spetznaz and other skilled former USSR special forces soldiers who are earning more than a few extra dollars as "technical consultants" helping Al Queso et al build better mouse traps that blow up Humvees... The RPG-7 is not a weapon system to be dismissed.
Much like how Russia is a US "ally" in the War On Terror (insert ominous music), yet is more than willing to sell (and help build) nuke stuff to Iran (hey, weren't they doing this with Iraq too?).
At least in Russia's schizoid world, the irony for everyone else is that some of the stuff they do sell to whomever is coming right back at them in Chechnya. Don't see too many "terrorists" arming up with M-16s, do you? Nope. AK-47s, RPG-7s and AK-74. And I would think that most of the Stinger missiles that we sold to the Mujahadeen to get the commies out of Afghanistan have been used, either actually fired or disassembled to use their warheads and motors hacked for other unintended consequences.
Well, how do you know that a Wikipedia article is based on facts or a complete whitewashing of a controversial issue?
I could throw in some good examples where there would be strong reasons for people to do so:
o "Intelligent" design o the fall of Arthur Anderson Co. o the fall of Enron (and why haven't its executives faced trials yet???) o did the Holocaust really happen? o the real reasons why Pol Pot hated people who wore glasses o Hutu (or Tutsi) superiority
et freaking al.
Look at all the issues in the US surrounding the history of Custer's Last Stand, from the cracker's perspective, vs the heroic decimation of the 7th Cavalry by the Sioux (Sioux perspective), and how things have changed over the last 20 or so years with regards to Custer Battlefield National Monument...
Or why most of Asia hates Japanese apologism w.r.t. Japan's colonialism before and during WWII (and even before that).
Or Israel vs Palestine (or The Arab League vs Israel, when nothing ever seemed to be said w.r.t. Saddam Hussein's treatment of Iraqis...).
Overall, it's a foolish and dangerous idea to consider such limitations in licensing,
But what about the little blurb in the Java license that says, essentially, to not use Java for critical systems like nuclear reactor controllers, medical XRay machines, etc.?
Same with watching a tire broken loose from a race car in an accident. They look like they're not going very fast, but they are, and they have a lot of KE in them from the speed they might be spinning at, and they're not light in the first place, so if it hits a human, it's not pretty. Now, add in the occaisional pieces of suspension and brake that can sometimes stay attached to them, also whirling at Cuisinart speeds...
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if they do any bioengineering to it at all (i.e., insert different genetic material to generate a different protene, for example), they can then patent that...
For one, you can patent a process that can make them in bioreactors in clinically significant quantities, and for another, you can patent the process of using them as a specific medical treatment.
The patent isn't on the virus, but on the method of injecting the virus to treat cancer cells. I would argue, though, that the phage (viruses that typically infect and kill bacteria in a very targeted fashion) treatments used in Russia/Eastern Europe for bacterial infections might constitute prior art, at least in that part of the world. Articles have been written in various paper magazines about this, how Russian scientists, at least, actively pursue them, but because they're essentially unpatentable in the US and western Europe, they get scant attention.
Oops, I should add that my dad isn't being treated, basically for one of the reasons stated by the GP. Attempting to treat now could skew his body into unintentionally accentuating the growth of the acute bad cells. Until his blood cell counts change dramatically (indicating it's changing to an acute phase), this is the rational approach...
Good points, but are the limiting cases (AIDS and other immunocompromised) a large majority of cancer victims? Probably not.
i think that using this therapy alone may be a way of selecting for cancers which do not depend completely on the activated ras pathway for propagation.
At least cancer cells do not get propagated outside of the patients' bodies, unlike drug-resistant bacteria etc., so this could be a slight red herring. Yes, I know and realize (my dad has a very low-grade non-acute lymphoma that is barely on the oncology register, and yes, his type of lymphoma consists of many different types of cancerous cells, some of which are generally associated with the acute flavor of the disease, even in low-grade chronic cases), and that most cancers are a mixture of cells that tend to be affected differently by available treatments, which is why a multiple-course treatment is now given (i.e., chemo, radiation, etc) for many.
As far as using this reovirus as you describe, we know even less about so-called nanoparticles and how they interact in the human body. You say that you can target uptake of these nanoparticles in given cells, but you won't ever really be sure that maybe they'll accumulate in unintended areas or not get flushed from the body effectively, eventually be recognized as foreign particles, thus possibly unleashing a very unintended immunoresponse or delivery of medicine in an unintended location...
New medicine treatments, more or less, are an excercise in trading the devil you know for the devil you may not even know is around the corner or choosing from Door #3 in exchange for the hope of a better day tomorrow.
But it won't stop all the vitamin and herbal remedy people from picking them up and selling them, albeit without the mantle of the FDA saying that they are useful for anything or as part of any treatment.
Research *will* be done on these folk remedies, and any glimmer of efficacy revealed by these small-scale studies will be trounced upon by the herbal remedy companies as facts that the stuff is "good" for something.
Just because Abbott Laboratories, Glaxo, Lilly, Novaris, et al. don't pick up on them, doesn't mean that someone won't.
And, if a compound in some herbal remedy is finally isolated that actually does do things well, if a company like the above can make a synthetic analogue which it can patent (the process to make it and derivatives, not necessarily the compound in and of itself), it will invest the $$$ to run traditional medical trials and get an FDA-approved product.
Basically, if it's a useful compound like digitoxin or curare, it will eventually be used when a "legitimate" pharma makes it and it becomes FDA-approved in a given treatment protocol.
After all, Wrigley Gum doesn't make Nicorette (even though it easily could. They'd just have to source out the nicotine used in it), but one of the Pharmas does, because Nicorette is a drug delivery device..
If someone figured out how to put a pediatric medicine into Pez tablets, do you think the candy company that makes Pez would make it? Nope. One of the Pharmas would (it'd be a drug delivery device).
But what if you're Islamic, and are tired of Hindu anti-Islamists coming into your town and raising hell?
Until Pat Robertson and the like declare all-out physical war (not just rhetorical war) in the US, the US doesn't have anything really similar right now (60's and segregation probably were close to it).
He may have been in an academic environment, but I would bet that his family life was not one of cooperation and sharing...
Besides, in India, if you're of the wrong caste, good luck. If the "upper" castes buy into the Microsoft Way, then it really will be, "let Them use vi and dot-matrix printers" for most of India.
Well, it's a perception thing.
If you start off busting your ass 14 hrs a day, and then come to the US where you can make 10x money that to an American that pays even less than minimum wage (try to pick up sheep shearing...) but is far less work than you are used to, and it's a golden opportunity, and the US is full of them.
The only thing I wish this "foreign investment" carried would be a requirement that India make its borders as open to US workers choosing to work over there for a time, much like Indians have been able to do in a variety of ways for...oh, quite a while.
But it's not that way. Would I personally get rich working in India in US terms, with an eye of eventually coming back to the US? Maybe, but probably not. Alas, it's not a free labor market.
mod parent up.
ROTFLMAO.
But you should also look around and find the people who seem to work harder than anyone else around them, and yet they can barely keep their boat afloat, as they're constantly bailing water from one wave sweeping over the gunwales after another. They could be flippin' brilliant, but you'd never know just by watching them.
If "it's not what you are given that determines your success. It is what you do with it. And that means work" were really true, most of the people in the world would probably feel like they should have the life of Donald Trump. Could we have asked John Henry (of the song) this question, he probably would have popped you a good one when the railroad crew boss wasn't around.
Worse than dialup is 56K frame relay WANS...
But...has anyone looked into how this exact same scenario would affect asp.net, which essentially does the same exact thing that AJAX uses (server side components that spit Javascript code to client, which executes the Javascript code to communicate bidirectionally with the server, essentially "out of band" of the original HTML stream)?
How many companies do you think actually want a known rabble-rouser in the midst?
The funny thing is, they often do so little to try and get rid of employees who become rabble-rousers after the fact...
This is a private institution enacting disciplinary action on a member who directly insulted other members and staff of said instutition ina public forum.
No, the student made sweeping generalizations about some of his costudents, and other comments about a professor, but no one was named.
You cannot directly insult someone without also naming them. Sure, some who read it probably knew the prof in question. Everyone bitches and moans about their fellow students and profs at some point or another.
Maybe the asshat who was running the kangaroo court was the faculty member in question in the blog...
Most bicycle commuters tend to also own cars, unless they're riding a bike because the Court took away their driving privileges or vehicles or can't afford one in the first place, or they're kids.
The plus side to bike lanes? The road is wider.
In rural areas, it's actually nice having a little extra runoff room, especially on windy roads. Having driven on some of the rural roads outside of Fredericksburg, VA, with what seems to be 9'-wide lanes and 0 shoulder, and 55 mph speed limits, compared to most other areas where at least there tends to be a few inches of pavement or at least gravel on the edges of the roads, it does test one's nerves...
Well, Illinois tried this out as well. Personally, lowering the state gas tax seems stupid.
What is stupid about the GPS-based tax is that it assumes that all vehicles "use" the roadways the same per mile driven. A Honda Insight, Toyota Echo, etc. does not use up the road surface like an H2, Ford Excursion or Cadillac Escalade (but the true road eaters are semi-trucks and buses).
And even in Portland, how many more minivans, SUVs and trucks (i.e., F250, Dodge 2500, etc) do you see compared to Toyota Prius or Honda Insights? What are the sales volumes of these two different classes of vehicles?
They should raise the fuel tax (or go back to a car value-based registration fee, instead of flat per-vehicle registration fee).
Neither are "fair", but they are probably the least unfair to the largest number of people, especially regarding the ability to abuse the data gathered by the states and the costs to implement.
Well, I would argue, then, that every piece of "made in China" stuff you own supports chinese censorship as well. Most of those chinese companies are one way or another run by those same evil oppressive Chinese Communist Party bastards.
Since it is virtually impossible to live in a modern society (like, use a computer) w/o owning *something* that wasn't made or sourced from China these days, your argument is a red herring.
Would China be changing (China now is different than China in 1972) without it being involved in the world economy?
Forget China. Compare and contrast Vietnam and Cuba instead.
The fact is that the vast majority of businesses aren't evil, Microsoft included. They might do some bad things, but no reasonable person could say they are overall evil. Now Enron, and Worldcom could be considered evil, but there are the rare exceptions in American society, not the rule.
Hmm... I'll disagree, but their evilness comes out when they think you're trying to suck money out of them, whether it be insisting that their service sucked and you want your money back, that the product they sold to you sucks and you want your money back, that they did not deliver what goods/service they said they would, that their sales team pitched you x and y but you didn't get it in writing (sucka) and now the company never heard of those sales employees in the first place, etc.
There are evil people in every company. How close they are to the top of the org chart reflects how evil the company is probably percieved, and whether the evil people are in customer-facing or employee-facing groups.
The MS employees I've known are not evil. But the actions of MS' legal team, SteveB and BillG certainly do have a lot of arrogant evilness in them, and because they are a big part of the customer-facing part of MS, affect the perceived image of Microsoft.
Yes, especially as how they're still being made and developed in Russia (or Ukraine), who are more than happy to sell them to whomever is willing to pay them, and they continue to develop them. They now make several different (and suprising...) models, including one that has an IR seeker head (hint: Blackhawk Down). I wouldn't be suprised that there aren't a few former Spetznaz and other skilled former USSR special forces soldiers who are earning more than a few extra dollars as "technical consultants" helping Al Queso et al build better mouse traps that blow up Humvees... The RPG-7 is not a weapon system to be dismissed.
Much like how Russia is a US "ally" in the War On Terror (insert ominous music), yet is more than willing to sell (and help build) nuke stuff to Iran (hey, weren't they doing this with Iraq too?).
At least in Russia's schizoid world, the irony for everyone else is that some of the stuff they do sell to whomever is coming right back at them in Chechnya. Don't see too many "terrorists" arming up with M-16s, do you? Nope. AK-47s, RPG-7s and AK-74. And I would think that most of the Stinger missiles that we sold to the Mujahadeen to get the commies out of Afghanistan have been used, either actually fired or disassembled to use their warheads and motors hacked for other unintended consequences.
The only thing it doesn't really allow for is bookmarking of individual pages.
Hmm... that kind of kills off the whole idea, then, but this is because of using frames.
Well, how do you know that a Wikipedia article is based on facts or a complete whitewashing of a controversial issue?
I could throw in some good examples where there would be strong reasons for people to do so:
o "Intelligent" design
o the fall of Arthur Anderson Co.
o the fall of Enron (and why haven't its executives faced trials yet???)
o did the Holocaust really happen?
o the real reasons why Pol Pot hated people who wore glasses
o Hutu (or Tutsi) superiority
et freaking al.
Look at all the issues in the US surrounding the history of Custer's Last Stand, from the cracker's perspective, vs the heroic decimation of the 7th Cavalry by the Sioux (Sioux perspective), and how things have changed over the last 20 or so years with regards to Custer Battlefield National Monument...
Or why most of Asia hates Japanese apologism w.r.t. Japan's colonialism before and during WWII (and even before that).
Or Israel vs Palestine (or The Arab League vs Israel, when nothing ever seemed to be said w.r.t. Saddam Hussein's treatment of Iraqis...).
Overall, it's a foolish and dangerous idea to consider such limitations in licensing,
But what about the little blurb in the Java license that says, essentially, to not use Java for critical systems like nuclear reactor controllers, medical XRay machines, etc.?
Same with watching a tire broken loose from a race car in an accident. They look like they're not going very fast, but they are, and they have a lot of KE in them from the speed they might be spinning at, and they're not light in the first place, so if it hits a human, it's not pretty. Now, add in the occaisional pieces of suspension and brake that can sometimes stay attached to them, also whirling at Cuisinart speeds...