Day: July 11, 2001

The thing that has struck me most about Rep. Gary Condit and missing intern Chandra Levy, is that Condit is either getting extremely irresponsible advice from his lawyers or he’s getting good advice from his lawyers which he’s chosen to ignore. At the moment, Condit’s approach to the case seems to be that his re-election chances are more important than protecting his legal rights.

For example, I can’t imagine why Condit agreed to allow police to search his apartment, nor why he would even consider a DNA test and a lie detector test. The proper response when police ask to search your house is, “Not without a warrant, officer.”

One of the reasons I suspect he might be getting bad legal advice is that his lawyers apparently made the offer to search the home because they didn’t think police would accept it — after all, weren’t police saying Condit wasn’t a suspect? Yes, but they were more than clear that the only reason Condit wasn’t a suspect was because they are still treating Levy’s disappearance as a missing persons case rather than as a murder or other criminal investigation.

Probably (correctly) thinking that if he refuses the search or appears not to be cooperating, he’s dead meat in the next election cycle, Condit agreed to the search. Stupid. Even if he is not connected in any way with Levy’s disappearance, thanks to DNA evidence we know of hundreds of people who were wrongfully convicted of crimes based on evidence that turned out to be a sham. In allowing the search, Condit is taking an enormous risk.

But since that’s done, I certainly hope somebody talks him out of taking any sort of lie detector test. Its amazing to me that police, prosecutors and the public seem to have a continuing fascination with these completely unscientific machines. The so-called “lie detector” does no such thing.

The other day I mentioned that one of the problems with ArsTechnica’s site is the pricing model for Open Topic, the bulletin board system they’re using. I just wanted to clarify exactly what I meant.

Open Topic is a product of InfoPop which sells the extremely popular Ultimate Bulletin Board system. I love the UBB and own several licenses to the software, but about 2 years ago Ted O’Neill — the programmer responsible for the UBB — announced he was working on an enterprise version, which was very good news. The bad news was that when he finally announced it, Open Topic was a hosted-only solution which was priced very high in my opinion. Since it became apparent that I wouldn’t be able to afford InfoPop’s prices, and didn’t want to stick with a CGI solution like the UBB, I eventually stumbled upon Conversant, and am very happy with that choice.

Anyway, just how expensive is OpenTopic? The entry level professional plan will allow you 100,000 page views for $250/month, with anything over that charged at $29 per 10,000 page views. That’s $2.50 per thousand page views initially, and then $2.90 per page thousand page views above and beyond that. That’s extremely high.

But it gets worse because of the formula they use to calculate how many messages you can store — your maximum allowable message base is 15 percent of your total monthly page views. So if you’re paying $250 for the 100,000 page view option, your message base can’t be larger than 15,000 messages or you incur additional charges at the rate of $29 per 1,500 posts stored.

When I finally ditched the UBB I had 25,000 messages stored on my most popular web site, which was receiving about 100,000 page views per month — so I would have been looking at about $440/month for a single discussion forum on a single web site, and that number would have continued to grow as more messages were posted.

The next level from a 100,000 page view plan is a 250,000 page views plan which starts at $625 and would definitely be out of my league.

Now, a web site with the massive message base that ArsTechnica has might be able to reach a deal at significantly lower prices per thousand page views, but InfoPop really priced this system completely out of reach of small webmasters who wanted a more robust solution than the UBB offered.

Ahead of the Sixth European Conference on Experimental AIDS Research, it was announced that a vaccine for feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV) had been discovered by Italian researchers. The BBC reported that the researchers successfully vaccinated cats who remained FIV-free after being exposed to the virus.

This has two main implications. First, it could eventually lead to a commercially viable FIV vaccination which would be a godsend give how prevalent the disease is.

Second, it demonstrates that it is possible, in principle, to vaccinate against immunodeficiency viruses. As Professor Oswald Jarret of Glasgow Veterinary School told the BBC, “We have shown that you can vaccinate against FIV. We know that our vaccines can do that. I think that one of the lessons to be learnt from our study is that HIV vaccines can and do work.”

Source:

Cat AIDS vaccine’s hope for humans. The BBC, June 22, 2001.