this fuckn blogger. and fukn google for messin with that damn toolbar blogger. they should have left well enough alone, but no, they had to get their dirty lil' fingers in there and mess everything up.

anyway, what i meant to say before i was so rudely cut off from posting by an obnoxious graphical user interface, was that this was a brainstorming even like none other.

sheeeeeesh.... from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

Software scientists at Microsoft Research have teamed up with biomedical researchers in Seattle, Boston and Perth, Australia, to see if computer techniques used to defeat e-mail spam can also be used to help design a vaccine that can defeat AIDS.

Today, members of this unique collaboration will announce a plan to use "machine learning" or "data mining" computational techniques to decipher HIV's wildly creative genetic ability to constantly change and disguise itself from immune system detection and deletion.

"HIV mutates like crazy, but it does show a pattern," said Dr. David Heckerman, a physician and computer scientist at Microsoft Research.

"It isn't completely random," added Heckerman's colleague Nebojsa Jojic. Just as a spammer can add only so much nonsense or other disguising characters without obscuring the message, Jojic said, so can the AIDS virus vary only so much without disabling itself.