title: Family of Medium Tactical Vehicles

text: The Army announced on 7 February 2018 that it had selected Oshkosh to build to FMTV A2. The initial estimated contract value is $476.2 million with no cap on the number of vehicles the Army may purchase. The firm fixed price contract covers a five-year ordering period plus two additional one-year options. The estimated date of completion has previously been quoted as February 2022. Both Oshkosh and AM General submitted bids for the requirement. Following the FMTV A2 award Oshkosh initially built and delivered vehicles in support of Production Verification Testing (PVT), Live Fire Testing (LFT) and logistics development. In August 2021, it was announced by Oshkosh that the Army's Tank-Automotive and Armaments Command (TACOM) Life Cycle Management Command (LCMC) had awarded the company a $152 million delivery order for 541 FMTV A2. The Army is expected to begin fielding the A2 FMTV variant in June 2023.


title: Family of Medium Tactical Vehicles

text: Specific details of FMTV export orders are seldom officially announced, with a large quantity of deliveries covered by assorted US Foreign Military Sales (FMS) awards.


title: Family of Medium Tactical Vehicles

text: Djibouti, Lebanon and Romania were three countries listed as possible future recipients of FMTVs in a June 2019 US DoD FMS delivery announcement, with Romania and Lebanon since confirmed.


title: Mann Act

text: The White-Slave Traffic Act, also called the Mann Act, is a United States federal law, passed June 25, 1910 (ch. 395, ; "codified as amended at" ). It is named after Congressman James Robert Mann of Illinois.


title: Mann Act

text: In its original form the act made it a felony to engage in interstate or foreign commerce transport of "any woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose". Its primary stated intent was to address prostitution, immorality, and human trafficking, particularly where trafficking was for the purposes of prostitution. It was one of several acts of protective legislation aimed at moral reform during the Progressive Era. In practice, its ambiguous language about "immorality" resulted in it being used to criminalize even consensual sexual behavior between adults. It was amended by Congress in 1978 and again in 1986 to limit its application to transport for the purpose of prostitution or other illegal sexual acts.


title: Mann Act

text: In the 19th century, many of America's cities had designated legally protected areas of prostitution. Increased urbanization, as well as greater numbers of young women entering the workforce, led to greater flexibility in courtship without supervision. It was in this changing social sphere that concern over "white slavery" began. This term referred to women kidnapped for the purposes of prostitution and derives from Charles Sumner's 1847 description of the Barbary slave trade.


title: Mann Act

text: Numerous communities appointed vice commissions to investigate the extent of local prostitution, whether prostitutes participated in it willingly or were forced into it, and the degree to which it was organized by any cartel-type organizations. The second significant action at the local level was to close the brothels and the red light districts. From 1910 to 1913, city after city changed previously tolerant approaches and forced the closing of their brothels. Opposition to openly practiced prostitution had been growing steadily throughout the last decades of the 19th century. The federal government's response was the Mann Act. The purpose of the act was to make it a crime to "transport or cause to be transported, or aid to assist in obtaining transportation for" or to "persuade, induce, entice or coerce" a woman to travel. Many of the changes that occurred after 1900 were a result of tensions between social ideals and practical realities. Family form and functions changed in response to a complex set of circumstances that were the effects of economic class and ethnicity.


title: Mann Act

text: According to historian Mark Thomas Connelly, "a group of books and pamphlets appeared announcing a startling claim: a pervasive and depraved conspiracy was at large in the land, brutally trapping and seducing American girls into lives of enforced prostitution, or 'white slavery.' These white slave narratives, or white-slave tracts, began to circulate around 1909." Such narratives often portrayed innocent girls "victimized by a huge, secret and powerful conspiracy controlled by foreigners", as they were drugged or imprisoned and forced into prostitution.


title: Mann Act

text: This excerpt from "The War on the White Slave Trade" was written by the United States District Attorney in Chicago:


title: Mann Act

text: According to Connelly, such concerns represented an "hysterical" version of genuine and long-standing issues arising from the concentration of young women from rural backgrounds in the expanding cities of the era, many of whom were drawn into prostitution for "mundane" economic reasons. A number of Vice Commission reports had drawn attention to the issue. Some contemporaries questioned the idea of abduction and foreign control of prostitution through cartels. For example, noted radical and feminist Emma Goldman asked "What is really the cause of the trade in women? Not merely white women, but yellow and black women as well. Exploitation, of course; the merciless Moloch of capitalism that fattens on underpaid labor, thus driving thousands of women and girls into prostitution. With Mrs. Warren these girls feel, 'Why waste your life working for a few shillings a week in a scullery, eighteen hours a day?' ... Whether our reformers admit it or not, the economic and social inferiority of woman is responsible for prostitution." While prostitution was widespread, contemporary studies by local vice commissions indicate that it was "overwhelmingly locally organized without any large business structure, and willingly engaged in by the prostitutes."


title: Mann Act

text: Suffrage activists, especially Harriet Burton Laidlaw and Rose Livingston, took up the concerns. They worked in New York City's Chinatown and in other cities to rescue young white and Chinese girls from forced prostitution, and helped pass the Mann Act to make interstate sex trafficking a federal crime. Livingston publicly discussed her past as a prostitute and made the claim that she was abducted and developed a drug problem as a sex slave in a Chinese man's home, narrowly escaped, and experienced a Christian conversion. Although her claim was unsupported by evidence, her story exemplified the stereotypes used to pass the Mann Act—fear of foreigners, especially Chinese men; abduction and drugging in order to be raped and enslaved; a narrow escape; and salvation through Christian conversion. Other groups like the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and Hull House focused on children of prostitutes and poverty in community life while trying to pass protective legislation. The American Purity Alliance also supported the Mann Act.


title: Mann Act

text: Although the law was created to stop forced sexual slavery of women, the most common use of the Mann Act was to prosecute men for having sex with underage females. The phrase "immoral purpose" in the statute allowed a broad application of the law following its affirmation in


title: Mann Act

text: In addition to its stated purpose of preventing human trafficking, the law was used to prosecute unlawful premarital, extramarital, and interracial relationships. The penalties would be applied to men whether or not the woman involved consented and, if she had consented, the woman could be considered an accessory to the offense. Some attribute enactment of the law to the case of world champion heavyweight boxer Jack Johnson. Johnson was known to be intimate with white women, some of whom he met at the fighting venue after his fights. In 1912 he was prosecuted, and later convicted, for "transporting women across state lines for immoral purposes" as a result of his relationship with a white prostitute named Belle Schreiber; the month prior to the prosecution, Johnson had been charged with violating the Mann Act due to traveling with his white girlfriend, Lucille Cameron, who refused to cooperate with the prosecution and whom he married soon thereafter.


title: Mann Act

text: The 1948 prosecution of Frank LaSalle for abducting Florence Sally Horner is believed to have been an inspiration for Vladimir Nabokov in writing his novel "Lolita". Humbert Humbert, the narrator, at one point explicitly refers to LaSalle. The Mann Act has also been used by the U.S. federal government to prosecute polygamists (such as Mormon fundamentalists) because the U.S. has no federal law against polygamy. All U.S. states have anti-polygamy laws, but only in recent years have state authorities used them to prosecute bigamy. Colorado City, Arizona; Hildale, Utah; Bountiful, British Columbia; and sites in Mexico are historic locations of several Mormon sects that practiced polygamy, although The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has expressly forbidden polygamy since the start of the 20th century. Sect leaders and individuals have been charged under the Mann Act when "wives" are transported across the Utah–Arizona state line or the U.S.–Canadian and U.S.–Mexican borders.


title: Mann Act

text: In 1978, Congress updated the act's definition of "transportation" and added protections against commercial sexual exploitation for minors. It added a 1986 amendment which further protected minors and added protection for adult males. In particular, as part of a larger 1986 bill focused on criminalizing various aspects of child pornography that passed unanimously in both houses of Congress, the Mann Act was further amended to replace the ambiguous "debauchery" and "any other immoral purpose" with the more specific "any sexual activity for which any person can be charged with a criminal offense" as well as to make it gender-neutral.


title: Mann Act

text: While the Mann Act was meant to combat forced prostitution, it had repercussions that extended into consensual sexual activity. Because it lacked specificity, it criminalized many who were not participating in prostitution. It became a way to persecute large numbers of unmarried couples participating in premarital or extramarital activities, especially when it involved crossing state lines such as in the cases for Chuck Berry and Jack Johnson. The Mann Act also became a form of blackmail, by wives who were suspicious of cheating husbands or other women. This was the case for both Drew Caminetti and Maury Diggs. Both men from Sacramento, California, were married, and took their mistresses (Lola Norris and Marsha Warrington, respectively) to Reno, Nevada. The men's wives contacted the police, and the men were arrested in Reno and found guilty under the Mann Act. One author wrote:


title: Mann Act

text: In 1914 a woman by the name of Jessie A. Cope was arrested in Chicago for attempting to bribe an official to assist her in the blackmail of Colonel Charles Alexander of Providence Rhode Island, on a white slavery charge. The two had met two years previous in LA, Alexander had promised to divorce his wife, and marry her. When he attempted to leave her, Cope and her mother pursued him to Providence. Cope consulted lawyers in Providence and LA, then brought the charges in Chicago, where she was arrested.


title: Mann Act

text: Upon continuous blackmail accounts, "The New York Times" became an advocate against the Mann Act. In 1915 the paper published an editorial pointing out how the act led to extortion. In 1916 it labeled the Mann Act "The Blackmail Act", arguing that its dangers had been clear from the start as the act could make a harmless spree or simple elopement a crime. The paper also called the "blackmail that resulted from the Mann Act [...] worse than the prostitution it sought to suppress".


title: Mann Act

text: While the Mann Act has never been repealed, it has been amended and altered since its initial passing. The Mann Act continued essentially unchanged until 1978 amendments that expanded coverage to issues around child pornography and exploitation. Most recently, in 1986, the Mann Act was significantly altered to make the whole Act gender neutral and to redress the specific ambiguous phrasing that had enabled decades of unjust applications of the Act. With the 1986 amendments, the Mann Act outlaws interstate or foreign transport of "any person" for purposes of "any sexual activity for which any person can be charged with a criminal offense." Prior to the Supreme Court ruling in "Lawrence v. Texas" (2003), sodomy was illegal in many states which left open the possibility of prosecution under the Mann Act of consenting adult couples, especially gay couples, though there is no record of such enforcement actions.


title: Usenet

text: Usenet () is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was established in 1980. Users read and post messages (called "articles" or "posts", and collectively termed "news") to one or more topic categories, known as newsgroups. Usenet resembles a bulletin board system (BBS) in many respects and is the precursor to the Internet forums that have become widely used. Discussions are threaded, as with web forums and BBSs, though posts are stored on the server sequentially.


title: Usenet

text: A major difference between a BBS or web message board and Usenet is the absence of a central server and dedicated administrator or hosting provider. Usenet is distributed among a large, constantly changing set of news servers that store and forward messages to one another via "news feeds". Individual users may read messages from and post to a local (or simply preferred) news server, which can be operated by anyone, and those posts will automatically be forwarded to any other news servers peered with the local one, while the local server will receive any news its peers have that it currently lacks. This results in the automatic proliferation of content posted by any user on any server to any other user subscribed to the same newsgroups on other servers.


title: Usenet

text: As with BBSs and message boards, individual news servers or service providers are under no obligation to carry any specific content, and may refuse to do so for many reasons: a news server might attempt to control the spread of spam by refusing to accept or forward any posts that trigger spam filters, or a server without high-capacity data storage may refuse to carry any newsgroups used primarily for file sharing, limiting itself to discussion-oriented groups. However, unlike BBSs and web forums, the dispersed nature of Usenet usually permits users who are interested in receiving some content to access it simply by choosing to connect to news servers that carry the feeds they want.


title: Usenet

text: Usenet is culturally and historically significant in the networked world, having given rise to, or popularized, many widely recognized concepts and terms such as "FAQ", "flame", sockpuppet, and "spam". In the early 1990s, shortly before access to the Internet became commonly affordable, Usenet connections via Fidonet's dial-up BBS networks made long-distance or worldwide discussions and other communication widespread, not needing a server, just (local) telephone service.


title: Usenet

text: The name "Usenet" comes from the term "users' network". The first Usenet group was "NET.general", which quickly became "net.general". The first commercial spam on Usenet was from immigration attorneys Canter and Siegel advertising green card services.


title: Usenet

text: On the Internet, Usenet is transported via the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) on TCP Port 119 for standard, unprotected connections and on TCP port 563 for SSL encrypted connections.


title: Usenet

text: Usenet was conceived in 1979 and publicly established in 1980, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University, over a decade before the World Wide Web went online (and thus before the general public received access to the Internet), making it one of the oldest computer network communications systems still in widespread use. It was originally built on the "poor man's ARPANET", employing UUCP as its transport protocol to offer mail and file transfers, as well as announcements through the newly developed news software such as A News. The name "Usenet" emphasizes its creators' hope that the USENIX organization would take an active role in its operation.


title: Usenet

text: The articles that users post to Usenet are organized into topical categories known as newsgroups, which are themselves logically organized into hierarchies of subjects. For instance, "sci.math" and "sci.physics" are within the "sci.*" hierarchy. Or, "talk.origins" and "talk.atheism" are in the "talk.*" hierarchy. When a user subscribes to a newsgroup, the news client software keeps track of which articles that user has read.


title: Usenet

text: In most newsgroups, the majority of the articles are responses to some other article. The set of articles that can be traced to one single non-reply article is called a thread. Most modern newsreaders display the articles arranged into threads and subthreads. For example, in the wine-making newsgroup "rec.crafts.winemaking," someone might start a thread called; "What's the best yeast?" and that thread or conversation might grow into dozens of replies long, by perhaps six or eight different authors. Over several days, that conversation about different wine yeasts might branch into several sub-threads in a tree-like form.


title: Usenet

text: When a user posts an article, it is initially only available on that user's news server. Each news server talks to one or more other servers (its "newsfeeds") and exchanges articles with them. In this fashion, the article is copied from server to server and should eventually reach every server in the network. The later peer-to-peer networks operate on a similar principle, but for Usenet it is normally the sender, rather than the receiver, who initiates transfers. Usenet was designed under conditions when networks were much slower and not always available. Many sites on the original Usenet network would connect only once or twice a day to batch-transfer messages in and out. This is largely because the POTS network was typically used for transfers, and phone charges were lower at night.


title: Usenet

text: The format and transmission of Usenet articles is similar to that of Internet e-mail messages. The difference between the two is that Usenet articles can be read by any user whose news server carries the group to which the message was posted, as opposed to email messages, which have one or more specific recipients.


title: Usenet

text: Today, Usenet has diminished in importance with respect to Internet forums, blogs, mailing lists and social media. Usenet differs from such media in several ways: Usenet requires no personal registration with the group concerned; information need not be stored on a remote server; archives are always available; and reading the messages does not require a mail or web client, but a news client. However, it is now possible to read and participate in Usenet newsgroups to a large degree using ordinary web browsers since most newsgroups are now copied to several web sites. The groups in " are still widely used for data transfer.


title: Usenet

text: Many Internet service providers, and many other Internet sites, operate news servers for their users to access. ISPs that do not operate their own servers directly will often offer their users an account from another provider that specifically operates newsfeeds. In early news implementations, the server and newsreader were a single program suite, running on the same system. Today, one uses separate newsreader client software, a program that resembles an email client but accesses Usenet servers instead.


title: Usenet

text: Not all ISPs run news servers. A news server is one of the most difficult Internet services to administer because of the large amount of data involved, small customer base (compared to mainstream Internet service), and a disproportionately high volume of customer support incidents (frequently complaining of missing news articles). Some ISPs outsource news operations to specialist sites, which will usually appear to a user as though the ISP itself runs the server. Many of these sites carry a restricted newsfeed, with a limited number of newsgroups. Commonly omitted from such a newsfeed are foreign-language newsgroups and the " hierarchy which largely carries software, music, videos and images, and accounts for over 99 percent of article data.


title: Usenet

text: There are also Usenet providers that offer a full unrestricted service to users whose ISPs do not carry news, or that carry a restricted feed.


title: Usenet

text: Newsgroups are typically accessed with newsreaders: applications that allow users to read and reply to postings in newsgroups. These applications act as clients to one or more news servers. Historically, Usenet was associated with the Unix operating system developed at AT&T, but newsreaders were soon available for all major operating systems. Email client programs and Internet suites of the late 1990s and 2000s often included an integrated newsreader. Newsgroup enthusiasts often criticized these as inferior to standalone newsreaders that made correct use of Usenet protocols, standards and conventions.


title: Usenet

text: With the rise of the World Wide Web (WWW), web front-ends (web2news) have become more common. Web front ends have lowered the technical entry barrier requirements to that of one application and no Usenet NNTP server account. There are numerous websites now offering web based gateways to Usenet groups, although some people have begun filtering messages made by some of the web interfaces for one reason or another. Google Groups is one such web based front end and some web browsers can access Google Groups via news: protocol links directly.


title: Usenet

text: A minority of newsgroups are moderated, meaning that messages submitted by readers are not distributed directly to Usenet, but instead are emailed to the moderators of the newsgroup for approval. The moderator is to receive submitted articles, review them, and inject approved articles so that they can be properly propagated worldwide. Articles approved by a moderator must bear the Approved: header line. Moderators ensure that the messages that readers see in the newsgroup conform to the charter of the newsgroup, though they are not required to follow any such rules or guidelines. Typically, moderators are appointed in the proposal for the newsgroup, and changes of moderators follow a succession plan.


title: Usenet

text: Historically, a "mod.*" hierarchy existed before Usenet reorganization. Now, moderated newsgroups may appear in any hierarchy, typically with codice_1 added to the group name.


title: Usenet

text: Usenet newsgroups in the Big-8 hierarchy are created by proposals called a Request for Discussion, or RFD. The RFD is required to have the following information: newsgroup name, checkgroups file entry, and moderated or unmoderated status. If the group is to be moderated, then at least one moderator with a valid email address must be provided. Other information which is beneficial but not required includes: a charter, a rationale, and a moderation policy if the group is to be moderated. Discussion of the new newsgroup proposal follows, and is finished with the members of the Big-8 Management Board making the decision, by vote, to either approve or disapprove the new newsgroup.


title: Usenet

text: Unmoderated newsgroups form the majority of Usenet newsgroups, and messages submitted by readers for unmoderated newsgroups are immediately propagated for everyone to see. Minimal editorial content filtering vs propagation speed form one crux of the Usenet community. One little cited defense of propagation is canceling a propagated message, but few Usenet users use this command and some news readers do not offer cancellation commands, in part because article storage expires in relatively short order anyway. Almost all unmoderated Usenet groups tend to receive large amounts of spam.


title: Usenet

text: Usenet is a set of protocols for generating, storing and retrieving news "articles" (which resemble Internet mail messages) and for exchanging them among a readership which is potentially widely distributed. These protocols most commonly use a flooding algorithm which propagates copies throughout a network of participating servers. Whenever a message reaches a server, that server forwards the message to all its network neighbors that haven't yet seen the article. Only one copy of a message is stored per server, and each server makes it available on demand to the (typically local) readers able to access that server. The collection of Usenet servers has thus a certain peer-to-peer character in that they share resources by exchanging them, the granularity of exchange however is on a different scale than a modern peer-to-peer system and this characteristic excludes the actual users of the system who connect to the news servers with a typical client-server application, much like an email reader.


title: Usenet

text: RFC 850 was the first formal specification of the messages exchanged by Usenet servers. It was superseded by RFC 1036 and subsequently by RFC 5536 and RFC 5537.


title: Usenet

text: In cases where unsuitable content has been posted, Usenet has support for automated removal of a posting from the whole network by creating a cancel message, although due to a lack of authentication and resultant abuse, this capability is frequently disabled. Copyright holders may still request the manual deletion of infringing material using the provisions of World Intellectual Property Organization treaty implementations, such as the United States Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act, but this would require giving notice to each individual news server administrator.


title: Usenet

text: On the Internet, Usenet is transported via the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) on TCP Port 119 for standard, unprotected connections and on TCP port 563 for SSL encrypted connections.


title: Usenet

text: The major set of worldwide newsgroups is contained within nine hierarchies, eight of which are operated under consensual guidelines that govern their administration and naming. The current "Big Eight" are:


title: Usenet

text: The "alt.*" hierarchy is not subject to the procedures controlling groups in the Big Eight, and it is as a result less organized. Groups in the "alt.*" hierarchy tend to be more specialized or specific—for example, there might be a newsgroup under the Big Eight which contains discussions about children's books, but a group in the alt hierarchy may be dedicated to one specific author of children's books. Binaries are posted in "", making it the largest of all the hierarchies.


title: Usenet

text: Many other hierarchies of newsgroups are distributed alongside these. Regional and language-specific hierarchies such as ".*", ".*" and "ne.*" serve specific countries and regions such as Japan, Malta and New England. Companies and projects administer their own hierarchies to discuss their products and offer community technical support, such as the historical ".*" hierarchy from the Free Software Foundation. Microsoft closed its newsserver in June 2010, providing support for its products over forums now. Some users prefer to use the term "Usenet" to refer only to the Big Eight hierarchies; others include "alt.*" as well. The more general term "netnews" incorporates the entire medium, including private organizational news systems.


title: Usenet

text: Informal sub-hierarchy conventions also exist. "*.answers" are typically moderated cross-post groups for FAQs. An FAQ would be posted within one group and a cross post to the "*.answers" group at the head of the hierarchy seen by some as a refining of information in that news group. Some subgroups are recursive—to the point of some silliness in "alt.*".


title: Usenet

text: Usenet was originally created to distribute text content encoded in the 7-bit ASCII character set. With the help of programs that encode 8-bit values into ASCII, it became practical to distribute binary files as content. Binary posts, due to their size and often-dubious copyright status, were in time restricted to specific newsgroups, making it easier for administrators to allow or disallow the traffic.


title: Usenet

text: The oldest widely used encoding method for binary content is uuencode, from the Unix UUCP package. In the late 1980s, Usenet articles were often limited to 60,000 characters, and larger hard limits exist today. Files are therefore commonly split into sections that require reassembly by the reader.


title: Usenet

text: With the header extensions and the Base64 and Quoted-Printable MIME encodings, there was a new generation of binary transport. In practice, MIME has seen increased adoption in text messages, but it is avoided for most binary attachments. Some operating systems with metadata attached to files use specialized encoding formats. For Mac OS, both BinHex and special MIME types are used. Other lesser known encoding systems that may have been used at one time were BTOA, XX encoding, BOO, and USR encoding.


title: Usenet

text: In an attempt to reduce file transfer times, an informal file encoding known as yEnc was introduced in 2001. It achieves about a 30% reduction in data transferred by assuming that most 8-bit characters can safely be transferred across the network without first encoding into the 7-bit ASCII space. The most common method of uploading large binary posts to Usenet is to convert the files into RAR archives and create Parchive files for them. Parity files are used to recreate missing data when not every part of the files reaches a server.


title: Usenet

text: Each news server allocates a certain amount of storage space for content in each newsgroup. When this storage has been filled, each time a new post arrives, old posts are deleted to make room for the new content. If the network bandwidth available to a server is high but the storage allocation is small, it is possible for a huge flood of incoming content to overflow the allocation and push out everything that was in the group before it. The average length of time that posts are able to stay on the server before being deleted is commonly called the "retention time".


title: Usenet

text: Binary newsgroups are only able to function reliably if there is sufficient storage allocated to handle the amount of articles being added. Without sufficient retention time, a reader will be unable to download all parts of the binary before it is flushed out of the group's storage allocation. This was at one time how posting undesired content was countered; the newsgroup would be flooded with random garbage data posts, of sufficient quantity to push out all the content to be suppressed. This has been compensated by service providers allocating enough storage to retain everything posted each day, including spam floods, without deleting anything.


title: Usenet

text: Modern Usenet news servers have enough capacity to archive years of binary content even when flooded with new data at the maximum daily speed available.


title: Usenet

text: In part because of such long retention times, as well as growing Internet upload speeds, Usenet is also used by individual users to store backup data. While commercial providers offer easier to use online backup services, storing data on Usenet is free of charge (although access to Usenet itself may not be). The method requires the uploader to cede control over the distribution of the data; the files are automatically disseminated to all Usenet providers exchanging data for the news group it is posted to. In general the user must manually select, prepare and upload the data. The data is typically encrypted because it is available to anyone to download the backup files. After the files are uploaded, having multiple copies spread to different geographical regions around the world on different news servers decreases the chances of data loss.


title: Usenet

text: This results in more than 60 petabytes (60000 terabytes) of storage (see image). When using Usenet for data storage, providers that offer longer retention time are preferred to ensure the data will survive for longer periods of time compared to services with lower retention time.


title: Usenet

text: While binary newsgroups can be used to distribute completely legal user-created works, Free software, and public domain material, some binary groups are used to illegally distribute Proprietary software, copyrighted media, and pornographic material.


title: Usenet

text: ISP-operated Usenet servers frequently block access to all "" groups to both reduce network traffic and to avoid related legal issues. Commercial Usenet service providers claim to operate as a telecommunications service, and assert that they are not responsible for the user-posted binary content transferred via their equipment. In the United States, Usenet providers can qualify for protection under the DMCA Safe Harbor regulations, provided that they establish a mechanism to comply with and respond to takedown notices from copyright holders.


title: Usenet

text: Removal of copyrighted content from the entire Usenet network is a nearly impossible task, due to the rapid propagation between servers and the retention done by each server. Petitioning a Usenet provider for removal only removes it from that one server's retention cache, but not any others. It is possible for a special "post cancellation" message to be distributed to remove it from all servers, but many providers ignore cancel messages by standard policy, because they can be easily falsified and submitted by anyone. For a takedown petition to be most effective across the whole network, it would have to be issued to the origin server to which the content has been posted, before it has been propagated to other servers. Removal of the content at this early stage would prevent further propagation, but with modern high speed links, content can be propagated as fast as it arrives, allowing no time for content review and takedown issuance by copyright holders.


title: Usenet

text: Establishing the identity of the person posting illegal content is equally difficult due to the trust-based design of the network. Like SMTP email, servers generally assume the header and origin information in a post is true and accurate. However, as in SMTP email, Usenet post headers are easily falsified so as to obscure the true identity and location of the message source. In this manner, Usenet is significantly different from modern P2P services; most P2P users distributing content are typically immediately identifiable to all other users by their network address, but the origin information for a Usenet posting can be completely obscured and unobtainable once it has propagated past the original server.


title: Usenet

text: Also unlike modern P2P services, the identity of the downloaders is hidden from view. On P2P services a downloader is identifiable to all others by their network address. On Usenet, the downloader connects directly to a server, and only the server knows the address of who is connecting to it. Some Usenet providers do keep usage logs, but not all make this logged information casually available to outside parties such as the Recording Industry Association of America. The existence of anonymising gateways to USENET also complicates the tracing of a postings true origin.


title: Usenet

text: Newsgroup experiments first occurred in 1979. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis of Duke University came up with the idea as a replacement for a local announcement program, and established a link with nearby University of North Carolina using Bourne shell scripts written by Steve Bellovin. The public release of news was in the form of conventional compiled software, written by Steve Daniel and Truscott. In 1980, Usenet was connected to ARPANET through , which had connections to both Usenet and ARPANET. Mark Horton, the graduate student who set up the connection, began "feeding mailing lists from the ARPANET into Usenet" with the "fa" ("From ARPANET") identifier. Usenet gained 50 member sites in its first year, including Reed College, University of Oklahoma, and Bell Labs, and the number of people using the network increased dramatically; however, it was still a while longer before Usenet users could contribute to ARPANET.


title: Usenet

text: UUCP networks spread quickly due to the lower costs involved, and the ability to use existing leased lines, X.25 links or even ARPANET connections. By 1983, thousands of people participated from more than 500 hosts, mostly universities and Bell Labs sites but also a growing number of Unix-related companies; the number of hosts nearly doubled to 940 in 1984. More than 100 newsgroups existed, more than 20 devoted to Unix and other computer-related topics, and at least a third to recreation. As the mesh of UUCP hosts rapidly expanded, it became desirable to distinguish the Usenet subset from the overall network. A vote was taken at the 1982 USENIX conference to choose a new name. The name Usenet was retained, but it was established that it only applied to news. The name UUCPNET became the common name for the overall network.


title: Usenet

text: In addition to UUCP, early Usenet traffic was also exchanged with Fidonet and other dial-up BBS networks. By the mid-1990s there were almost 40,000 FidoNet systems in operation, and it was possible to communicate with millions of users around the world, with only local telephone service. Widespread use of Usenet by the BBS community was facilitated by the introduction of UUCP feeds made possible by MS-DOS implementations of UUCP, such as UFGATE (UUCP to FidoNet Gateway), FSUUCP and UUPC. In 1986, RFC 977 provided the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) specification for distribution of Usenet articles over TCP/IP as a more flexible alternative to informal Internet transfers of UUCP traffic. Since the Internet boom of the 1990s, almost all Usenet distribution is over NNTP.


title: Usenet

text: Early versions of Usenet used Duke's A News software, designed for one or two articles a day. Matt Glickman and Horton at Berkeley produced an improved version called B News that could handle the rising traffic (about 50 articles a day as of late 1983). With a message format that offered compatibility with Internet mail and improved performance, it became the dominant server software. C News, developed by Geoff Collyer and Henry Spencer at the University of Toronto, was comparable to B News in features but offered considerably faster processing. In the early 1990s, InterNetNews by Rich Salz was developed to take advantage of the continuous message flow made possible by NNTP versus the batched store-and-forward design of UUCP. Since that time INN development has continued, and other news server software has also been developed.


title: Usenet

text: Usenet was the first Internet community and the place for many of the most important public developments in the pre-commercial Internet. It was the place where Tim Berners-Lee announced the launch of the World Wide Web, where Linus Torvalds announced the Linux project, and where Marc Andreessen announced the creation of the Mosaic browser and the introduction of the image tag, which revolutionized the World Wide Web by turning it into a graphical medium. Activist Amy Goodloe used the platform to maintain an email list for LGBT activism.


title: Usenet

text: Many jargon terms now in common use on the Internet originated or were popularized on Usenet. Likewise, many conflicts which later spread to the rest of the Internet, such as the ongoing difficulties over spamming, began on Usenet.


title: Usenet

text: Sascha Segan of "PC Magazine" said in 2008 that "Usenet has been dying for years". Segan said that some people pointed to the Eternal September in 1993 as the beginning of Usenet's decline, when AOL began offering Usenet access. He argues that when users began putting large (non-text) files on Usenet by the late 1990s, Usenet disk space and traffic increased correspondingly. Internet service providers questioned why they needed to host space for binary articles.


title: Usenet

text: AOL discontinued Usenet access in 2005. In May 2010, Duke University, whose implementation had started Usenet more than 30 years earlier, decommissioned its Usenet server, citing low usage and rising costs. On February 4, 2011, the Usenet news service link at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (news.unc.edu) was retired after 32 years.


title: Usenet

text: In response, John Biggs of TechCrunch said "As long as there are folks who think a command line is better than a mouse, the original text-only social network will live on". While there are still some active text newsgroups on Usenet, the system is now primarily used to share large files between users, and the underlying technology of Usenet remains unchanged.


title: Usenet

text: Over time, the amount of Usenet traffic has steadily increased. the number of all text posts made in all Big-8 newsgroups averaged 1,800 new messages every hour, with an average of 25,000 messages per day. However, these averages are minuscule in comparison to the traffic in the binary groups. Much of this traffic increase reflects not an increase in discrete users or newsgroup discussions, but instead the combination of massive automated spamming and an increase in the use of "" newsgroups in which large files are often posted publicly. A small sampling of the change (measured in feed size per day) follows:


title: Usenet

text: In 2008, Verizon Communications, Time Warner Cable and Sprint Nextel signed an agreement with Attorney General of New York Andrew Cuomo to shut down access to sources of child pornography. Time Warner Cable stopped offering access to Usenet. Verizon reduced its access to the "Big 8" hierarchies. Sprint stopped access to the "alt.*" hierarchies. AT&T stopped access to the "" hierarchies. Cuomo never specifically named Usenet in his anti-child pornography campaign. David DeJean of "PC World" said that some worry that the ISPs used Cuomo's campaign as an excuse to end portions of Usenet access, as it is costly for the Internet service providers and not in high demand by customers. In 2008 AOL, which no longer offered Usenet access, and the four providers that responded to the Cuomo campaign were the five largest Internet service providers in the United States; they had more than 50% of the U.S. ISP market share. On June 8, 2009, AT&T announced that it would no longer provide access to the Usenet service as of July 15, 2009.


title: Usenet

text: AOL announced that it would discontinue its integrated Usenet service in early 2005, citing the growing popularity of weblogs, chat forums and on-line conferencing. The AOL community had a tremendous role in popularizing Usenet some 11 years earlier.


title: Usenet

text: In August 2009, Verizon announced that it would discontinue access to Usenet on September 30, 2009. JANET announced it would discontinue Usenet service, effective July 31, 2010, citing Google Groups as an alternative.


title: Usenet

text: Microsoft announced that it would discontinue support for its public newsgroups (msnews.microsoft.com) from June 1, 2010, offering web forums as an alternative.


title: Usenet

text: Primary reasons cited for the discontinuance of Usenet service by general ISPs include the decline in volume of actual readers due to competition from blogs, along with cost and liability concerns of increasing proportion of traffic devoted to file-sharing and spam on unused or discontinued groups.


title: Usenet

text: Some ISPs did not include pressure from Cuomo's campaign against child pornography as one of their reasons for dropping Usenet feeds as part of their services. ISPs Cox and Atlantic Communications resisted the 2008 trend but both did eventually drop their respective Usenet feeds in 2010.


title: Usenet

text: Public archives of Usenet articles have existed since the early days of Usenet, such as the system created by Kenneth Almquist in late 1982. Distributed archiving of Usenet posts was suggested in November 1982 by Scott Orshan, who proposed that "Every site should keep all the articles it posted, forever." Also in November of that year, Rick Adams responded to a post asking "Has anyone archived netnews, or does anyone plan to?" by stating that he was, "afraid to admit it, but I started archiving most 'useful' newsgroups as of September 18." In June 1982, Gregory G. Woodbury proposed an "automatic access to archives" system that consisted of "automatic answering of fixed-format messages to a special mail recipient on specified machines."


title: Usenet

text: In 1985, two news archiving systems and one RFC were posted to the Internet. The first system, called keepnews, by Mark M. Swenson of the University of Arizona, was described as "a program that attempts to provide a sane way of extracting and keeping information that comes over Usenet." The main advantage of this system was to allow users to mark articles as worthwhile to retain. The second system, YA News Archiver by Chuq Von Rospach, was similar to keepnews, but was "designed to work with much larger archives where the wonderful quadratic search time feature of the Unix ... becomes a real problem." Von Rospach in early 1985 posted a detailed RFC for "archiving and accessing usenet articles with keyword lookup." This RFC described a program that could "generate and


title: Usenet

text: maintain an archive of Usenet articles and allow looking up articles based on the article-id, subject lines, or keywords pulled out of the article itself." Also included was C code for the internal data structure of the system.


title: Usenet

text: The desire to have a fulltext search index of archived news articles is not new either, one such request having been made in April 1991 by Alex Martelli who sought to "build


title: Usenet

text: some sort of keyword index for [the news archive]." In early May, Mr. Martelli posted a summary of his responses to Usenet, noting that the "most popular suggestion award must definitely go to 'lq-text' package, by Liam Quin, recently posted in alt.sources."


title: Usenet

text: The Alt Sex Stories Text Repository (ASSTR) site archives and indexes erotic and pornographic stories posted to the Usenet group alt.sex.stories.


title: Usenet

text: The archiving of Usenet has led to fears of loss of privacy. An archive simplifies ways to profile people. This has partly been countered with the introduction of the " X-No-Archive: Yes" header, which is itself controversial.


title: Usenet

text: Web-based archiving of Usenet posts began in 1995 at Deja News with a very large, searchable database. In 2001, this database was acquired by Google.


title: Usenet

text: Google Groups hosts an archive of Usenet posts dating back to May 1981. The earliest posts, which date from May 1981 to June 1991, were donated to Google by the University of Western Ontario with the help of David Wiseman and others, and were originally archived by Henry Spencer at the University of Toronto's Zoology department. The archives for late 1991 through early 1995 were provided by Kent Landfield from the NetNews CD series and Jürgen Christoffel from GMD. The archive of posts from March 1995 onward was started by the company Deja News (later Deja), which was purchased by Google in February 2001. Google began archiving Usenet posts for itself starting in the second week of August 2000.


title: Usenet

text: Google has been criticized by "Vice" and "Wired" contributors as well as former employees for its stewardship of the archive and for breaking its search functionality.


title: Usenet

text: Usenet as a whole has no administrators. Each server administrator is free to do what they want, as long as the end users and peer servers accept it. But there are a few famous administrators:


title: Brigade combat team

text: The brigade combat team (BCT) is the basic deployable unit of maneuver in the U.S. Army. A brigade combat team consists of one combat arms branch maneuver brigade, and its assigned support and fire units. A brigade is normally commanded by a colonel (O-6) although in some cases a brigadier general (O-7) may assume command. A brigade combat team contains combat support and combat service support units necessary to sustain its operations. BCTs contain organic artillery training and support, received from the parent division artillery (DIVARTY). There are three types of brigade combat teams: infantry, Stryker, and armored.


title: Brigade combat team

text: Currently, the U.S. Army is structured around the brigade combat team. In this program, divisions that previously had not deployed individual brigades due to lack of integral support have now been restructured. The 1st Armored Division, 25th Infantry Division, etc. now have the ability to deploy one or more BCTs anywhere in the world. These BCTs are intended to be able to stand on their own, like a division in miniature. The soldiers assigned to a BCT will stay at their assignment for three years; this is intended to bolster readiness and improve unit cohesion.


title: Brigade combat team

text: The infantry brigade combat team, as of 2014, contains 4,413 soldiers and is organized around three battalions of infantry. Each type of brigade (infantry or airborne infantry) has the same basic organization. Each infantry brigade is equipped and capable of air assault operations. Also, most units typically maneuver in HMMWVs when deployed and operate as "motorized infantry" to facilitate speed of movement. The Infantry BCT can conduct entry operations by ground, air, and amphibious means.


title: Brigade combat team

text: The infantry brigade combat team consists of seven battalions: one cavalry (reconnaissance) battalion, one brigade support battalion, one engineer battalion, three infantry battalions and one field artillery (fires) battalion.


title: Brigade combat team

text: The Stryker brigade combat team (SBCT) is a mechanized infantry force structured around the Stryker eight-wheeled variant of the General Dynamics LAV III. A full Stryker brigade was intended to be C-130 Hercules air transportable into theatre within 96 hours, while a division-sized force is expected to need 120 hours. The Stryker brigade is an organic combined arms unit of lightly-armored, medium-weight wheeled vehicles, and is organized differently from the infantry or armored brigade combat teams. The Stryker brigades are being used to implement network-centric warfare doctrines, and are intended to fill a gap between the United States' highly mobile light infantry and its much heavier armored infantry. The team also receives training in chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear defense (CBRN defense).


title: Brigade combat team

text: Each Stryker brigade combat team consists of three infantry battalions, one reconnaissance (cavalry) squadron, one fires (artillery) battalion, one brigade support battalion, one brigade headquarters and headquarters company, and one brigade engineer battalion. A Stryker brigade is made up of more than 300 Stryker vehicles and 4,500 soldiers.


title: Brigade combat team

text: Starting in 2015, the anti-tank company was reflagged from the brigade engineer battalion to the cavalry squadron, to form a weapons troop—also incorporating the mobile gun systems from the infantry battalions.


title: Brigade combat team

text: The armored brigade combat team (ABCT) is the army's primary armored force. It is designed around combined arms battalions (CABs) that contain both M1 Abrams tanks and M2 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs). Other vehicles, such as HMMWVs and M113 armored personnel carrier, operate in a supporting role. In the future, it will also contain vehicles from the Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicle and likely the Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle (OMFV).


title: Brigade combat team

text: An armored brigade combat team consists of seven battalions: three combined arms battalions, one cavalry (reconnaissance) squadron, one artillery battalion, one engineer battalion and one brigade support battalion. As of 2014, the armored brigade combat team is the largest brigade combat team formation with 4,743 soldiers. Prior to 2012, the armored brigade combat team was named the heavy brigade combat team.


title: Brigade combat team

text: An ABCT includes 87 Abrams, 152 Bradley IFVs, 18 M109s and 45 armed M113 vehicles. The operational cost for these combat systems is $66,735 per mile. The range of the Abrams limits the brigade to 330 km (205 miles), requiring fuel every 12 hours. The brigade can self-transport 738,100 L (195,000 gallons) of fuel, which is transported by 15 19,000 L (5,000 gal) M969A1 tankers and 48 9,500 L (2,500 gal) M978 tankers.


title: Brigade combat team

text: Prior to 2016, the CAB contained two tank companies and two mechanized infantry companies. In 2016, the CAB was reorganized to have two variations; an "armored battalion" biased towards armor, with two tank companies and one mechanized infantry company, and a "mechanized infantry" battalion biased towards infantry, with two mechanized infantry companies and one tank company. The ABCTs thus adopted a "triangle" structure of two armored battalions and one mechanized infantry battalion. This resulted in an overall reduction of two mechanized infantry companies; the deleted armored company was reflagged to the cavalry squadron.


title: Brigade combat team

text: The U.S. Army planned to implement elements of the BCT Modernization program in 2010. This program was planned to utilize elements from the Future Combat Systems program that was canceled in early 2009.


title: Brigade combat team

text: The program came in two segments. The first to be implemented would be the "Early Infantry Brigade Combat Team Capability Package" (Early IBCT Package), which would modernize infantry brigade combat teams. The second to be implemented would be the "Follow-on Incremental Capabilities Package", which could modernize all brigades.


title: Brigade combat team

text: After the 2013 reform's round of de-activations and downsizing, the below numbers represent the number of BCTs that will be left in the US Army's Active Component. (Numbers after the brigade re-organization in brackets)


title: Brigade combat team

text: In July 2015, the Army announced the reduction of 2 additional BCTs as part of ongoing reductions to an end strength of 450,000. In addition to the reduction, one active Stryker BCT will convert to an infantry BCT, and its vehicles will be used to convert an Army National Guard BCT from armored to Stryker.


title: Brigade combat team

text: In April 2017, the Army confirmed that the proposed downsizing of 4/25 (Airborne) BCT was being reversed, and the BCT retained.


title: Brigade combat team

text: As of September 2018, the active duty component of United States Army consists of 31 brigade combat teams:


title: Brigade combat team

text: On 20 September 2018, the Army announced that the 1st Brigade Combat Team of the 1st Armored Division (1/1 AD) stationed at Fort Bliss, Texas, will convert from a Stryker brigade combat team (SBCT) to an armored brigade combat team (ABCT); and the 2nd Brigade Combat Team of the 4th Infantry Division (2/4 ID) stationed at Fort Carson, Colorado, will convert from an infantry brigade combat team (IBCT) to a SBCT. The conversion of the 1st Brigade Combat Team, 1st Armored Division, and the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division, were planned to begin in the spring of 2019 and spring of 2020 respectively. With 25th Infantry Division Alaska's change to 11th Airborne Division in 2022, the Army will have one less Stryker Brigade and one more Infantry brigade, changing the total to 15 IBCT's and 6 SBCT's.


title: Brigade combat team

text: Army National Guard brigade combat teams have the same TOE as active duty component BCTs. As of September 2018, the Army National Guard consists of 27 BCTs:


title: Austin Swift

text: Austin Kingsley Swift (born March 11, 1992) is an American actor, who has been in films such as "Live by Night" (2016) and "I.T." (2016). He is the younger brother of singer-songwriter Taylor Swift, and has appeared in or produced her music videos. Swift currently manages Taylor's film projects and music licensing.


title: Austin Swift

text: Austin Kingsley Swift was born on March 11, 1992, at Reading Hospital in West Reading, Pennsylvania. His father, Scott Archie Swift, is a financial advisor at Merrill Lynch, and his mother, Andrea Gardner Swift ( Finlay), is a former homemaker who had previously worked as a mutual fund marketing executive. His older sister, Taylor Swift, is a singer-songwriter. His maternal grandmother, Marjorie Finlay, was an opera singer. Swift's paternal great-great-grandfather was an Italian immigrant entrepreneur and community leader who opened several businesses in Philadelphia in the 1800s. Swift moved from Wyomissing, Pennsylvania, to Hendersonville, Tennessee, with his family at a young age.


title: Austin Swift

text: Swift graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 2015, where he studied film and had roles in plays such as "Dead Man's Cell Phone" and "Six Characters in Search of an Author". During college, he transferred to Vanderbilt University, but eventually transferred back to University of Notre Dame for the completion of his studies. He interned at Lionsgate, where his responsibilities included making and sending out screeners. He made his film debut in the 2016 thriller "I.T." starring Pierce Brosnan. Swift has also appeared in "Live by Night", Megyn Kelly's political drama "Embeds", sitcom "Still the King", and Todd Berger's "Cover Versions". In 2019, he starred in the indie movie "Braking for Whales", originally titled "Whaling", written by Tammin Sursok and her husband Sean McEwen, and in the horror thriller "We Summon the Darkness", directed by Marc Meyers.


title: Cytokine

text: Cytokines are a broad and loose category of small proteins (~5–25 kDa) important in cell signaling. Cytokines are peptides and cannot cross the lipid bilayer of cells to enter the cytoplasm. Cytokines have been shown to be involved in autocrine, paracrine and endocrine signaling as immunomodulating agents.


title: Cytokine

text: Cytokines include chemokines, interferons, interleukins, lymphokines, and tumour necrosis factors, but generally not hormones or growth factors (despite some overlap in the terminology). Cytokines are produced by a broad range of cells, including immune cells like macrophages, B lymphocytes, T lymphocytes and mast cells, as well as endothelial cells, fibroblasts, and various stromal cells; a given cytokine may be produced by more than one type of cell. They act through cell surface receptors and are especially important in the immune system; cytokines modulate the balance between humoral and cell-based immune responses, and they regulate the maturation, growth, and responsiveness of particular cell populations. Some cytokines enhance or inhibit the action of other cytokines in complex ways. They are different from hormones, which are also important cell signaling molecules. Hormones circulate in higher concentrations, and tend to be made by specific kinds of cells. Cytokines are important in health and disease, specifically in host immune responses to infection, inflammation, trauma, sepsis, cancer, and reproduction.


title: Cytokine

text: The word comes from the ancient Greek language: "cyto", from Greek κύτος, "kytos", 'cavity, cell' + "kines", from Greek κίνησις, "kinēsis", 'movement'.


title: Cytokine

text: Interferon-alpha, an interferon type I, was identified in 1957 as a protein that interfered with viral replication. The activity of interferon-gamma (the sole member of the interferon type II class) was described in 1965; this was the first identified lymphocyte-derived mediator. Macrophage migration inhibitory factor (MIF) was identified simultaneously in 1966 by John David and Barry Bloom.


title: Cytokine

text: In 1969, Dudley Dumonde proposed the term "lymphokine" to describe proteins secreted from lymphocytes and later, proteins derived from macrophages and monocytes in culture were called "monokines". In 1974, pathologist Stanley Cohen, M.D. (not to be confused with the Nobel laureate) published an article describing the production of MIF in virus-infected allantoic membrane and kidney cells, showing its production is not limited to immune cells. This led to his proposal of the term cytokine. Ogawa described the early acting growth factors, intermediate acting growth factors and late acting growth factors.


title: Cytokine

text: Classic hormones circulate in aqueous solution in nanomolar (10 M) concentrations that usually vary by less than one order of magnitude. In contrast, some cytokines (such as IL-6) circulate in picomolar (10 M) concentrations that can increase up to 1,000 times during trauma or infection. The widespread distribution of cellular sources for cytokines may be a feature that differentiates them from hormones. Virtually all nucleated cells, but especially endo/epithelial cells and resident macrophages (many near the interface with the external environment) are potent producers of IL-1, IL-6, and TNF-α. In contrast, classic hormones, such as insulin, are secreted from discrete glands such as the pancreas. The current terminology refers to cytokines as immunomodulating agents.


title: Cytokine

text: A contributing factor to the difficulty of distinguishing cytokines from hormones is that some immunomodulating effects of cytokines are systemic ("i.e.", affecting the whole organism) rather than local. For instance, to accurately utilize hormone terminology, cytokines may be autocrine or paracrine in nature, and chemotaxis, chemokinesis and endocrine as a pyrogen. Essentially, cytokines are not limited to their immunomodulatory status as molecules.


title: Cytokine

text: Cytokines have been classed as lymphokines, interleukins, and chemokines, based on their presumed function, cell of secretion, or target of action. Because cytokines are characterised by considerable redundancy and pleiotropism, such distinctions, allowing for exceptions, are obsolete.


title: Cytokine

text: Structural homogeneity has been able to partially distinguish between cytokines that do not demonstrate a considerable degree of redundancy so that they can be classified into four types:


title: Cytokine

text: A classification that proves more useful in clinical and experimental practice outside of structural biology divides immunological cytokines into those that enhance cellular immune responses, type 1 (TNFα, IFN-γ, etc.), and those that enhance antibody responses, type 2 (TGF-β, IL-4, IL-10, IL-13, etc.). A key focus of interest has been that cytokines in one of these two sub-sets tend to inhibit the effects of those in the other. Dysregulation of this tendency is under intensive study for its possible role in the pathogenesis of autoimmune disorders. Several inflammatory cytokines are induced by oxidative stress. The fact that cytokines themselves trigger the release of other cytokines and also lead to increased oxidative stress makes them important in chronic inflammation, as well as other immunoresponses, such as fever and acute phase proteins of the liver (IL-1,6,12, IFN-a). Cytokines also play a role in anti-inflammatory pathways and are a possible therapeutic treatment for pathological pain from inflammation or peripheral nerve injury. There are both pro-inflammatory and anti-inflammatory cytokines that regulate this pathway.


title: Cytokine

text: In recent years, the cytokine receptors have come to demand the attention of more investigators than cytokines themselves, partly because of their remarkable characteristics and partly because a deficiency of cytokine receptors has now been directly linked to certain debilitating immunodeficiency states. In this regard, and also because the redundancy and pleomorphism of cytokines are, in fact, a consequence of their homologous receptors, many authorities think that a classification of cytokine receptors would be more clinically and experimentally useful.


title: Cytokine

text: A classification of cytokine receptors based on their three-dimensional structure has, therefore, been attempted. Such a classification, though seemingly cumbersome, provides several unique perspectives for attractive pharmacotherapeutic targets.


title: Cytokine

text: Each cytokine has a matching cell-surface receptor. Subsequent cascades of intracellular signaling then alter cell functions. This may include the upregulation and/or downregulation of several genes and their transcription factors, resulting in the production of other cytokines, an increase in the number of surface receptors for other molecules, or the suppression of their own effect by feedback inhibition. The effect of a particular cytokine on a given cell depends on the cytokine, its extracellular abundance, the presence and abundance of the complementary receptor on the cell surface, and downstream signals activated by receptor binding; these last two factors can vary by cell type. Cytokines are characterized by considerable redundancy, in that many cytokines appear to share similar functions. It seems to be a paradox that cytokines binding to antibodies have a stronger immune effect than the cytokine alone. This may lead to lower therapeutic doses.


title: Cytokine

text: It has been shown that inflammatory cytokines cause an IL-10-dependent inhibition of T-cell expansion and function by up-regulating PD-1 levels on monocytes, which leads to IL-10 production by monocytes after binding of PD-1 by PD-L. Adverse reactions to cytokines are characterized by local inflammation and/or ulceration at the injection sites. Occasionally such reactions are seen with more widespread papular eruptions.


title: Cytokine

text: Cytokines are involved in several developmental processes during embryonic development. Cytokines are released from the blastocyst, and are also expressed in the endometrium, and have critical roles in the stages of zona hatching, and implantation. Cytokines are crucial for fighting off infections and in other immune responses. However, they can become dysregulated and pathological in inflammation, trauma, sepsis, and hemorrhagic stroke. Dysregulated cytokine secretion in the aged population can lead to inflammaging, and render these individuals more vulnerable to age-related diseases like neurodegenerative diseases and type 2 diabetes.


title: Cytokine

text: Adverse effects of cytokines have been linked to many disease states and conditions ranging from schizophrenia, major depression and Alzheimer's disease to cancer. T regulatory cells (Tregs) and related-cytokines are effectively engaged in the process of tumor immune escape and functionally inhibit immune response against the tumor. Forkhead box protein 3 (Foxp3) as a transcription factor is an essential molecular marker of Treg cells. Foxp3 polymorphism (rs3761548) might be involved in cancer progression like gastric cancer through influencing Tregs function and the secretion of immunomodulatory cytokines such as IL-10, IL-35, and TGF-β.


title: Cytokine

text: Normal tissue integrity is preserved by feedback interactions between diverse cell types mediated by adhesion molecules and secreted cytokines; disruption of normal feedback mechanisms in cancer threatens tissue integrity.


title: Cytokine

text: Over-secretion of cytokines can trigger a dangerous cytokine storm syndrome. Cytokine storms may have been the cause of severe adverse events during a clinical trial of TGN1412. Cytokine storms are also suspected to be the main cause of death in the 1918 "Spanish Flu" pandemic. Deaths were weighted more heavily towards people with healthy immune systems, because of their ability to produce stronger immune responses, with dramatic increases in cytokine levels. Another example of cytokine storm is seen in acute pancreatitis. Cytokines are integral and implicated in all angles of the cascade, resulting in the systemic inflammatory response syndrome and multi-organ failure associated with this intra-abdominal catastrophe. In the COVID-19 pandemic, some deaths from COVID-19 have been attributable to cytokine release storms. Current data suggest cytokine storms may be the source of extensive lung tissue damage and dysfunctional coagulation in COVID-19 infections.


title: Cytokine

text: Some cytokines have been developed into protein therapeutics using recombinant DNA technology. Recombinant cytokines being used as drugs as of 2014 include:


title: Roger Lloyd-Pack

text: Roger Lloyd-Pack (8 February 1944 – 16 January 2014) was an English actor. He is best known for playing Trigger in "Only Fools and Horses" from 1981 to 2003, and Owen Newitt in "The Vicar of Dibley" from 1994 to 2007. He later starred as Tom in "The Old Guys" with Clive Swift. He is also well known for the role of Barty Crouch Sr. in "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" and for his appearances in "Doctor Who" as John Lumic in the episodes "Rise of the Cybermen" and "The Age of Steel". He was sometimes credited without the hyphen in his surname. He died in 2014 from pancreatic cancer.


title: Roger Lloyd-Pack

text: Lloyd-Pack was born in Islington, London, the son of actor Charles Lloyd-Pack (1902–1983) and Ulrike Elisabeth ("née" Pulay, 1921–2000), an Austrian Jewish refugee who worked as a travel agent. He attended Bedales School near Petersfield in Hampshire, where he achieved A Level passes in English, French and Latin. He subsequently trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), where he worked with actors including Kenneth Cranham and Richard Wilson.


title: Roger Lloyd-Pack

text: Roger Lloyd-Pack began his acting career at Northampton's Royal Theatre, which he revisited when he appeared in the tour of "Blue/Orange". On British television, he was best known for portraying "Trigger" in the BBC sitcom "Only Fools and Horses". He was also known for his role in "The Vicar of Dibley" as Owen Newitt, and to international audiences his greatest fame was as Barty Crouch, Sr. in the film "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire". In addition, he had a semi-regular role during the 1990s as the plumber Jake "The Klingon" Klinger, Ben Porter's arch-rival, in the sitcom "2 point 4 children."


title: Roger Lloyd-Pack

text: In 2005, he appeared in the second series of ITV's "Doc Martin" as a farmer who held a grudge against Doctor Ellingham for what he believed was the malpractice-related death of his wife. In 2006, he played John Lumic and provided the voice of the Cyber-Controller in two episodes of "Doctor Who", "Rise of the Cybermen" and "The Age of Steel", opposite David Tennant, who had played his son in the same "Harry Potter" film. Lloyd-Pack's final TV appearance was in "" as Alex Greene.


title: Roger Lloyd-Pack

text: Lloyd-Pack was married twice: first to Sheila Ball, from whom he was divorced in 1972, and secondly to the poet and dramatist Jehane Markham (the daughter of David Markham), whom he married in 2000. He had a daughter, actress Emily Lloyd, and three sons. He latterly lived in Kentish Town, north London, but also had a home near Fakenham in Norfolk.


title: Roger Lloyd-Pack

text: Lloyd-Pack supported Tottenham Hotspur. He voiced the pre-match build-up montage video shown ahead of all Tottenham Hotspur's home matches which is still played today.


title: Roger Lloyd-Pack

text: In June 2008, he appeared as a guest on the BBC's "The Politics Show", arguing the case for better-integrated public transport (specifically railways). He was an honorary patron of the London children's charity Scene & Heard.


title: Roger Lloyd-Pack

text: Lloyd-Pack supported the Labour Party and campaigned for Ken Livingstone in the 2012 London mayoral election. However, in 2013, he signed a letter in "The Guardian" stating he had withdrawn his support from the Labour Party, in favour of a new party of the left.


title: Roger Lloyd-Pack

text: In a 2008 interview, when asked what profession he would have chosen aside from acting, Lloyd-Pack said: "Psychiatrist or a psychoanalyst or something in the psycho world because I've always been interested in that... or I might have been a photographer... I also would have loved to have been a musician." In that same interview, he listed his favourite directors as Peter Gill, Harold Pinter, Richard Eyre, Thea Sharrock, and Tina Packer, and also listed actor Paul Scofield as both a favourite and influence.


title: Roger Lloyd-Pack

text: In January 2012, he and fellow actor Sarah Parish supported a campaign to raise £1million for The Bridge School in Islington.


title: Roger Lloyd-Pack

text: Lloyd-Pack died of pancreatic cancer at his home in Kentish Town aged 69 on 16 January 2014. His funeral was held at the church of St. Paul's, Covent Garden. It was attended by Sir David Jason, Nicholas Lyndhurst, John Challis and Sue Holderness. Nigel Havers, Stephen Rea, Miranda Richardson, Alison Steadman, Kathy Burke and Joely Richardson paid tribute to him. His body was buried at Highgate Cemetery East. In March that year, the Sport Relief special of "Only Fools and Horses" was dedicated to the memory of both Lloyd-Pack and John Sullivan. Similarly, the final episode of the lockdown edition of "The Vicar of Dibley" ended with a tribute just before the closing credits reading, "In loving memory of Liz, John, Emma and Roger", paying tribute to him and three other late Dibley cast members (Liz Smith, John Bluthal and Emma Chambers).


title: Utopia (British TV series)

text: Utopia is a British thriller drama television series that was broadcast on Channel 4 from 15 January 2013 to 12 August 2014. The show was written by Dennis Kelly and starred Fiona O'Shaughnessy, Adeel Akhtar, Paul Higgins, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, Alexandra Roach, Oliver Woollford, Alistair Petrie and Neil Maskell. A second six-episode series was commissioned by Channel 4 and went into production in late 2013, and was broadcast in July and August 2014. The show has since gained a cult following.


title: Utopia (British TV series)

text: In October 2014, the series' official Twitter feed stated there would not be a third series. HBO had originally planned to make an American version of the show in 2014, but did not produce it due to budget disputes. Amazon then acquired the rights to the series as of April 2018, and an American version was released on 25 September 2020. Initially nearly inaccessible for viewing on the U.S. market, Amazon released both of the original series on Amazon Prime on 1 November 2020.


title: Utopia (British TV series)

text: A community of comic book fans believe the graphic novel "The Utopia Experiments" predicted several disastrous epidemics, such as mad cow disease (BSE). A rumoured unpublished sequel supposedly contains further information on future world events. When one "Utopia" enthusiast procures the manuscript, he invites four of his friends from an online forum to meet in real life. However, after getting their hands on the manuscript, the four – Ian, Becky, Wilson, and Grant – find themselves in over their heads, as a secret organization only known as "The Network" is after it. They find their lives systematically dismantled, while Network operatives kill anyone in their way as they hunt for the manuscript and someone named Jessica Hyde.


title: Utopia (British TV series)

text: Jessica, who has been on the run from The Network her entire life, meets with the group and helps them evade capture. Meanwhile, other characters find themselves ensnared in The Network's orbit, and through their interactions with its agents, the organization's purpose and secret plot come into focus. The closer people come to understanding what's truly going on, the more dangerous things become. As rumors of "Russian flu" proliferate worldwide and a variety of groups and individuals close in on the protagonists, they try to solve the web of mysteries and conspiracies around them.


title: Utopia (British TV series)

text: In April 2012, Channel 4 announced that it had commissioned a six-episode drama series titled "Utopia". The series was written by Dennis Kelly and produced by Kudos Film and Television. Marc Munden was chosen as the director, Rebekah Wray-Rogers the producer, and Dennis Kelly, Jane Featherstone and Karen Wilson the executive producers.


title: Utopia (British TV series)

text: Kudos Film and Television approached Kelly with an idea about a conspiracy hidden inside a graphic novel. Kelly liked some of the idea, but some of it he changed. The story involved a shadowy organisation called The Network, and Kelly initially came out with an idea that The Network might be responsible for the rise in conspiracy theories because they thought it would be the best way to hide an actual conspiracy. Kelly said he does not believe in conspiracy theories, but is fascinated by them. The series took about two years to come to fruition.


title: Utopia (British TV series)

text: To emulate the graphic novel printing process, Marc Munden chose to use a Technicolor palette: "The three-strip Technicolor process we use is the opposite colours – yellows, cyan, magentas. I was interested in Doris Day films from the 1950s that pushed those distinct elements." Colourist Aidan Farrell used grading software Nucoda Film Master to paint bolder colours into the shots. By the second series the production crew were preparing the film sets for grading.


title: Utopia (British TV series)

text: "Utopia" is set in London, but was filmed mostly in Merseyside and Yorkshire between April and October 2012, while the panning shot of the Mercury Hotel in the first episode was filmed in Westhoughton. Producer Bekki Wray-Rogers claimed the reason for this was that no other area in the UK could have provided them with such a variety of locations. Some scenes, such as the office of Conran Letts, were filmed at Scarisbrick Hall near Ormskirk. Scenes for the school shooting in episode 3 were filmed at Alsop High School in Walton whilst the school was closed for summer in July 2012. The empty red sandstone stately home the group make use of from episode 4 is filmed at Woolton Hall. The café scene in the fifth episode is filmed at TC's Cafe & Take-Away on Southport New Road near the village of Mere Brow. Many scenes were filmed in Crosby and Skelmersdale. Scenes set in the office of a fictional newspaper were shot in the offices of the Liverpool Echo newspaper on Old Hall Street in Liverpool. The final scene of the first series, with Jessica and Milner, was shot atop the Cunard Building, one of Liverpool's "three graces".


title: Utopia (British TV series)

text: In the second series, locations used included Barnsley Interchange in Barnsley, Temple Works in Leeds, The Chocolate Works in York, the Yorkshire Dales National Park, the Hepworth Gallery in Wakefield, and various spots in Leeds city centre, which doubled as London by superimposing London landmarks on the horizon. The scene in which Mr Rabbit and Philip Carvel meet was filmed at Allerton Castle near Harrogate. The abandoned building in the second episode of series 2 was shot in the former Terry's Chocolate Factory in York.


title: Utopia (British TV series)

text: The TV drama referenced a number of real world events, and incorporated these events into the story of the conspiracy. In the second series, the show used various news footage from the 1970s including the assassinations of Aldo Moro, Carmine Pecorelli, Richard Sykes, and Airey Neave. The TWA Flight 841 disaster is also referenced in this episode. In particular, several events from a 10-day period in 1979, including the Three Mile Island accident and the collapse of the Labour government, had been combined as a jumping off point for the second series.


title: Utopia (British TV series)

text: The first series was generally well received by the critics, with some high praise for its striking visuals, but also some expressions of concern about its violence. Aidan Smith of "The Scotsman" noted both its "astonishing visuals" as well as its "astonishing violence", while Tom Sutcliffe of "The Independent" thought it a dystopian fantasy "delivered with great visual style" but was not convinced that its violence is necessary. Mark Monahan of "The Daily Telegraph" described it as "a dark, tantalizingly mysterious overture", while Sam Wollaston of "The Guardian" called it "a work of brilliant imagination", "a 21st-century nightmare" that "looks beautiful", but also wondered about the gratuitousness of its violence.


title: Utopia (British TV series)

text: UK media regulator Ofcom received 44 complaints about the television series including complaints about violence, offensive language and child actors being involved in scenes of adult content. Thirty-seven of the complaints related to a scene at the beginning of the third episode where a shooting takes place in a secondary school, a month after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.


title: Utopia (British TV series)

text: In the second series, the use of real life events including the assassination of Airey Neave prompted criticisms of the show by a number of people, including members of the Neave family. In response, Channel 4 issued a statement and said that the drama series is "entirely fictional" and "it is not [Channel 4's] intention to cause offence and "Utopia" does not suggest that any other real organization was responsible for the death of Airey Neave."


title: Utopia (British TV series)

text: The series soundtrack was composed by Cristobal Tapia de Veer. The album entitled "Utopia (Original Television Soundtrack)" was released 7 October 2013, on both CD and MP3 download by Silva Screen Music. In August 2014 a contest was announced on Facebook to create a remix of the "Utopia Overture".


title: Utopia (British TV series)

text: Cristobal Tapia De Veer announced via Twitter that the Series 2 soundtrack was coming 8 December. It was then released that day, and is now available on major music streaming services. It is also available for purchase as a CD/DVD, as well as on vinyl.


title: Utopia (British TV series)

text: In February 2014, HBO ordered an American adaptation of "Utopia", to be co-created and directed by David Fincher, with Gillian Flynn as the writer. Fincher planned to direct all episodes of the series, and said "I like the characters – I love Dennis’s honesty and affinity for the nerds." In June 2015, it was announced that Rooney Mara was negotiating for the role of Jessica Hyde. On 30 July 2015, it was reported that the series would not go into production because of budget disputes between Fincher and HBO, and that the cast had been released from their contracts. After HBO lost rights to the project, Amazon ordered a nine-episode first season directly on 19 April 2018, with Flynn said to adapt the project from the original.


title: Utopia (British TV series)

text: The American adaptation was released on Amazon Prime Video on 25 September 2020 and was created by Gillian Flynn.


title: The Society (TV series)

text: The Society is an American mystery teen drama television series created by Christopher Keyser, that was released via streaming on Netflix on May 10, 2019. The series stars Kathryn Newton, Gideon Adlon, Sean Berdy, Natasha Liu Bordizzo, Jacques Colimon, Olivia DeJonge, Alex Fitzalan, Kristine Froseth, Jose Julian, Alexander MacNicoll, Toby Wallace and Rachel Keller. Although the series was initially renewed for a second season, it was ultimately canceled after one season as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.


title: The Society (TV series)

text: "The Society" follows the story of a group of teenagers who must learn to run their own community after the rest of the population of their town (West Ham, Connecticut) disappears. The mystery begins when the students of the local high school return early from a canceled field trip and find that everyone else is gone. A dense forest appears surrounding the town; the outside world apparently no longer exists and cannot be contacted by telephone or Internet. The teenagers must come up with their own rules to survive with limited resources.


title: The Society (TV series)

text: In 2013, Christopher Keyser and Marc Webb pitched the show to Showtime, but the network decided to pass on the series. On July 24, 2018, Netflix announced that it had given the production a series order. The series was created by Keyser, who also acted as writer and executive producer, with Webb directing.


title: The Society (TV series)

text: Alongside the initial series announcement, it was confirmed that Kathryn Newton had been cast as a series regular. In November 2018, Rachel Keller, Gideon Adlon, Jacques Colimon, Olivia DeJonge, Alex Fitzalan, Kristine Froseth, Jose Julian, Natasha Liu Bordizzo, Alex MacNicoll, Jack Mulhern, Salena Qureshi, Grace Victoria Cox, Sean Berdy, and Toby Wallace joined the cast. Prior to the cancellation of the second season, it was planned that Olivia Nikkanen would be promoted to a series regular role for that season.


title: The Society (TV series)

text: The series was renewed for a second season in July 2019, but production was halted by the COVID-19 pandemic. It was announced on August 21, 2020 that the show had been canceled, the complications of the pandemic having led to cost increases and difficulty scheduling production.


title: The Society (TV series)

text: The review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes provides an 86% approval from 36 reviews, and an average rating of 7.44/10. The website's critical consensus states, "An intriguing tangle of mystery and melodrama, what "The Society" lacks in levity—and at times clarity—it makes up for with its surprisingly thoughtful exploration of community, culture, and what it means to grow up." On Metacritic, it has a weighted average score of 66 out of 100, based on 9 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".


title: Final Destination 3

text: Final Destination 3 is a 2006 American supernatural horror film directed by James Wong. A standalone sequel to "Final Destination 2" (2003), it is the third installment in the "Final Destination" film series. Wong and Glen Morgan, who worked on the franchise's first film, wrote the screenplay. "Final Destination 3" stars Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Ryan Merriman, and takes place years after the first film. Winstead plays Wendy Christensen, a high school graduate who has a premonition that a roller coaster she and her classmates are riding will derail. Although she saves some of them, Death begins hunting the survivors. Wendy realizes photographs she took at the amusement park contain clues about her classmates' death. With survivor and friend Kevin Fischer (Merriman), Wendy tries to use this knowledge to save the rest of them and ruin Death's scheme.


title: Final Destination 3

text: The film's development began shortly after the release of "Final Destination 2"; Jeffrey Reddick, creator of the franchise and a co-writer of the first two films, did not return for the third one. Unlike the second film, which was a direct sequel to the first, the producers envisioned "Final Destination 3" as a stand-alone film. The idea of featuring a roller coaster derailment as the opening-scene disaster came from New Line Cinema executive Richard Bryant. From the beginning, Wong and Morgan saw control as a major theme in the film. Casting began in March 2005 and concluded in April. Like the previous two installments, it was filmed in Vancouver, Canada. The first two weeks of the three-month shoot were spent filming the roller coaster's derailment.


title: Final Destination 3

text: Following its premiere at Grauman's Chinese Theatre on February 2, 2006, the film was released in cinemas in the United States on February 10, 2006. The DVD, released on July 25, 2006, includes commentaries, documentaries, a deleted scene and an animated video. A special-edition DVD called "Thrill Ride Edition" includes a feature called "Choose Their Fate", which acts as an interactive film, allowing viewers to make decisions at specific points in the film that alter the course of the story.


title: Final Destination 3

text: "Final Destination 3" received a mixed critical response. The film was a financial success and, with box office receipts of nearly $118 million, the highest-grossing installment in the franchise at the time. A fourth film, "The Final Destination", was released in August 2009.


title: Final Destination 3

text: In 2005, high school student Wendy Christensen visits an amusement park in Pennsylvania with her boyfriend Jason Wise, her best friend Carrie Dreyer, Carrie's boyfriend Kevin Fischer, and their classmates to celebrate their graduation. As they board the Devil's Flight roller coaster, Wendy has a premonition that the hydraulics securing the restraints and train cars will fail during the ride, killing everyone on board. She convinces nine people including Kevin, best friends Ashley Freund and Ashlyn Halperin, alumnus Frankie Cheeks, athlete Lewis Romero, and goth couple Ian McKinley and Erin Ulmer, not to ride the roller coaster, but fails to save Jason and Carrie, who are among the remaining passengers killed in the derailment.


title: Final Destination 3

text: Several weeks later, Kevin tells Wendy about the explosion of Flight 180 and the survivors' subsequent deaths, believing they may be in a similar situation. At a tanning salon, Ashley and Ashlyn are burnt alive in malfunctioning tanning beds. Now convinced that Death is stalking them, Wendy and Kevin set out to save the remaining survivors using omens hidden in photographs of the survivors that Wendy took on the night of the roller coaster crash. When Wendy and Kevin pull into a drive-thru restaurant and observe Frankie's photo, a runaway semi-trailer truck forces them to escape Kevin's car before it collides. The collision causes the car's motor to fly out and kill Frankie, who was in the car in front of them, by slicing his skull.


title: Final Destination 3

text: The next day, Wendy and Kevin fail to save Lewis, whose head is crushed by two weights from a Bowflex machine at the school gym. They find Ian and Erin working at a hardware store, where a chain reaction from a runaway forklift allows Wendy to save Ian from his death. However, Death skips to Erin, who falls on a nail gun that shoots repeatedly through her head. While identifying the last two survivors from the photographs, whose faces are obscured, Wendy realizes that they are her sister Julie and one of her friends, prompting Wendy and Kevin to rush to the local tricentennial fair to save them. Kevin saves Julie from being impaled on a harrow, but an airborne flagpole fatally impales Julie's friend Perry Malinowski moments later. After Wendy saves Kevin from an exploding propane canister, the trio is confronted by a grief-stricken Ian, who blames Wendy for Erin's death, until an unstable cart of firework cannons launches into a cherry picker that falls and crushes him.


title: Final Destination 3

text: Five months later, Wendy experiences more omens while riding on a subway train with her roommate Laura and her friend Sean. As Wendy is about to disembark, she suddenly reunites with Julie and Kevin, who had also boarded the train. Wendy receives another premonition that the train will crash, killing everyone on board. Panicked, the remaining survivors attempt to stop the train as it is about to crash, leaving their fates unknown.


title: Final Destination 3

text: "Final Destination 3" was originally the last part of a trilogy and had been in development since the release of "Final Destination 2". Franchise creator Jeffrey Reddick and one of the co-writers of the first two films did not return for the third installment. Director James Wong said that unlike the second film, which was closely tied to the first and continued its story, the producers always envisioned "Final Destination 3" as a stand-alone sequel featuring new characters. He said:[W]e really felt that the idea of "Final Destination", or the fact that Death can visit you and you can cheat death ... could happen to anyone." By not using characters from the first film the producers could use a new plot, with new characters who would be unaware what was happening to them and react accordingly.


title: Final Destination 3

text: The film's original title, "Cheating Death: Final Destination 3", changed during development. Craig Perry and Warren Zide's Zide/Perry Productions, and Wong and Glen Morgan's own Hard Eight Pictures that co-produced "Final Destination" returned to produce "Final Destination 3" with Practical Pictures and Manitee Pictures. Initially, the film was to be filmed in 3D, but this was abandoned. Morgan said it was for financial reasons and because he believed fire and blood effects would not be shown properly through the red filters of anaglyph 3D systems.


title: Final Destination 3

text: The idea of using a roller coaster derailment as the opening-scene disaster came from New Line Cinema executive Richard Bryant and was not inspired by the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad incident from 2003 when a derailment occurred that crushed a rider. "The Omen" (1976) was the inspiration to depict death omens in photographs. Morgan said he searched the aisles of a store on Sunset Boulevard for days for inspiration for Erin's hardware-store death. Loss of control is a major theme he and Wong had envisioned for the film from the very beginning; both Wendy, who is afraid of losing control, and the roller coaster exemplify this. He said psychologists have confirmed one reason some people are afraid of riding a roller coaster is because they have no control over it and what happens to them.


title: Final Destination 3

text: During the casting process, Wong sought actors who could portray the main characters as heroic individuals with realistic qualities. Perry echoed this sentiment, saying that for the Wendy and Kevin characters they looked for actors who "had the charisma of movie stars, but weren't so ridiculously rarefied that you couldn't feel like you might know them". They took great care casting the supporting characters who were considered as important to the film as the main characters.


title: Final Destination 3

text: On March 21, 2005, Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Ryan Merriman—co-stars of "The Ring Two" (2005)—were cast as Wendy Christensen and Kevin Fischer. Winstead, who had auditioned for the second "Final Destination" film, won the role because her portrayal of the character's emotion impressed Wong and Morgan. Wong said he had originally intended Wendy to be a "perky blonde" and reworked the character slightly after Winstead was selected. Wong believed the actors were right for their roles. He felt Winstead "[brought] a kind of soulfulness to her role as Wendy" and though her character "is deeply affected by the accident", her strength allows her to remain in control. Wong said when Merriman arrived to audition he was sure he was "the right guy to play Kevin". He described the character as "the kind of guy you want to hang out with, your goofy best buddy, but also someone who could rise to the occasion and become a hero".


title: Final Destination 3

text: On April 9, 2005, Kris Lemche and Alexz Johnson were cast as the goth couple Ian McKinley and Erin Ulmer. Johnson, who was starring in the Canadian television series "Instant Star" (2004–2008), had auditioned to play Wendy's sister Julie; that role later went to Amanda Crew, who originally auditioned to play Erin. Johnson said she wore a rocker jacket during her second reading and was in a bad mood. As she was leaving, the filmmakers called her back to read some of Erin's sarcastic dialogue in a scene. Johnson thought her dry sense of humor, which the filmmakers caught, helped her land the part. Of his role, Lemche said Ian "spouts some interesting facts that seem to be just right there on the tips of his fingers". He researched most of Ian's information and during read-throughs often asked Morgan about Ian's facts. Morgan wrote Lemche notes and gave him URLs to research the information Ian gives out.


title: Final Destination 3

text: Jesse Moss was cast as Wendy's boyfriend Jason Wise. Texas Battle played athlete Lewis Romero. Chelan Simmons took the role of Ashley Freund. Sam Easton portrayed school alumnus Frankie Cheeks. Gina Holden played Kevin's girlfriend and Wendy's best friend, Carrie Dreyer. Crystal Lowe joined the cast as student Ashlyn Halperin. Tony Todd, who appeared in the first two films, did not return as the mortician Bludworth but voiced the Devil statue at the roller coaster and a subway conductor. Maggie Ma and Ecstasia Sanders played Julie's friends Perry Malinowski and Amber Regan, respectively.


title: Final Destination 3

text: Like the first two installments of the franchise, "Final Destination 3" was filmed in Vancouver, Canada. The Corkscrew roller coaster at Vancouver's Playland was the Devil's Flight coaster depicted in the film. Winstead and Merriman said the filming took three months with the first two weeks were spent shooting the roller coaster derailment. The rest of the filming was done out of sequence. Filming wrapped in July, but viewers at early screenings reacted negatively to the ending. This led to the filming of a new ending sequence featuring a subway train derailment in November 2005.


title: Final Destination 3

text: The death scenes required varying degrees of 2D and 3D graphic enhancement. The roller coaster scene necessitated 144 visual-effect shots. Custom-designed coaster cars were built and modified for the script; most of the model was hand-built and computer-designed MEL scripts added specific elements. For the coaster-crash scenes, the actors were filmed performing in front of a green screen, to which a CGI background was added. Several of the roller coaster's cars were suspended with bungee cords to film the crash; the deaths required the use of CGI onscreen effects and each actor had a corresponding CGI double.