After reading the story title I immediately looked up Encyclopedia Britannica's article on Wikipedia. As expected, more than half of the article (714 out of 1378 words) was spent on the Issues and Controversies section.
Last year Bayers spent €227 million to acquire 4 companies, only one of which is human health related (the other 3 are animal health and GM food related). That lone human health pharmaceutical acquisition cost €88 million, which is tiny compared to Bayer's own R&D expenses.
Taking a look at the longer term, Bayer spent €732 million in pharmaceutical related acquisitions from 2008 to 2011: 2011: €88 for Pathway Medical Technologies 2010: €0 2009: €43 for SkinMedica, Inc 2008: €601 million in total; €227 million for Possis Medical Inc, €265 for the OTC medicines division of Sagmel Inc, €109 million for Topsun Science and Technology Qidong Gaitianli Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd
Over that same period Bayer spent €6.6 billion on in-house pharmaceutical research.
Note that the acquisitions are very sporadic. Looking at 2010 or 2008 alone for example would give very misleading results, which is why I had to sum over 4 years. Maybe if you look back further a different trend will emerge. I stopped at 2008 because it's last year with a HTML version of financial statements readily accessible. PDF versions are available all the way back to 1999.
I really don't get why the parent is modded funny. Plenty of countries have universal health care. There's no reason why these countries can't pool their resources together to research "open drugs".
The vast majority of drugs today are already developed in academic institutes with funding from drug companies. All that would be changing is just the source of the funding.
I bet you're thinking "but wouldn't countries who don't contribute to the "open drug fund" get a free ride?". Well in response I ask: Why would company X spend millions to develop product Y and then open source it? Wouldn't that give their competitors a free ride? (If you can't name at least a dozen X,Y pairs please hand in your geek card)
Last year they spent 17.975 billion euros on manufacturing, and 2.932 billion on R&D. "Selling expenses", which I assume are mostly advertising costs, was 8.958 billion. Note though that these data also include Bayer's GM food and material science divisions. Medical R&D only accounts for 66.4% of their total R&D expenses. I'm too lazy to tabulate how much of their manufacturing and advertising costs are from the medicinal division.
No offense, but all I had to do was type in bayer.com and click on the "annual report" link on their front page. All that probably took less time than typing "can anyone show me the stats".
They want a convenient one-stop-shop for all their politician-purchasing needs.
"Purchasing" isn't exactly the right term here. The CRTC chairman was an Assistant Director at Bell and a President at Rogers. He's still technically working for Rogers and Bell, except at a fancier government office that's all.
Earth does not have enough fossil fuel and radioactive materials left to send trillions of pounds material into space. It would cost the VNM swarm a certain amount of energy to process Earth. The swarm does a cost/benefit analysis on each planet/galaxy. Maybe the swarm spent that energy on other planets more worthwhile and skipped Earth.
And of course there are plenty of other possibilities:
Two completing swarms are fighting outside our supercluster as we speak for control of the cluster.
Alien races all discover the necessary technology to become post-scarcity societies. The swarm simply manufactures matter and energy in their home system.
Alien races all discover transcendental technology and have no need for matter and energy anymore. They don't even bother sending out a swarm because physical matter is meaningless to them.
Maybe there's no economic incentive for them to come here.
The self-replicating nanomachines scans the supercluster, sorts the all galaxies by their useful material to junk ratio and sends detachments to the top N galaxies. The algorithm repeats until all galaxies above the cut-off line gets harvested, and the swarm move onto the next supercluster.
But seriously though, it's kinda presumptuous to assume that when aliens visit the Virgo supercluster they're required to visit a particular piece of rock within that supercluster.
Maybe there's no economic incentive for them to come here. Maybe they've already came, took their samples, and left. Maybe they're not even interested in studying Earth. Maybe they're too busy fighting a war of attrition against other aliens to care about space explorations.
I'm not thrilled because it's old news. Europa was found to have a mostly oxygen atmosphere back in 1995. Just like Dione, that "atmosphere" is too thin to be useful at only 0.1 uPa.
Slashdot Mirror
The latest version of the 15th edition was introduced in 2010.
After reading the story title I immediately looked up Encyclopedia Britannica's article on Wikipedia. As expected, more than half of the article (714 out of 1378 words) was spent on the Issues and Controversies section.
Al Jazeera that brown dwarves and nomad planets
I see what you did there.
Last year Bayers spent €227 million to acquire 4 companies, only one of which is human health related (the other 3 are animal health and GM food related). That lone human health pharmaceutical acquisition cost €88 million, which is tiny compared to Bayer's own R&D expenses.
Taking a look at the longer term, Bayer spent €732 million in pharmaceutical related acquisitions from 2008 to 2011:
2011: €88 for Pathway Medical Technologies
2010: €0
2009: €43 for SkinMedica, Inc
2008: €601 million in total; €227 million for Possis Medical Inc, €265 for the OTC medicines division of Sagmel Inc, €109 million for Topsun Science and Technology Qidong Gaitianli Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd
Over that same period Bayer spent €6.6 billion on in-house pharmaceutical research.
Note that the acquisitions are very sporadic. Looking at 2010 or 2008 alone for example would give very misleading results, which is why I had to sum over 4 years. Maybe if you look back further a different trend will emerge. I stopped at 2008 because it's last year with a HTML version of financial statements readily accessible. PDF versions are available all the way back to 1999.
I really don't get why the parent is modded funny. Plenty of countries have universal health care. There's no reason why these countries can't pool their resources together to research "open drugs".
The vast majority of drugs today are already developed in academic institutes with funding from drug companies. All that would be changing is just the source of the funding.
I bet you're thinking "but wouldn't countries who don't contribute to the "open drug fund" get a free ride?". Well in response I ask: Why would company X spend millions to develop product Y and then open source it? Wouldn't that give their competitors a free ride? (If you can't name at least a dozen X,Y pairs please hand in your geek card)
Here's Bayer's 2011 annual report.
Last year they spent 17.975 billion euros on manufacturing, and 2.932 billion on R&D. "Selling expenses", which I assume are mostly advertising costs, was 8.958 billion. Note though that these data also include Bayer's GM food and material science divisions. Medical R&D only accounts for 66.4% of their total R&D expenses. I'm too lazy to tabulate how much of their manufacturing and advertising costs are from the medicinal division.
No offense, but all I had to do was type in bayer.com and click on the "annual report" link on their front page. All that probably took less time than typing "can anyone show me the stats".
How is crippling DES "not bad"?
IBM researchers independently discovered differential cryptanalysis, so it's not like NSA contributed anything.
They want a convenient one-stop-shop for all their politician-purchasing needs.
"Purchasing" isn't exactly the right term here. The CRTC chairman was an Assistant Director at Bell and a President at Rogers. He's still technically working for Rogers and Bell, except at a fancier government office that's all.
What if Internet access becomes a constitutional right?
It's gonna be tough to snatch those robot votes away from Romney.
I used to think the patent licensing system was like racketeering. But I was wrong.
With racketeering you only have to pay one gang. With the patent system you have to pay multiple gangs.
More specifically, technocracy.
Sounds like you're talking about Google Goggles.
"Chrome usage is correlated with Calcudoku proficiency"
1) Radio broadcasting, sightseeing, vanity.
2) Weeaboo
He meant "design" as in "aesthetic appearance". You interpreted "design" as in "engineering design". Just a minor miscommunication, that's all.
Earth does not have enough fossil fuel and radioactive materials left to send trillions of pounds material into space. It would cost the VNM swarm a certain amount of energy to process Earth. The swarm does a cost/benefit analysis on each planet/galaxy. Maybe the swarm spent that energy on other planets more worthwhile and skipped Earth.
And of course there are plenty of other possibilities:
Two completing swarms are fighting outside our supercluster as we speak for control of the cluster.
Alien races all discover the necessary technology to become post-scarcity societies. The swarm simply manufactures matter and energy in their home system.
Alien races all discover transcendental technology and have no need for matter and energy anymore. They don't even bother sending out a swarm because physical matter is meaningless to them.
Maybe there's no economic incentive for them to come here.
The self-replicating nanomachines scans the supercluster, sorts the all galaxies by their useful material to junk ratio and sends detachments to the top N galaxies. The algorithm repeats until all galaxies above the cut-off line gets harvested, and the swarm move onto the next supercluster.
Three words explains it all: the Prime Directive.
But seriously though, it's kinda presumptuous to assume that when aliens visit the Virgo supercluster they're required to visit a particular piece of rock within that supercluster.
Maybe there's no economic incentive for them to come here. Maybe they've already came, took their samples, and left. Maybe they're not even interested in studying Earth. Maybe they're too busy fighting a war of attrition against other aliens to care about space explorations.
I'm not thrilled because it's old news. Europa was found to have a mostly oxygen atmosphere back in 1995. Just like Dione, that "atmosphere" is too thin to be useful at only 0.1 uPa.
Hydrogen is much lighter so it either gets stripped away by solar wind or achieves escape velocity.
Because iPod are designed by hippies instead of engineers, am I right?
I would love to see how you can load music and podcast onto an iPod without a computer or the internet.
My fan is diesel powered, you insensitive clod!
Sorry, that was a typo.
For planes and airships there's that whole "Oh no we're losing altitude, let's push the fat guy out" trope.
I wonder what's the weight limit for this little gizmo.