It may or may not be true that 9 out of 10 fail, I don't know, and I don't really care. The overall profit over the year indicates that 1/10 success rate is still wildly profitable.
The latter part of your paragraph speaks of pharmaceuticals going bust all the time, which leads me to think we're talking about two different types of pharmaceutical companies. A quick google will show you that they go bust all the time, with debts in excess of $10 million USD, which to put it in perspective, is the amount of profit the #1 pharmaceutical company in the world makes in 6 hours and 20 minutes. I'm not arguing that it's hard to get started up in the pharmaceutical business. That same company, btw, spends 3.3% of its revenue on R&D, and rakes in 20.4% of its revenue in raw, net profit.
3.3%. Put another way, every single year, they can fund the entirety of their R&D expenses for the next 17 years. After 2 years, they've made enough to fund the entirety of their R&D expenses for the next 33 years.
I got my 30% number from the WHO. After reading what you had written, I decided to do some more investigation.
Over the top 12 pharmaceutical companies in the world, ranked by revenue, you are correct: 19.9% is the mean profit margin.
The mean amount of money spent on R&D as a ratio against total revenue is 13.2%.
The median profit margin is 18.9%, max of 42.65% (Go Pfizer!), minimum of 8.6% (Poor Bayer)
The median % of revenue spent on R&D is 14.72%, max of 23.9% (Eli Lilly), minimum of 3.3% (Johnson & Johnson).
I feel safe ignoring quarterlies and simply looking at the year-over-year. Quarterlies are far too affected by seasonal fluctuations, and ignore the point that they're overall wildly profitable, far beyond the argument of "shit is expensive because a lot of wasted dollars in R&D". I get that there is inherent risk in the business. But the numbers also firmly support that overall, they're raking in piles of cash with little risk whatsoever, on average.
So really, from my perspective, it looks more like they have "burst profits" that tend to pay for the next 6.7 years of R&D costs (mean across all 12), every. single. fucking. year.
I'm pretty sure we can find a better model to shepherd our scientific talent into finding newer and better drugs.
Horse shit. Pharmaceutical 30% profit margins, patent monopoly, and forced government cash flow in the form of un-negotiated social program requirements are the largest contributors to the expense of health care in the US. It's the same concept behind subsidized student loans and tuition rise. Blaming the FDA is oh so clever though, like they suddenly became more stringent starting in the early 2000's when pharmaceutical profits fucking exploded. Must have been that Bush guy and his love for federal regulation.
It's entirely unethical to allow companies subject to US jurisdiction to conduct what would basically be un-supervised animal trials on third-world denizens.
Perhaps you disagree? I know of a few groups people who thought medical testing on uninformed people was legit in the name of science.
Maybe not "super high", as in particle physics burdens of statistical proof, but 3 standard deviations on an assumed normal distribution is "pretty fucking high".
A larger portion of the cost of developing a drug is the 30% profit margin the corporations with their draconian patent-protected monopolies demand be paid to their shareholders.
30%. Let that sink in for a minute.
That's 3 times better than companies that extract liquid gold from the ground for pennies on the dollar of its worth and sell it.
You're both right. While ebola can't be transmitted via aerosol, being coughed on is more than enough to get infected, should the micron-sized droplets of water touch any of your mucous membranes. That *is* an air-born vector, though not quite as potent as say, influenza.
GSM is a good example of the trouble you can get yourself into if the government prematurely decides something should not be subject to market forces. The EU mandated all wireless phone carriers adhere to GSM.
[citation needed]
And eventually CDMA was incorporated into the GSM standard (most HSPA and HSDPA implementations use wideband CDMA - yes your GSM phone uses CDMA)
Yes, because the Japanese developed W-CDMA and released 3G upon the world, which was incorporated into the UMTS standard while CDMA2000 was still a snot-slow dog that still couldn't pass packet-switched data and run a phone call at the same time.
If the U.S. had gone along with the EU and required GSM, data services would've been several years behind where they are now, and we'd probably still be stuck at around 1 Mbps cellular data speeds.
No, the Japanese still would have utilized the fantastic Russian Code Division Multi-Access scheme known as CDMA to provide better services to their tech-savvy customers while also finding a way to incorporate it into the world standard of portability (GSM + SIM for Network ID).
We didn't invent CDMA. W-CDMA being in the UMTS is not because a couple of US network providers really liked CDMA2000.
At the point when CDMA2000 stopped sucking (EvDO), competing GSM networks were likewise rolling out EDGE support good to several megabits as well, and hey, at least they had SIM cards, and in more enlightened parts of the world, they could even move them to phones without having to suffer from the horse shit that is subsidy locking. Try moving your Verizon phone to Sprint. It's an awesome experience.
I get what you're saying, and even agree with the general point, however, QED for the last half century has been pretty much on a roll of confirming that the math is as close to reality as we can get. There are pretty strong proofs for a lot of bizarre mathematical concepts (wave-function collapse of things larger than bosons, non-locality in entanglement). It appears that the Universe is in fact some kind of bizarre mathematical model, perhaps that we perceive through our limited Einsteinian relativistic space-time. I think this is what leads people to really want to find some kind of String Theory variant to explain it *what it really is* beyond what we can factually test, with the unfortunate side effect of being nearly factually untestable themselves. QM pretty much conclusively shows that whatever "it really is" is not bound by our universal laws of Space Time, but it also concludes that we can only observe it following those laws; so while quantum superposition and entanglement may be real, and there's no fucking way they can happen in 3+1 relativistic space, that's ok, because we'll never observe them directly happening, just the weird slice of the picture we get from our limited view- in short, for us, the math *is* reality, until we're no longer limited by the laws of our relativistic universe.
Of course you can't have a perfect void, but it's quite a stretch to go from "vacuum has a refractive index" to "if it didn't, light speed would be infinite". You're basically saying General and Special Relativity are wrong, as Lorentz Invariance and the Speed of Light (the number, nothing itself to do with light) being the upper bound of velocity that not just the Universe, but Time itself can sustain. At c, time increments by 0. I'm also not including -t (>c) tachyons in that generalization, but they still follow the same rules, just on the other side of the center line.
Well, it's a label to describe an indivisible quanta of an interaction that we observe.
The electrical field wasn't always believed to have a discrete resolution (the electron).
Net angular momentum. Writing software to model simple square-distance fall-off force attraction across many particles will yield a flattened, or progressively more ovoid distribution, depending on the net angular momentum, if angular momentum is conserved.
Just to up the ante on the weirdness: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
The interference pattern can be destroyed, seemingly retroactively (if one doesn't accept superposition). Not many people are willing to accept particles with wave-functions measurable with interferometry (up to buckyballs, I believe) will go back in time and and alter their flight characteristics. The Universe really is quantum. And fucking weird.
The interference pattern emerges in spite of a conga line of electrically unconnected electrons, sent one at a time at a double-slit interface to the detector. Leptons, not bosons. Things with *rest mass*. Volume. Real shit, not just light, is *actually* a wave-function.
It's the most fucking bizarre thing in the Universe that I'm aware of, and upon learning of the single-electron version of the experiment, I finally realized that what we perceive of the universe isn't anything close to what it really is. We are little circles in a flat universe trying to perceive spheres passing through our planes of perception, or something that our evolved senses have similarly not equipped us to grok.
I have licensed GPL code (some of it Linux kernel code). I specifically didn't care about the idea of tivoization, and was even running a tivoized device that I developed it for (cell phone).
I have a distaste for the practice, to be sure, but for me the selection of GPL licensing even where I'm not really required to is more about just making sure that improvements or ports of the code make it back. Companies that tivoize are shit-bags. They're also more likely to give something back, though, and that's better than nothing. I'd prefer not to limit their rights for how they use my code. That's more about morality, and they can deal with the consequences of their immorality without me enforcing it upon them. My improved comes back, that's good enough for me.
I don't know what else to tell you. They really do suck. Trap-gates are faster and safer. Call-gates are... prettier, more elegant. It's probably much a much narrower/null lead these days with massive caches, but back in 98, it was serious business. The various kernel mailing lists are abound with discussions on people wanting to try out call-gates, and finding out that *they suck*. It had nothing to do with portability.
Also, SYSENTER wasn't switched to until we ran into the P4's massive pipeline stall on trap-gates, which the AMD K6 did *not* exhibit. It wasn't a fundamental problem with the trap-gate itself, but a quirk of the Netburst architecture.
Whether you're grabbing privilege descriptors on from the IDT or the GDT/LDT, it's the same amount of work. One has smaller instructions and less bouncing around in memory. That's it. The fact that the unices/dos used entry 0x80 in the IDT, and NT used 0x2e, and 95 used 0x30, with call-gates to VxD code (eventually gotten rid of) doesn't mean the methodology of the trap was what was inherited. Just the number. The methodology was used because it was sound, and the sanest.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the Caliphates would contest that.
So goddamn true.
I'm certain I don't have to explain free-market speculation bubbles to you... Right?
It may or may not be true that 9 out of 10 fail, I don't know, and I don't really care. The overall profit over the year indicates that 1/10 success rate is still wildly profitable.
The latter part of your paragraph speaks of pharmaceuticals going bust all the time, which leads me to think we're talking about two different types of pharmaceutical companies. A quick google will show you that they go bust all the time, with debts in excess of $10 million USD, which to put it in perspective, is the amount of profit the #1 pharmaceutical company in the world makes in 6 hours and 20 minutes. I'm not arguing that it's hard to get started up in the pharmaceutical business. That same company, btw, spends 3.3% of its revenue on R&D, and rakes in 20.4% of its revenue in raw, net profit. 3.3%. Put another way, every single year, they can fund the entirety of their R&D expenses for the next 17 years. After 2 years, they've made enough to fund the entirety of their R&D expenses for the next 33 years.
I got my 30% number from the WHO. After reading what you had written, I decided to do some more investigation.
Over the top 12 pharmaceutical companies in the world, ranked by revenue, you are correct: 19.9% is the mean profit margin.
The mean amount of money spent on R&D as a ratio against total revenue is 13.2%.
The median profit margin is 18.9%, max of 42.65% (Go Pfizer!), minimum of 8.6% (Poor Bayer)
The median % of revenue spent on R&D is 14.72%, max of 23.9% (Eli Lilly), minimum of 3.3% (Johnson & Johnson).
I feel safe ignoring quarterlies and simply looking at the year-over-year. Quarterlies are far too affected by seasonal fluctuations, and ignore the point that they're overall wildly profitable, far beyond the argument of "shit is expensive because a lot of wasted dollars in R&D". I get that there is inherent risk in the business. But the numbers also firmly support that overall, they're raking in piles of cash with little risk whatsoever, on average.
So really, from my perspective, it looks more like they have "burst profits" that tend to pay for the next 6.7 years of R&D costs (mean across all 12), every. single. fucking. year.
I'm pretty sure we can find a better model to shepherd our scientific talent into finding newer and better drugs.
You can't make a baby in 1 month by getting 9 women pregnant.
I'd gladly volunteer to test this hypothesis if the most likely outcome weren't 9 babies in 9 months.
Horse shit. Pharmaceutical 30% profit margins, patent monopoly, and forced government cash flow in the form of un-negotiated social program requirements are the largest contributors to the expense of health care in the US. It's the same concept behind subsidized student loans and tuition rise. Blaming the FDA is oh so clever though, like they suddenly became more stringent starting in the early 2000's when pharmaceutical profits fucking exploded. Must have been that Bush guy and his love for federal regulation.
Oh, it follows.
It's entirely unethical to allow companies subject to US jurisdiction to conduct what would basically be un-supervised animal trials on third-world denizens.
Perhaps you disagree? I know of a few groups people who thought medical testing on uninformed people was legit in the name of science.
Maybe not "super high", as in particle physics burdens of statistical proof, but 3 standard deviations on an assumed normal distribution is "pretty fucking high".
A larger portion of the cost of developing a drug is the 30% profit margin the corporations with their draconian patent-protected monopolies demand be paid to their shareholders.
30%. Let that sink in for a minute.
That's 3 times better than companies that extract liquid gold from the ground for pennies on the dollar of its worth and sell it.
Odds are you just wasted way too many finger strokes responding to an ignorant AC.
By my math, they could fund 3 new wonder drugs, in whole, every single year with their profits.
Your logic is undeniable, however in the face of facts, it falls flat on its face.
http://www.who.int/trade/gloss...
In the face of a 30% profit margin, I'd say they're charging what the market of fear-of-death will bear, not what is just or right.
You're both right. While ebola can't be transmitted via aerosol, being coughed on is more than enough to get infected, should the micron-sized droplets of water touch any of your mucous membranes. That *is* an air-born vector, though not quite as potent as say, influenza.
GSM is a good example of the trouble you can get yourself into if the government prematurely decides something should not be subject to market forces. The EU mandated all wireless phone carriers adhere to GSM.
[citation needed]
And eventually CDMA was incorporated into the GSM standard (most HSPA and HSDPA implementations use wideband CDMA - yes your GSM phone uses CDMA)
Yes, because the Japanese developed W-CDMA and released 3G upon the world, which was incorporated into the UMTS standard while CDMA2000 was still a snot-slow dog that still couldn't pass packet-switched data and run a phone call at the same time.
If the U.S. had gone along with the EU and required GSM, data services would've been several years behind where they are now, and we'd probably still be stuck at around 1 Mbps cellular data speeds.
No, the Japanese still would have utilized the fantastic Russian Code Division Multi-Access scheme known as CDMA to provide better services to their tech-savvy customers while also finding a way to incorporate it into the world standard of portability (GSM + SIM for Network ID).
We didn't invent CDMA. W-CDMA being in the UMTS is not because a couple of US network providers really liked CDMA2000.
At the point when CDMA2000 stopped sucking (EvDO), competing GSM networks were likewise rolling out EDGE support good to several megabits as well, and hey, at least they had SIM cards, and in more enlightened parts of the world, they could even move them to phones without having to suffer from the horse shit that is subsidy locking. Try moving your Verizon phone to Sprint. It's an awesome experience.
To the surprise of some, to be sure, the President didn't attempt to run again in 2008.
I get what you're saying, and even agree with the general point, however, QED for the last half century has been pretty much on a roll of confirming that the math is as close to reality as we can get. There are pretty strong proofs for a lot of bizarre mathematical concepts (wave-function collapse of things larger than bosons, non-locality in entanglement). It appears that the Universe is in fact some kind of bizarre mathematical model, perhaps that we perceive through our limited Einsteinian relativistic space-time. I think this is what leads people to really want to find some kind of String Theory variant to explain it *what it really is* beyond what we can factually test, with the unfortunate side effect of being nearly factually untestable themselves. QM pretty much conclusively shows that whatever "it really is" is not bound by our universal laws of Space Time, but it also concludes that we can only observe it following those laws; so while quantum superposition and entanglement may be real, and there's no fucking way they can happen in 3+1 relativistic space, that's ok, because we'll never observe them directly happening, just the weird slice of the picture we get from our limited view- in short, for us, the math *is* reality, until we're no longer limited by the laws of our relativistic universe.
Of course you can't have a perfect void, but it's quite a stretch to go from "vacuum has a refractive index" to "if it didn't, light speed would be infinite". You're basically saying General and Special Relativity are wrong, as Lorentz Invariance and the Speed of Light (the number, nothing itself to do with light) being the upper bound of velocity that not just the Universe, but Time itself can sustain. At c, time increments by 0. I'm also not including -t (>c) tachyons in that generalization, but they still follow the same rules, just on the other side of the center line.
Well, it's a label to describe an indivisible quanta of an interaction that we observe.
The electrical field wasn't always believed to have a discrete resolution (the electron).
Net angular momentum. Writing software to model simple square-distance fall-off force attraction across many particles will yield a flattened, or progressively more ovoid distribution, depending on the net angular momentum, if angular momentum is conserved.
I did it in high school, give it a shot.
Just to up the ante on the weirdness: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
The interference pattern can be destroyed, seemingly retroactively (if one doesn't accept superposition). Not many people are willing to accept particles with wave-functions measurable with interferometry (up to buckyballs, I believe) will go back in time and and alter their flight characteristics. The Universe really is quantum. And fucking weird.
Multiple electrons sent serially.
The interference pattern emerges in spite of a conga line of electrically unconnected electrons, sent one at a time at a double-slit interface to the detector. Leptons, not bosons. Things with *rest mass*. Volume. Real shit, not just light, is *actually* a wave-function.
It's the most fucking bizarre thing in the Universe that I'm aware of, and upon learning of the single-electron version of the experiment, I finally realized that what we perceive of the universe isn't anything close to what it really is. We are little circles in a flat universe trying to perceive spheres passing through our planes of perception, or something that our evolved senses have similarly not equipped us to grok.
Americans first.
I have licensed GPL code (some of it Linux kernel code). I specifically didn't care about the idea of tivoization, and was even running a tivoized device that I developed it for (cell phone).
I have a distaste for the practice, to be sure, but for me the selection of GPL licensing even where I'm not really required to is more about just making sure that improvements or ports of the code make it back. Companies that tivoize are shit-bags. They're also more likely to give something back, though, and that's better than nothing. I'd prefer not to limit their rights for how they use my code. That's more about morality, and they can deal with the consequences of their immorality without me enforcing it upon them. My improved comes back, that's good enough for me.
Sigh.
https://lkml.org/lkml/1998/9/3...
I don't know what else to tell you. They really do suck. Trap-gates are faster and safer. Call-gates are... prettier, more elegant. It's probably much a much narrower/null lead these days with massive caches, but back in 98, it was serious business. The various kernel mailing lists are abound with discussions on people wanting to try out call-gates, and finding out that *they suck*. It had nothing to do with portability.
Hell, today's SYSENTER mechanism isn't remotely portable.
Also, SYSENTER wasn't switched to until we ran into the P4's massive pipeline stall on trap-gates, which the AMD K6 did *not* exhibit. It wasn't a fundamental problem with the trap-gate itself, but a quirk of the Netburst architecture.
Whether you're grabbing privilege descriptors on from the IDT or the GDT/LDT, it's the same amount of work. One has smaller instructions and less bouncing around in memory. That's it. The fact that the unices/dos used entry 0x80 in the IDT, and NT used 0x2e, and 95 used 0x30, with call-gates to VxD code (eventually gotten rid of) doesn't mean the methodology of the trap was what was inherited. Just the number. The methodology was used because it was sound, and the sanest.