In other news today...
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@magus said in In other news today...:
Are you sure Cortana can't?
With Google Home, you can call any phone in North America for free.
With Skype, it will cost you CAN $9.50 / month
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@timebandit I'm not surprised about that. Google can usually get away with not paying people for things, like they did with Oracle.
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@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
As patients don't have any government's boot on their heads that forces them to buy this stuff, we're obviously dealing with a free and voluntary exchange for mutual advantage here
Yeah. Those companies were selling at a rate to cover their costs and make a bit of profit and then the doctors conspired to drastically reduce the demand for the drug, meaning they would lose a ton of money.
How do you know? J&J paid something between $150M and $975M for development of the stuff 7 years ago. Assuming $975M, that's between 6300 and 8400 patient-years to pay off development. As it's a small molecule that was very cheap to develop (chemically that is, the bulk of the cost came from medical trials), manufacturing costs are likely to be far lower.
Also, are you seriously calling research into lowering medication side effects ("extreme joint pain", liver problems and other pleasantries) a conspiracy?
Maybe in the same sense that Boyer and Moore conspired against hardware vendors.Do people think that pharmaceuticals magically appear for free?
I don't know what people think but that particular thing would be unlikely to be thought by many people because those people would then have to complain about companies charging anything, which I don't see many people doing.
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Yesterday, a van ran over a bunch of pedestrians in Toronto.
The suspect was arrested, without a single bullet fired.
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@hardwaregeek said in In other news today...:
I typically see headers from servers in the source and destination domains, but no relays in between, because that's all just packet switching, not mail relaying, these days.
There's still often quite a few hops, but they usually take hardly any time at all unless you're going through a very large mailing list.
Unless it's a spammer trying to disguise the mail's true origin.
There's not much they can do about that; the forensic information is inserted after it has left computers under their control. Also, they put spam in the content; that's pretty telling as to what you're dealing with.
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@laoc said in In other news today...:
How do you know?
Admittedly, I'm guessing, but it makes as much sense as anything else posted here.
@laoc said in In other news today...:
J&J paid something between $150M and $975M for development of the stuff 7 years ago. Assuming $975M, that's between 6300 and 8400 patient-years to pay off development. As it's a small molecule that was very cheap to develop (chemically that is, the bulk of the cost came from medical trials), manufacturing costs are likely to be far lower.
So it would take that much to pay off just that drug, for break even, without any profit and without considering all the drugs that never got approved and have to be paid for somehow.
@laoc said in In other news today...:
Also, are you seriously calling research into lowering medication side effects ("extreme joint pain", liver problems and other pleasantries) a conspiracy?
No, not really, but the effect is the same without the snark.
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@mott555 said in In other news today...:
Most satellites are in low earth orbit, where there's still quite a bit of atmospheric drag, so old broken stuff falls out of the sky constantly. If they did a moratorium on space launches for (number straight from my butt) 10 years or so, a lot of it would clear up.
I found this at http://www.aerospace.org/cords/all-about-debris-and-reentry/space-debris-faq/
In low Earth orbit (below 600 km or 370 miles), the little atmosphere that is there will, over weeks, months, and years, drag the space debris low enough to reenter. Between 600 km and 1000 km (620 mi) it may take tens to hundreds of years for the debris to reenter. So itās possible that some of the debris will be removed naturally. The problem is that space debris objects can collide with each other and produce more debris.
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@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
@laoc said in In other news today...:
J&J paid something between $150M and $975M for development of the stuff 7 years ago. Assuming $975M, that's between 6300 and 8400 patient-years to pay off development. As it's a small molecule that was very cheap to develop (chemically that is, the bulk of the cost came from medical trials), manufacturing costs are likely to be far lower.
So it would take that much to pay off just that drug, for break even, without any profit and without considering all the drugs that never got approved and have to be paid for somehow.
And this is a major problem. The drugs that even make it to Stage I testing (a small fraction of which make it to the market) only account for a tiny fraction of the development expense. And only those that hit the market can pay for the development of the rest of the iceberg.
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@benjamin-hall said in In other news today...:
And this is a major problem.
A significant amount of research effort in industrial chemistry and biochemistry is in what's usually referred to as ādial a moleculeā, i.e., think up a molecule and a computer can work out how to produce it at sufficient scale for testing. There's also a lot of work being put into ways to predict toxicity, both of the molecule itself and the things it is broken down into as it is metabolised. From some of the links that have crossed my Twitter feed, it looks like these are areas where the leading researchers in the field are starting to get some real success.
However, anything that interferes in any way with the immune system is much trickier, as that's very sensitive and very capable of killing patients in ways that are difficult for hospitals to intervene in. Which is awkward, as it appears that the immune system is very involved in a wide range of diseasesā¦
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@dkf said in In other news today...:
@benjamin-hall said in In other news today...:
And this is a major problem.
A significant amount of research effort in industrial chemistry and biochemistry is in what's usually referred to as ādial a moleculeā, i.e., think up a molecule and a computer can work out how to produce it at sufficient scale for testing. There's also a lot of work being put into ways to predict toxicity, both of the molecule itself and the things it is broken down into as it is metabolised. From some of the links that have crossed my Twitter feed, it looks like these are areas where the leading researchers in the field are starting to get some real success.
However, anything that interferes in any way with the immune system is much trickier, as that's very sensitive and very capable of killing patients in ways that are difficult for hospitals to intervene in. Which is awkward, as it appears that the immune system is very involved in a wide range of diseasesā¦
From everything I've read, getting to the "here's the molecule we want" stage is already a hard challenge. And then getting it to test and actually do what we want is another really hard thing. Because we don't really understand the intermediate biochemistry. We understand individual processes decently. But then there's the maze of interactions between those processes, and there we're pretty clueless. So we target one thing, but end up affecting something else, or the body compensates, or...
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How the Xbox got its name:
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@blakeyrat What really interests me:
Did they come up with the horribly stupid name Xbox One for their third gen first, and only after that fuck-up realized "hey, if we add another X to our last gen's stupid name then Xbox One X will literally spell XBOX"? Or was that the plan from the beginning and they sacrificed that whole 3rd gen name for just this pun later on?
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@timebandit said in In other news today...:
Yesterday, a van ran over a bunch of pedestrians in Toronto.
The suspect was arrested, without a single bullet fired.
Canada. Amirite?
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@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
@laoc said in In other news today...:
How do you know?
Admittedly, I'm guessing, but it makes as much sense as anything else posted here.
@laoc said in In other news today...:
J&J paid something between $150M and $975M for development of the stuff 7 years ago. Assuming $975M, that's between 6300 and 8400 patient-years to pay off development. As it's a small molecule that was very cheap to develop (chemically that is, the bulk of the cost came from medical trials), manufacturing costs are likely to be far lower.
So it would take that much to pay off just that drug, for break even, without any profit
That's an extremely low number though, around 1000 patients over those 7 years. There are no numbers on prescriptions available but one clinical trial involved over 1200 patients already, and for CLL, only one of the diseases against which they use Ibrutinib, there are about 15,000 new cases per year in the US alone. It's safe to assume prescriptions are orders of magnitude higher than this number required for break-even.
Oh, Wikipedia even has a statement on that that fits those rough estimates quite well: Pharmacyclics was acquired by AbbVie in May 2015, and Abbvie projected global sales of US$1 billion in 2016 and $5 billion in 2020.
and without considering all the drugs that never got approved and have to be paid for somehow.
No, then we'd have to calculate with the $150M J&J paid upfront. The rest was in milestones, i.e. to be paid iff the drug makes it past certain trials. It would have been bad business for Pharmacyclics to sell those milestones without factoring in the risk of not making them.
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@benjamin-hall said in In other news today...:
So it would take that much to pay off just that drug, for break even, without any profit and without considering all the drugs that never got approved and have to be paid for somehow.
And this is a major problem. The drugs that even make it to Stage I testing (a small fraction of which make it to the market)
The fraction is between 5 and 26% depending on medical area
only account for a tiny fraction of the development expense.
Non-clinical drug development activity today represents a substantial proportion of total R&D spending. According to the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), in 2011 major pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies spent $10.5 billion or 22% of total annual R&D costs on non-clinical research, more than the total spent on Phase I and II activity combined.
Considering there are three phases to pass before approval, that is to be read as "pre-clinical cost (that whittling down of 1000 candidate substances to the one that goes to clinical trial) is higher than phase I and II combined but lower than phase I+II+III". It makes sense, too, that clinical trials with their higher ethical and methodological standards would be more expensive than lab and animal testing.
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@laoc there are stages before the pre-clinical trials. Heck, defining the target (in bio chem terms) is a hard problem with many iterations. Then trying to get candidate molecules. Then figuring out how to make those molecules. And scale the production. And do it cheaply enough to be economical. All of those are unseen costs in accounting that just considers the testing phase.
Certainly, clinical trials aren't cheap. Nothing is cheap in that arena. But the idea that successful drugs have to pay for themselves and the failed ones is still true, and not reliant on any malice on the company's part.
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@benjamin-hall said in In other news today...:
But then there's the maze of interactions between those processes, and there we're pretty clueless.
There's been a lot of progress made on metabolomics. Also, most of the molecules of interest are actually fairly minor modifications of ones that are already made, with some extra groups tacked on to change the lifetime of the molecule or make it bind slightly differently. That makes producing the molecule a matter of making the precursors, adding the exact right transform to do the bit of extra jiggery-pokery, and then putting the whole thing in a bacterium and brewing up a vat of novel drug. Which is incredibly difficult, but not actually actively impossible; I used to work with people who were busy making that work. (One of the slowest parts of the process is characterising the starting points and finding enzymes that do key parts of the job; we're still truly terrible at de novo enzyme design.) The process of metabolising the resulting compound is extremely closely linked to its toxicity, unsurprisingly. ;)
Genetic engineering is ridiculously difficult to do once it isn't just modifying a single gene in one place.
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@benjamin-hall said in In other news today...:
@laoc there are stages before the pre-clinical trials. Heck, defining the target (in bio chem terms) is a hard problem with many iterations. Then trying to get candidate molecules.
Obviously. That's why they mention "non-clinical drug development activity" instead of "pre-clinical trials".
Certainly, clinical trials aren't cheap. Nothing is cheap in that arena. But the idea that successful drugs have to pay for themselves and the failed ones is still true, and not reliant on any malice on the company's part.
I did the math in my reply to @boomzilla. Note that I never assumed any kind of malice here. Companies are hardly ever malicious, they simply maximize their profits. The problem is that the effect is the same.
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Speaking of @Boner s...
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@boner said in In other news today...:
But I don't even really like breasts...
Edit: and the rest of the suggestions? Get married, fuck a lot, care for kids? Really?
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@boner said in In other news today...:
Staring at boobs is just one of six easy ways men can live longer
The same effect occurs when they look at cute animals.
Furries, explained.
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@boner said in In other news today...:
cute animals.@zecc said in In other news today...:
Furries, explained.
E_CORRELATION_NOT_FOUND
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@hardwaregeek said in In other news today...:
@boner said in In other news today...:
cute animals.@zecc said in In other news today...:
Furries, explained.
E_CORRELATION_NOT_FOUND
He seems to think furries are cute animals?
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@Tsaukpaetra
Having the same reaction to cute animals as to boobs:
Anthropomorphic cartoon animals ā maybe
Real animals ā that's illegal in most jurisdictions
Furries in fur suits ā brain bleach, pleaseMy first thought was the latter, and the correlation with cuteness is actually negative.
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@hardwaregeek said in In other news today...:
@Tsaukpaetra
Having the same reaction to cute animals as to boobs:
Anthropomorphic cartoon animals ā maybe
Real animals ā that's illegal in most jurisdictions
Furries in fur suits ā brain bleach, pleaseMy first thought was the latter, and the correlation with cuteness is actually negative.
Hmmm. This may not apply to me. I don't have much of a reaction to boobs or cute animals (though I'm learning!).
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I feel like that one box already added a few months
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@hardwaregeek said in In other news today...:
@boner said in In other news today...:
cute animals.@zecc said in In other news today...:
Furries, explained.
E_CORRELATION_NOT_FOUND
Furries expand their life by staring at animals with boobs.
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@zecc said in In other news today...:
Staring at boobs is just one of six easy ways men can live longer
The same effect occurs when they look at cute animals.
whynotboth.jpg
You're welcome
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@laoc said in In other news today...:
@zecc said in In other news today...:
Staring at boobs is just one of six easy ways men can live longer
The same effect occurs when they look at cute animals.
whynotboth.jpg
You're welcome
Eh, I rate it factor 4/10 for cuteness.
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@tsaukpaetra said in In other news today...:
Eh, I rate it factor 4/10 for cuteness.
You can't live forever after all.
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@tsaukpaetra said in In other news today...:
Eh, I rate it factor 4/10 for cuteness.
Yeah, it's not good if your boobie is blue at the bottom
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@laoc said in In other news today...:
I did the math in my reply to @boomzilla. Note that I never assumed any kind of malice here. Companies are hardly ever malicious, they simply maximize their profits. The
problemgenius of the system is that the effect is the same.
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@tsaukpaetra said in In other news today...:
Edit: and the rest of the suggestions? Get married
That only makes it seem like longer.
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@boner said in In other news today...:
Staring at boobs is just one of six easy ways men can live longer
Um - that depends on whose boobs you're staring at.
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Now this is my kind of race...
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@timebandit said in In other news today...:
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/new-c-ransomware-compiles-itself-at-runtime/
Well, that's horrible. Also one of the reasons we ditched a normal virus scanner and moved to a system that does live behavioral snooping.
I'm impressed that it loads the new process direct from memory, I managed to get that mostly working eventually. But you need to do a ton of undocumented things as the normal PE loader only works from disk. Without it you have to do all the really fun things like relocation, import loading, fixing the EIP, page protection fixup, screaming a lot...
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In other news, scientists are beginning a study to determine if water is, in fact, wet
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@izzion said in In other news today...:
Cord cutting is being caused primarily by a 74% increase in customer cable bills since 2000
Not only did the bill increased by 74%, but the fuckin ads increased by about the same percentage
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The former chief technical officer and chief software architect of Microsoft and the creator of Lotus Notes
Oh.
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@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
They wouldn't have had this issue if they previewed the structures in VR.