I remember in the 1980s it seemed like kind of a big deal, an "advanced" programming language that required a compiler and a more real computer than an Apple ][ (although, yes, there was a Pascal system for the ][, IIRC it was worthless without two disk drives and really not an ideal platform). I knew people writing commercial software in Pascal. They taught it when I was in college. I think "Inside Macintosh" Vols. 1-3 that documented the Macintosh used Pascal.
It was kind of everywhere, and then it wasn't. What happened to it? Was it not really meant to be a "practical" language and meant to be kind of an advanced educational language? Did the growth of Unix-like systems on x86 push everyone into C? Did stuff like the availability of maybe Visual Basic or something grab the users who would have used Pascal?
Circa 1986 or so, you wouldn't have thought "kind of a dead language, nobody uses it for anything anymore" and you wouldn't have thought it would get that way any time soon.
It is incredible how many people bring "free speech!" up in conversation where it is not warranted.
It's actually more incredible how many people think that freedom of speech is only a concept in relation to governmental restrictions on communication.
Obviously private party restrictions on speech aren't a violation of 1st Amendment rights, but it should be more than obvious that freedom of speech can be threatened by private restrictions on speech by refusing access to media, venues or physical places which are commonly accepted as public spaces.
I think part of it is a mindset that every problem has a solution, and that existing problems remain problems only because whoever gets to decide doesn't like the solution.
I'm sure everyone in IT has been at the point where euphemistically the solution to a problem is just to nuke the old system and start over because the problems in the old system are so complex and intractable that fixing it isn't practical on any timescale and replacing it is more time efficient.
I think applying that kind of thinking to political and social problems is probably a very easy step for a lot of people to make.
I also think that engineers are prone to thinking of "correct" and "incorrect" answers -- I've known plenty of IT people who once they latch onto "the correct" answer can't see any other solution -- even ones that solve the same problem -- as correct. There's one right answer. 1 + 1 = 2 and everything else is *wrong*.
It's not really what you'd call comprehensive, but monitoring power consumption is a reasonable way to guess at how active a device is, especially if the vendor says it's doing nothing.
Any law that actually implemented this would close obvious loopholes like this and I also suspect the courts would invalidate other sham arrangements designed to accomplish the same thing.
The entire fucking place is one giant network, down to the RF wristbands ("magicbands") used by guests to do everything from unlocking their rooms, paying tabs everywhere throughout the entire resort, getting on rides, entering the parks, everything.
And let's not forget that pretty much every ride and attraction runs or is directly dependent on computers. It's like Steam, but connected to animatronics.
Disneyworld is the most IT-driven place I've ever been to.
We can fix this problem and get patent reform at the same time.
After 3 years, patents issued to foreign based or owned companies can't be enforced against US owned companies making products in the US that utilize them. Patents issued to American owned companies using the patent to make a product in the US can enforce them for the normal time against anyone.
This solves the problem with obnoxious multi-nationals hoarding patents by making them only useful for a very short time. It discourages US companies from "inverting" for tax purposes but largely remaining American corporations (and thus benefitting from taxpayer provided legal, diplomatic and protection but skipping out on the taxes). And it encourages businesses to make products in the US.
Of course companies with insanely good and hard to make products may choose not to sell them here because of this, but the upside is there'd be an incentive and means to make them here by other means and for the most part, willfully refusing to sell in the American marketplace is like throwing money away.
There's no reason that the patent system couldn't be used as a tool to encourage business in America and discourage evading paying for the very civil society that makes business work. Hopefully now Pfizer will be utilizing the vast resources, long reach and deep influence of the Irish government to enforce their patents, lobby governments when they don't get the treatment they want, when, say a new drug is copied in China or India or when the FDA doesn't approve it.
That's easy to solve. MS will sell you an Enterprise Root CA Server system which _can_ install into client root CA stores. It's only $10,000 plus $100 per CAL for every client system the root CA is installed on.
I keep trying to play on the relentless oppression of my German people since the Roman empire and how this is a crime that hasn't been addressed and has been repeated over the centuries, from the 100 years war, the Napoleonic wars, the anti-German discrimination against German Americans during and after WW I, the internment of Germans during WW II.
My people are being picked on, and it's been going on FOR MILLENNIA and I deserve a check in the mail.
Nearly 12,000 Germans were interred during WW II as well.
I'm never quite sure why when internment is mentioned that this is left out. It could be that it's because it's historically obscure or smaller than the number of Japanese interred.
Or could just be that the fact that Germans were interred doesn't fit the "because racism" narrative of internment.
As they say, water will find its own level. A sport that says "sure, take whatever drugs you want" will probably follow some kind of path.
At first, it will be weird, high tech drugs that have minimal risks and probably marginal improvements. But the pressure of competition will result in increasingly risky drugs being used. Eventually athletes will die -- during competition, after competition or suffer debilitating chronic conditions after their careers are over.
At some point, the athletes will only take drugs with minimal risks which will likely mean minimal performance enhancement and we'll reach the point where everybody is back to the same place.
White phosphorous is used in munitions, including the controversial "whiskey pete" anti-personnel explosives. Red phosphorous is the source for phosphine, a toxic gas used as a fumigant.
OK, neither one is mercury or a radionuclide, but one is red, one is a weapon, and phosphine could be used as WMD.
Project comes a long with a whole bunch of "after hours" tasks which, as it turns out, you really can get done in normal hours without any noticeable disruption.
Or when it's really necessary, structuring the project so that the "after hours" work gets done on MY schedule, rather than arbitrarily.
Or making sure that "after hours" work is something that can be done from my house, rather than on site.
I think it goes way beyond the kind of social politics of feminism and actually far deeper into the neuropsychology of female desire.
I think women have the ability to engage in sexual behavior without actually being motivated by an erotic desire for sex. Want to please their husband/boyfriend/partner, want to make money (eg, prostitutes, porn actresses). I think in many cases these women find the *stimulation* of the sexual activity pleasurable (eg, prostitutes do report experiencing orgasms, even some rape victims report experiencing orgasms).
Yet I think for a lot of them there's a certain kind of cognitive dissonance when they lack both a strong external motivation (eg, please a partner, make money) and they also lack any specific erotic motivation. I think a lot of these kinds of situations are non-coercive, yet women are being encouraged to view the cognitive dissonance of these experience as being "date rape", often based on their ex-post-facto emotional responses.
It's clear there are people exaggerating the claims or severity of sexual violence, but it's also clear that many women have participated in "real sex" that they wanted no part of, either before, during or after. That latter number is hard to pin down, but does consistently seem to be somewhere in the 10-20% range. We have to stop that.
I think there's a larger number of women who are participating in "real sex" that they weren't sure they wanted before, were engaged enough with during to continue, but were unhappy with after.
How exactly is that situation supposed to be evaluated? Does it ever make sense to allow ex-post-facto "justice" against a sexual partner? While there's probably lots of reasons to criticize a sexual partner after the fact, it seems unfair to decide after that the fact that the totality of the experience is somehow non-consensual.
I think the "problem" is probably much deeper than that and involves a whole bunch of cultural assumptions, behaviors and perhaps even physiological responses that aren't even questioned, let alone well understood.
I've always been kind of curious about the assumptions implied by the language used to describe sexual encounters. Sex is often described in active/passive giver/receiver terms. "I let him have sex with me" or more colloquially "I let him fuck me", implying that sex in some way is an experience where men actively act on women who somewhat passively accept or recieve it.
Men and women typically approcah sex with men as the initiators, with women signallling their approval quite often by passive acceptance of male advances throughout the sexual experience.
I also think there's something of a physiological element as well. I've read that some percentage of women actually experience orgasm during consciously unwanted sexual encounters. Which leads somewhat to a kind of paradox where women may actually by experiencing some kind of physical pleasure during a sexual encounter that they may not conscioulsy want from an intellectual and emotional perspective. It's not hard to see this leading to a kind of cognitive dissonance and confusion which allows results in the sexual act to be completed (physical response in the moment overriding longer term desire and motivation) yet longer term the experience is evaluated by women as being unwanted despite the appearance of it being desired at the time.
Now, ladle on to that all the other elements of college -- alcohol and drug use clouding judgement, a lack of experience by both men and women in terms of what they really believe to be a holisitically good sexual experience, broader social expectations about "hooking up", etc.
And then you have a fairly strong undercurrent of ideology in feminism that tends to view most sex, including sex that most people would consider consensual, as being rape or male aggression.
But let's ignore all that, create an app that just turns sexual assault into a yes/no checkbox.
When the drug dealer started sending MMS images of clocks?
It seems entirely reasonable that you could plan just about anything with plain text SMS. It wouldn't be hard to talk about whatever it was in plain language substituting normal activities like going shopping or whatever.
An innocuous code would be impossible to decode if you didn't suspect the people in question. You'd never filter out the 373738483847 other texts that were about mundane activities.
My first thought was that "shouting fire in a crowded theater" is a dated metaphor. Building codes have been updated, emergency exits increased, emergency lighting, fire alarms and so on.
When Justice Holmes used it as a metaphor in 1919 or thereabouts, it probably made more sense. Theaters were made of wood, many of them prior to electrification used fire to do lighting, there really wasn't much of a concept of emergency exits, and no fire alarm or smoke alarms to provide early alerts as to fires. Your only hope of escaping WAS rushing out of the theater as soon as the alarm was raised, not doing so placed your life in grave peril.
So at this point it's not hard to see why shouting fire falsely is malicious and deserving of restriction. At the time the metaphor was coined, a theater fire DID represent a serious risk and the panicked responses were not really excessive. 5 of the 10 deadliest building fires in US history were in theaters.
I would not necessarily assume that the GP was ignorant.
The physician's assistant *works for* the surgeon. It's a 1:1 relationship.
The basic problem is that there isn't prescribing alignment between the two professionals working with each other in a direct reporting relationship in the same practice.
Perhaps the PA is wrong for deviating from the prescribing practice of the surgeon she works for, although you can make a strong argument that the PA was actually employing a better prescribing practice based on newer and more sound understandings of acetaminophen toxicity (IIRC, the FDA very nearly voted to ban painkiller compounds with acetaminophen).
I think it's hard to argue in defense of the surgeon's reflexive prescription of acetaminophen painkiller compounds. Sure, she's done it forever, and there's probably data (older, and perhaps less reliable like so much research) that acetaminophen boosts oxycodone effectiveness resulting in lower oxycodone consumption.
Although I'm always suspicious of the goal of marginally reduced painkiller consumption. I don't know if you can even get sub-5mg doses without access to compounding pharmacy nor do I know what kind of reduced consumption an acetaminophen containing compound would have. Is the risk of toxicity really worth an extra 5mg oxycodone consumption per day? It really feels like "zomg, opioids, addiction" paranoia that doesn't really do much useful.
Clearly Barton's idea has numerous, show-stopping problems but I feel like playing contrarian.
Even in the US, the 1st amendment isn't totally immutable. There are concepts like "fighting words" and the notion that you can't shout "fire" in a crowded theater. And I don't doubt that the court would go along with some limitations on 1st amendment rights during wartime.
Could Barton have some kind of argument based on these limitations? Could you possibly even frame the argument that taking down terrorist web sites was actually protective of law abiding Muslims because ordinary people might be incited to violence against them by exposure to propaganda that colors Islam as a religion of violence and hatred?
I don't even know if Doctors know all that much about the drugs they prescribe or keep up with new information.
I had a serious accident that involved amputating half my left ring finger and fusion of the distal joint on my left middle finger. The hand surgeon prescribed Percocet for pain management -- oxycodone with acetaminophen.
I had a review with the surgeon's physician assistant about two weeks after surgery and she renewed my pain medication, prescribing straight oxycodone (same strength as the Percocet, minus the acetaminophen). When I asked her why she did that, she said "well, the latest advice is to reduce acetaminophen consumption".
At my next follow up visit, this time with the hand surgeon she asked me if I needed the medication refilled. I said yes and asked if she could write it for the formulation without acetaminophen. She asked why and looked at me like I was a drug addict. I finally told her that's what the PA did and what her rationale was. She did it, but was clearly bothered at being confronted with a potentially outdated prescribing practice.
I've had similar experiences with other prescription drugs where the doctor just hands you a prescription, but the pharmacist goes into a long description of usage and side effects. One was for a "black label" antibiotic that I might have challenged in the doctor's office if he had been informed and informed me of it.
What I wonder is if the pharmacist's role is so important (and I think there's a huge gap in education and information on drugs), why is the pharmacist experience at a retail counter (with basically zero patient relationship -- my pharmacy has had like six different pharmacists on staff in two years) and the doctor is the cloistered office visit? Maybe doctors should only recommend therapies in their offices and then have an in-office pharmacist visit with patients who get prescriptions to review both the recommendation, other drugs they're taking and provide information on how to take the drug, side effects, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember in the 1980s it seemed like kind of a big deal, an "advanced" programming language that required a compiler and a more real computer than an Apple ][ (although, yes, there was a Pascal system for the ][, IIRC it was worthless without two disk drives and really not an ideal platform). I knew people writing commercial software in Pascal. They taught it when I was in college. I think "Inside Macintosh" Vols. 1-3 that documented the Macintosh used Pascal.
It was kind of everywhere, and then it wasn't. What happened to it? Was it not really meant to be a "practical" language and meant to be kind of an advanced educational language? Did the growth of Unix-like systems on x86 push everyone into C? Did stuff like the availability of maybe Visual Basic or something grab the users who would have used Pascal?
Circa 1986 or so, you wouldn't have thought "kind of a dead language, nobody uses it for anything anymore" and you wouldn't have thought it would get that way any time soon.
It is incredible how many people bring "free speech!" up in conversation where it is not warranted.
It's actually more incredible how many people think that freedom of speech is only a concept in relation to governmental restrictions on communication.
Obviously private party restrictions on speech aren't a violation of 1st Amendment rights, but it should be more than obvious that freedom of speech can be threatened by private restrictions on speech by refusing access to media, venues or physical places which are commonly accepted as public spaces.
I think part of it is a mindset that every problem has a solution, and that existing problems remain problems only because whoever gets to decide doesn't like the solution.
I'm sure everyone in IT has been at the point where euphemistically the solution to a problem is just to nuke the old system and start over because the problems in the old system are so complex and intractable that fixing it isn't practical on any timescale and replacing it is more time efficient.
I think applying that kind of thinking to political and social problems is probably a very easy step for a lot of people to make.
I also think that engineers are prone to thinking of "correct" and "incorrect" answers -- I've known plenty of IT people who once they latch onto "the correct" answer can't see any other solution -- even ones that solve the same problem -- as correct. There's one right answer. 1 + 1 = 2 and everything else is *wrong*.
It's not really what you'd call comprehensive, but monitoring power consumption is a reasonable way to guess at how active a device is, especially if the vendor says it's doing nothing.
Any law that actually implemented this would close obvious loopholes like this and I also suspect the courts would invalidate other sham arrangements designed to accomplish the same thing.
You've never been to Disneyworld, have you?
The entire fucking place is one giant network, down to the RF wristbands ("magicbands") used by guests to do everything from unlocking their rooms, paying tabs everywhere throughout the entire resort, getting on rides, entering the parks, everything.
And let's not forget that pretty much every ride and attraction runs or is directly dependent on computers. It's like Steam, but connected to animatronics.
Disneyworld is the most IT-driven place I've ever been to.
We can fix this problem and get patent reform at the same time.
After 3 years, patents issued to foreign based or owned companies can't be enforced against US owned companies making products in the US that utilize them. Patents issued to American owned companies using the patent to make a product in the US can enforce them for the normal time against anyone.
This solves the problem with obnoxious multi-nationals hoarding patents by making them only useful for a very short time. It discourages US companies from "inverting" for tax purposes but largely remaining American corporations (and thus benefitting from taxpayer provided legal, diplomatic and protection but skipping out on the taxes). And it encourages businesses to make products in the US.
Of course companies with insanely good and hard to make products may choose not to sell them here because of this, but the upside is there'd be an incentive and means to make them here by other means and for the most part, willfully refusing to sell in the American marketplace is like throwing money away.
There's no reason that the patent system couldn't be used as a tool to encourage business in America and discourage evading paying for the very civil society that makes business work. Hopefully now Pfizer will be utilizing the vast resources, long reach and deep influence of the Irish government to enforce their patents, lobby governments when they don't get the treatment they want, when, say a new drug is copied in China or India or when the FDA doesn't approve it.
Yeah, but thanks to Justice Department "internal security guidance", there will be no anti-trust suit against Windows' new "root ca secure store".
That's easy to solve. MS will sell you an Enterprise Root CA Server system which _can_ install into client root CA stores. It's only $10,000 plus $100 per CAL for every client system the root CA is installed on.
...a root certificate store that is locked and can only have NSA-approved certificates installed.
I keep trying to play on the relentless oppression of my German people since the Roman empire and how this is a crime that hasn't been addressed and has been repeated over the centuries, from the 100 years war, the Napoleonic wars, the anti-German discrimination against German Americans during and after WW I, the internment of Germans during WW II.
My people are being picked on, and it's been going on FOR MILLENNIA and I deserve a check in the mail.
Nearly 12,000 Germans were interred during WW II as well.
I'm never quite sure why when internment is mentioned that this is left out. It could be that it's because it's historically obscure or smaller than the number of Japanese interred.
Or could just be that the fact that Germans were interred doesn't fit the "because racism" narrative of internment.
I think this is a great idea, actually.
As they say, water will find its own level. A sport that says "sure, take whatever drugs you want" will probably follow some kind of path.
At first, it will be weird, high tech drugs that have minimal risks and probably marginal improvements. But the pressure of competition will result in increasingly risky drugs being used. Eventually athletes will die -- during competition, after competition or suffer debilitating chronic conditions after their careers are over.
At some point, the athletes will only take drugs with minimal risks which will likely mean minimal performance enhancement and we'll reach the point where everybody is back to the same place.
White phosphorous is used in munitions, including the controversial "whiskey pete" anti-personnel explosives. Red phosphorous is the source for phosphine, a toxic gas used as a fumigant.
OK, neither one is mercury or a radionuclide, but one is red, one is a weapon, and phosphine could be used as WMD.
I would "reasonably" expect children to be present in a school zone an hour before school starts and maybe a couple of hours after school ended.
I wouldn't consider it reasonable to expect children to be present while school was in session -- I mean, they're inside being taught, right?
Is there any reason that this kind of setup couldn't be used to create virtual servers and network environments?
I've always wondered how long it would be until there was a CAD-like drawing environment for creating virtual server environments.
Am I the only one who cheats at this?
Project comes a long with a whole bunch of "after hours" tasks which, as it turns out, you really can get done in normal hours without any noticeable disruption.
Or when it's really necessary, structuring the project so that the "after hours" work gets done on MY schedule, rather than arbitrarily.
Or making sure that "after hours" work is something that can be done from my house, rather than on site.
I think it goes way beyond the kind of social politics of feminism and actually far deeper into the neuropsychology of female desire.
I think women have the ability to engage in sexual behavior without actually being motivated by an erotic desire for sex. Want to please their husband/boyfriend/partner, want to make money (eg, prostitutes, porn actresses). I think in many cases these women find the *stimulation* of the sexual activity pleasurable (eg, prostitutes do report experiencing orgasms, even some rape victims report experiencing orgasms).
Yet I think for a lot of them there's a certain kind of cognitive dissonance when they lack both a strong external motivation (eg, please a partner, make money) and they also lack any specific erotic motivation. I think a lot of these kinds of situations are non-coercive, yet women are being encouraged to view the cognitive dissonance of these experience as being "date rape", often based on their ex-post-facto emotional responses.
It's clear there are people exaggerating the claims or severity of sexual violence, but it's also clear that many women have participated in "real sex" that they wanted no part of, either before, during or after. That latter number is hard to pin down, but does consistently seem to be somewhere in the 10-20% range. We have to stop that.
I think there's a larger number of women who are participating in "real sex" that they weren't sure they wanted before, were engaged enough with during to continue, but were unhappy with after.
How exactly is that situation supposed to be evaluated? Does it ever make sense to allow ex-post-facto "justice" against a sexual partner? While there's probably lots of reasons to criticize a sexual partner after the fact, it seems unfair to decide after that the fact that the totality of the experience is somehow non-consensual.
I think the "problem" is probably much deeper than that and involves a whole bunch of cultural assumptions, behaviors and perhaps even physiological responses that aren't even questioned, let alone well understood.
I've always been kind of curious about the assumptions implied by the language used to describe sexual encounters. Sex is often described in active/passive giver/receiver terms. "I let him have sex with me" or more colloquially "I let him fuck me", implying that sex in some way is an experience where men actively act on women who somewhat passively accept or recieve it.
Men and women typically approcah sex with men as the initiators, with women signallling their approval quite often by passive acceptance of male advances throughout the sexual experience.
I also think there's something of a physiological element as well. I've read that some percentage of women actually experience orgasm during consciously unwanted sexual encounters. Which leads somewhat to a kind of paradox where women may actually by experiencing some kind of physical pleasure during a sexual encounter that they may not conscioulsy want from an intellectual and emotional perspective. It's not hard to see this leading to a kind of cognitive dissonance and confusion which allows results in the sexual act to be completed (physical response in the moment overriding longer term desire and motivation) yet longer term the experience is evaluated by women as being unwanted despite the appearance of it being desired at the time.
Now, ladle on to that all the other elements of college -- alcohol and drug use clouding judgement, a lack of experience by both men and women in terms of what they really believe to be a holisitically good sexual experience, broader social expectations about "hooking up", etc.
And then you have a fairly strong undercurrent of ideology in feminism that tends to view most sex, including sex that most people would consider consensual, as being rape or male aggression.
But let's ignore all that, create an app that just turns sexual assault into a yes/no checkbox.
When the drug dealer started sending MMS images of clocks?
It seems entirely reasonable that you could plan just about anything with plain text SMS. It wouldn't be hard to talk about whatever it was in plain language substituting normal activities like going shopping or whatever.
An innocuous code would be impossible to decode if you didn't suspect the people in question. You'd never filter out the 373738483847 other texts that were about mundane activities.
My first thought was that "shouting fire in a crowded theater" is a dated metaphor. Building codes have been updated, emergency exits increased, emergency lighting, fire alarms and so on.
When Justice Holmes used it as a metaphor in 1919 or thereabouts, it probably made more sense. Theaters were made of wood, many of them prior to electrification used fire to do lighting, there really wasn't much of a concept of emergency exits, and no fire alarm or smoke alarms to provide early alerts as to fires. Your only hope of escaping WAS rushing out of the theater as soon as the alarm was raised, not doing so placed your life in grave peril.
So at this point it's not hard to see why shouting fire falsely is malicious and deserving of restriction. At the time the metaphor was coined, a theater fire DID represent a serious risk and the panicked responses were not really excessive. 5 of the 10 deadliest building fires in US history were in theaters.
I would not necessarily assume that the GP was ignorant.
The physician's assistant *works for* the surgeon. It's a 1:1 relationship.
The basic problem is that there isn't prescribing alignment between the two professionals working with each other in a direct reporting relationship in the same practice.
Perhaps the PA is wrong for deviating from the prescribing practice of the surgeon she works for, although you can make a strong argument that the PA was actually employing a better prescribing practice based on newer and more sound understandings of acetaminophen toxicity (IIRC, the FDA very nearly voted to ban painkiller compounds with acetaminophen).
I think it's hard to argue in defense of the surgeon's reflexive prescription of acetaminophen painkiller compounds. Sure, she's done it forever, and there's probably data (older, and perhaps less reliable like so much research) that acetaminophen boosts oxycodone effectiveness resulting in lower oxycodone consumption.
Although I'm always suspicious of the goal of marginally reduced painkiller consumption. I don't know if you can even get sub-5mg doses without access to compounding pharmacy nor do I know what kind of reduced consumption an acetaminophen containing compound would have. Is the risk of toxicity really worth an extra 5mg oxycodone consumption per day? It really feels like "zomg, opioids, addiction" paranoia that doesn't really do much useful.
Clearly Barton's idea has numerous, show-stopping problems but I feel like playing contrarian.
Even in the US, the 1st amendment isn't totally immutable. There are concepts like "fighting words" and the notion that you can't shout "fire" in a crowded theater. And I don't doubt that the court would go along with some limitations on 1st amendment rights during wartime.
Could Barton have some kind of argument based on these limitations? Could you possibly even frame the argument that taking down terrorist web sites was actually protective of law abiding Muslims because ordinary people might be incited to violence against them by exposure to propaganda that colors Islam as a religion of violence and hatred?
I don't even know if Doctors know all that much about the drugs they prescribe or keep up with new information.
I had a serious accident that involved amputating half my left ring finger and fusion of the distal joint on my left middle finger. The hand surgeon prescribed Percocet for pain management -- oxycodone with acetaminophen.
I had a review with the surgeon's physician assistant about two weeks after surgery and she renewed my pain medication, prescribing straight oxycodone (same strength as the Percocet, minus the acetaminophen). When I asked her why she did that, she said "well, the latest advice is to reduce acetaminophen consumption".
At my next follow up visit, this time with the hand surgeon she asked me if I needed the medication refilled. I said yes and asked if she could write it for the formulation without acetaminophen. She asked why and looked at me like I was a drug addict. I finally told her that's what the PA did and what her rationale was. She did it, but was clearly bothered at being confronted with a potentially outdated prescribing practice.
I've had similar experiences with other prescription drugs where the doctor just hands you a prescription, but the pharmacist goes into a long description of usage and side effects. One was for a "black label" antibiotic that I might have challenged in the doctor's office if he had been informed and informed me of it.
What I wonder is if the pharmacist's role is so important (and I think there's a huge gap in education and information on drugs), why is the pharmacist experience at a retail counter (with basically zero patient relationship -- my pharmacy has had like six different pharmacists on staff in two years) and the doctor is the cloistered office visit? Maybe doctors should only recommend therapies in their offices and then have an in-office pharmacist visit with patients who get prescriptions to review both the recommendation, other drugs they're taking and provide information on how to take the drug, side effects, etc.