In America, is eating into a competitor's profits a crime?
Companies will certainly try to make it one. See car dealerships vs Tesla if you need an example. Car dealerships in many states have managed to make themselves a mandatory middle man (with attendant markups) even though there is no discernible benefit to either the customers or manufacturers. When Tesla wanted to sell direct they managed to make doing so literally a crime though lobbying their cronies in the state legislature.
No, it's because dogs can key off of subtle, hard to detect signals from their handlers, and then "detect" the drugs and explosives which are carried by the people with the wrong skin color.
Do you have a better scent detecting technology available? If not, shut up until you do. In any case the issues with drug sniffing dogs have nothing to do with cancer detection.
The crime of selling 100k worth of ads, that promoted both sides ?
"Both sides"? What side do Russians have in the US election? Last I checked they were neither democrats nor republicans. They have no business being involved at all. If Facebook facilitated their actions then there is a good chance Facebook was complicit in attempted election rigging and quite possibly in violation of federal election laws.
If anything, the ads just served as confirmation bias to people on either side, and were used more to sow discord than to actually influence the election one way or another.
Russians buying ads is by definition an attempt to influence the election. You are making a distinction without a difference.
Mark Zuckerberg started 2017 scoffing at the idea of Russia election manipulation on Facebook...
No transparent conflict of interest in that position... [/sarcasm] Of course that is what he would say. Otherwise he and his company are complicit in a crime.
...and looked like he was contemplating his own possible run for the presidency.
So software that used to interpret sensor data is AI?
In principle it could be. You can do clever things with the data (AI for lack of a better term) or simply provide read-outs to be interpreted by people or something not quite AI but still automated. Whether this particular case is AI will depend on what the software actually does. I'm a little dubious it will be more exotic than an expert system but maybe they are working on something more clever than that. Not enough detail to really know. Like you I strongly suspect it is mostly marketing fluff since AI is the new hotness term for any software these days.
What did we use with sensors with digital systems before?
Give it a few moments thought and I'm sure you'll figure it out.
Sensors are AI now. Will the hype cycle ever end for AI?
No, the software to interpret the data from the sensors is what they are calling AI. Bit of a stretch of the term I'll agree but not quite as silly as you are implying. To be honest if the system isn't able to autonomously interpret the data in novel ways without being more than a glorified lookup table I'm not really sure the there is any AI involved. I don't really see how this is more than an expert system in any circumstance.
If cynicism is truly misplaced here, care to tell me why the fuck we haven't evolved in other areas of detection where we still use dogs?
Because we haven't got better technology yet. You seem to be under the delusion that scent detection is an easy thing to do. It isn't. Replicating even a fraction of a dog's nose is a problem as difficult as replicating human visual recognition. We've had some results but we're still not very good at it yet. There is lots of money to be made with artificial noses so I have little doubt it will get figured out eventually but until then we have to work with what we've got and what we've got are dogs.
Using "sniffing thousands of samples in which only a handful...is challenging work with little positive reinforcement" as an excuse to not use dogs to screen cancer seems pretty damn weak when that is essentially exactly what drug and bomb sniffing dogs are doing all day, every day.
We can do it if you are willing to indemnify the doctors for the results just like the police are indemnified against being sued for false positives and false negatives. Right now if the dog misses the diagnosis the doctor is the one who will be sued. Police use dogs because they work (even if imperfectly) and they are effectively immune to liability for useing them.
Your wife does not directly speak for the trillions made by the cancer industry.
She doesn't have to. The claim was that no one in the industry would support using dogs to detect cancer which is a claim that is demonstrably false.
OH, now you want to balance the budget after 8 years if 1T deficit?
8 years? Try 30+ years. We've been running huge and increasing deficits since the Reagan administration. And no the annual increase for the last 8 years was about $500-600 billion - roughly the amount we spend on defense annually. They've recently become bigger because the Bush administration decided to start two wars in the Middle East and didn't raise taxes to pay for them. Then there was all the stimulus to keep the economy running after the crash in 2008 with again, no taxes to compensate because republicans break out in hives if you mention the words "raise taxes" even when it is the responsible thing to do. So we continue to borrow to keep everything running with no end in sight. Right now the federal debt stands at around $18.9 trillion which means every man, woman and child in the US owes approximately $63,000. Lowering taxes will not lessen this problem.
The same can be said for drugs and we still use dogs for that.
That's because it is a hard problem to solve and dogs are exquisitely evolved to detect scents. Learning to replicate even a fraction of that functionality will take many years of hard work. And yes, top people are working on it.
If dogs became mainstream at detecting cancers, there would be immediate palpable disruption to the present status quo. Schools that train doctors, radiologists and the whole associated ecosystem would be in peril.
Nice try but no. Under the best of circumstances dogs wouldn't be more than a cheap form of screening which would have to be confirmed by other more reliable methods of detection. Screening tests are useful but don't replace entire ecosystems of medicine. At most dogs can tell us that something is going on in the patient but they cannot provide much in the way of details.
Who in this industry, would support such a move? I do not see any.
My wife is a pathologist and she would happily support dogs being used to detect cancers if it were a practical and reliable approach. Nearly all doctors are more than happy to utilize any tool that will get better results for their patients. Your cynicism is misplaced.
Moreover, it takes time and energy to train these pups, who, despite extensive preparation, still might miss a diagnosis if they're having a bad day, experts told Live Science.
All screening tests have false positives and false negatives. That's why they are screening tests. A good screening test is cheap, fast, and has few (close to zero) false negatives and a modest number of false positives. Anyone with a positive test gets sent to follow up with more accurate and costly testing.
That said the article is right in that dogs really aren't sufficiently reliable. Same problems exist with search and rescue dogs. If it isn't fun for them even the best dogs get bored and stop cooperating. A better approach would be to try to figure out what the scent is and to develop a mechanical nose to replicate the functionality. The dogs should be sufficiently reliable to help development of a sensor.
im not rich by any means. and im going to save about 2 grand a year under the new plan. over 80% of americans are going to save money.
No they aren't. It just means we're going to have to borrow more which will need to be repaid later. They didn't cut medicare or defense or social security which account for around 3/4 of the federal budget so all they did was incur additional debt, most likely to burden future generations. Collectively we save nothing and any "savings" you realize will simply have to be picked up by someone else somewhere down the line.
I'll admit I don't feel much twinge about losing a language.
Agreed with the exception that sometimes we lose historical information when we lose a language. But in most cases little of value is lost. If it wasn't important enough for people to learn, odds are good it wasn't important in general.
at some level I feel like more languages just leads to more confusion, and the fewer of them we have, the more likely it is we'll understand each other.
Excellent point. Speaking a different language makes it just a bit easier to engage in pointless tribalism and we really don't need more of that. If the cost of people getting along better is to lose a bunch of minor languages then that is a cost I'm more than willing to pay.
The black community does have a bitch, not getting it's fair share of police protection. That isn't fixed until at least 40% of those being shot by police are black (the % of violent crime they commit).
Are you actually arguing that MORE black people should be needlessly shot by police? Wow...
How about we fix our policing system so that FEWER people get shot by trigger happy police. It's curious that in the US we have police that shoot FAR greater numbers (both absolute and per capita) of citizens than pretty much any major industrialized country. That says our police are doing something terribly wrong in how they do their jobs. Yes I said it. Our police are collectively doing a shitty job and the crime statistics prove it.
...One of the most divisive Presidents in US history famous for his identity politics and class-warfare and attacks on political/ideological opponents using agencies of the Federal government like the IRS.
Thanks for self identifying as a far right republican. The only people who actually believe this are conspiracy minded loons who get all their news from Fox News or similar. I'm sure you genuinely wish all that were true but fortunately the facts do not actually support you. Obama was politically a moderate and your ideas about "identity politics" say far more about you and your beliefs than about his.
I ask because in my [limited] professional life, I know of exactly zero entities using this software.
Only ones that would are small companies. Thunderbird is a reasonable client but it pretty much ignored the server side and calendaring features that make Outlook and other applications popular. This was pointed out to them ages ago and they never bothered to put in the resources to make it an Outlook fighter.
Am I missing out on anything? Can someone more knowledgeable advise me of why I should use Thunderbird over Outlook or GMail?
Outlook is easy because it isn't of much use if you aren't running Windows. Thunderbird is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. If you want something consistent between operating systems Outlook won't be your weapon of choice.
As for Gmail, you can use Thunderbird with Gmail if you need/want a desktop client. That's more a matter of preference than utility.
Indeed. I remember learning this in elementary school 40 years ago. You get way more radiation by living in Colorado than by living nextdoor to a nuclear power plant.
One important difference. There is essentially zero chance of the amount of natural radiation in Colorado changing. Living next to a nuke plant carries a small-but-not-zero chance of the amount of radiation going up substantially. Just ask the folks living near Chernobyl or Fukashima. Nuclear power has a pretty good safety record but when things go wrong they can go very wrong. To pretend that nuclear accidents aren't a serious concern is foolish.
That said I'll take the risk of fission power over coal and other fossil fuels any day of the week and twice on sunday.
Speaking as someone who was around during the early 80s that statement is nonsensical. The political environment today bears almost no resemblance to the one in the early 80s. If you think it does then you either have a very selective memory or you weren't there.
Reagan was decried as an "idiot who would get us into a nuclear war" and the Japanese were buying up real estate left and right.
It is true that there was a lot of angst about Japan during the 80s but your assertion about Reagan was not widely held outside of a few far left kooks. Bear in mind that the Cold War was in full swing so Reagan building up our military substantially did bring a lot of justifiable concern about how the Soviets would respond. But love him or hate him, Reagan bore little resemblance to Trump and he certainly was a more decent human being and a far better president than Trump. (I say this as someone who doesn't particularly like Reagan or his politics) Trump is easily the least competent and worst performing president during my lifetime and that includes Nixon and W.
Today, Trump is going to say Mean Things that will make him somehow responsible for the Norks going off the deep end and the Chinese are the ones buying property. We're going to be fine.
China is a different animal than Japan. Japan is a smaller country than the US with limited natural resources. China has around 4X the people the US has and comparable natural resources. Japan has sort of reached a natural limit on their ability to grow. China has the second largest economy in the world and they have a HUGE amount of room to grow. All other things being equal one one expect China to be the dominant force the in the world economy. Yes the US will probably be fine but baring some catastrophe China is going to make a much bigger splash than Japan could ever hope to.
As for Trump, I think it is a very real concern that he does or says something stupid to get us into another shooting war needlessly. He clearly doesn't understand or have the patience to learn the intricacies of foreign policy. He already has managed to get the UN General Assembly to condemn his policy on Jerusalem. He also seems depressingly enthusiastic to get a fight started on the Korean peninsula which will be a huge problem if the shells start flying.
The US per wikipedia has a total of about 12 million illegal immigrants.
Which were absorbed over a long period of time and who came to work for depressingly low wages. It wasn't 12 million all at once. Many of them have been here literally for decades. The total number of illegal immigrants in the US hasn't risen for about a decade and in fact has declined somewhat from the peak.
Migration has been a relatively minor problem for Europe.
It isn't a minor problem. It's not to the scale justifying any sort of panic but any time you get a million new refugees in a relatively short time frame that creates a lot of very real problems. These people need to be fed, sheltered, to find work and school, etc. This isn't a trivial undertaking by an measure. It's made worse of course by the inevitable racists and xenophobes who want to shut the borders to keep anyone different out.
This wave of immigration has led to political upheaval, with the rise of right-wing political parties in Germany, Poland, Austria, and Hungary, among others.
And you can google for websites which independently test various vitamin/supplements.
Great. Some random website tells me its ok. I know it must be true because it is on the internet. [/sarcasm]
Also note that non-prescription vitamins and drugs ("capitalism in action") are dirt cheap, versus FDA approved prescription drugs (government in action) such as Niacor, Epipen, etc are only affordable to lottery winners.
Non prescription drugs are either extremely safe (like asprin) or aren't actually drugs. We have a prescription system because quackery is a real thing. What you get without regulations is something like homeopathics and other snake oil "cures" or fake vitamins that don't actually contain what's on the label. Prescription vitamins are a thing because the OTC versions are of undependable and unverified quality. For some people that isn't good enough.
Now that's no excuse for jacking up the price but quality control IS a real issue with drugs and vitamins.
Software giants Google, Microsoft, Apple and others release a major software update to their desktop and mobile operating system (and OS for other platforms they have) each year.
I'm fine with annual software updates if someone can explain to me the relationship between the need for a software update and the time it takes to orbit the Sun once. Otherwise just release the updates when they are ready to be released. If that is more often or less often than 1 year I don't care either way. Release it when it has been adequately tested and debugged and not a moment earlier except to consenting beta testers.
Slashdot Mirror
North Korea is one of the least Wi-Fi-friendly countries in the world.
They could drop the word Wi-Fi from that sentence and it would still be true. I really cannot fathom any sane reason to travel to that country.
In America, is eating into a competitor's profits a crime?
Companies will certainly try to make it one. See car dealerships vs Tesla if you need an example. Car dealerships in many states have managed to make themselves a mandatory middle man (with attendant markups) even though there is no discernible benefit to either the customers or manufacturers. When Tesla wanted to sell direct they managed to make doing so literally a crime though lobbying their cronies in the state legislature.
No, it's because dogs can key off of subtle, hard to detect signals from their handlers, and then "detect" the drugs and explosives which are carried by the people with the wrong skin color.
Do you have a better scent detecting technology available? If not, shut up until you do. In any case the issues with drug sniffing dogs have nothing to do with cancer detection.
The crime of selling 100k worth of ads, that promoted both sides ?
"Both sides"? What side do Russians have in the US election? Last I checked they were neither democrats nor republicans. They have no business being involved at all. If Facebook facilitated their actions then there is a good chance Facebook was complicit in attempted election rigging and quite possibly in violation of federal election laws.
Which statute does that break exactly ?
There are plenty of articles on this very topic.
If anything, the ads just served as confirmation bias to people on either side, and were used more to sow discord than to actually influence the election one way or another.
Russians buying ads is by definition an attempt to influence the election. You are making a distinction without a difference.
Mark Zuckerberg started 2017 scoffing at the idea of Russia election manipulation on Facebook...
No transparent conflict of interest in that position... [/sarcasm] Of course that is what he would say. Otherwise he and his company are complicit in a crime.
...and looked like he was contemplating his own possible run for the presidency.
$diety save us!
So software that used to interpret sensor data is AI?
In principle it could be. You can do clever things with the data (AI for lack of a better term) or simply provide read-outs to be interpreted by people or something not quite AI but still automated. Whether this particular case is AI will depend on what the software actually does. I'm a little dubious it will be more exotic than an expert system but maybe they are working on something more clever than that. Not enough detail to really know. Like you I strongly suspect it is mostly marketing fluff since AI is the new hotness term for any software these days.
What did we use with sensors with digital systems before?
Give it a few moments thought and I'm sure you'll figure it out.
Sensors are AI now. Will the hype cycle ever end for AI?
No, the software to interpret the data from the sensors is what they are calling AI. Bit of a stretch of the term I'll agree but not quite as silly as you are implying. To be honest if the system isn't able to autonomously interpret the data in novel ways without being more than a glorified lookup table I'm not really sure the there is any AI involved. I don't really see how this is more than an expert system in any circumstance.
If cynicism is truly misplaced here, care to tell me why the fuck we haven't evolved in other areas of detection where we still use dogs?
Because we haven't got better technology yet. You seem to be under the delusion that scent detection is an easy thing to do. It isn't. Replicating even a fraction of a dog's nose is a problem as difficult as replicating human visual recognition. We've had some results but we're still not very good at it yet. There is lots of money to be made with artificial noses so I have little doubt it will get figured out eventually but until then we have to work with what we've got and what we've got are dogs.
Using "sniffing thousands of samples in which only a handful...is challenging work with little positive reinforcement" as an excuse to not use dogs to screen cancer seems pretty damn weak when that is essentially exactly what drug and bomb sniffing dogs are doing all day, every day.
We can do it if you are willing to indemnify the doctors for the results just like the police are indemnified against being sued for false positives and false negatives. Right now if the dog misses the diagnosis the doctor is the one who will be sued. Police use dogs because they work (even if imperfectly) and they are effectively immune to liability for useing them.
Your wife does not directly speak for the trillions made by the cancer industry.
She doesn't have to. The claim was that no one in the industry would support using dogs to detect cancer which is a claim that is demonstrably false.
OH, now you want to balance the budget after 8 years if 1T deficit?
8 years? Try 30+ years. We've been running huge and increasing deficits since the Reagan administration. And no the annual increase for the last 8 years was about $500-600 billion - roughly the amount we spend on defense annually. They've recently become bigger because the Bush administration decided to start two wars in the Middle East and didn't raise taxes to pay for them. Then there was all the stimulus to keep the economy running after the crash in 2008 with again, no taxes to compensate because republicans break out in hives if you mention the words "raise taxes" even when it is the responsible thing to do. So we continue to borrow to keep everything running with no end in sight. Right now the federal debt stands at around $18.9 trillion which means every man, woman and child in the US owes approximately $63,000. Lowering taxes will not lessen this problem.
The same can be said for drugs and we still use dogs for that.
That's because it is a hard problem to solve and dogs are exquisitely evolved to detect scents. Learning to replicate even a fraction of that functionality will take many years of hard work. And yes, top people are working on it.
If dogs became mainstream at detecting cancers, there would be immediate palpable disruption to the present status quo. Schools that train doctors, radiologists and the whole associated ecosystem would be in peril.
Nice try but no. Under the best of circumstances dogs wouldn't be more than a cheap form of screening which would have to be confirmed by other more reliable methods of detection. Screening tests are useful but don't replace entire ecosystems of medicine. At most dogs can tell us that something is going on in the patient but they cannot provide much in the way of details.
Who in this industry, would support such a move? I do not see any.
My wife is a pathologist and she would happily support dogs being used to detect cancers if it were a practical and reliable approach. Nearly all doctors are more than happy to utilize any tool that will get better results for their patients. Your cynicism is misplaced.
Moreover, it takes time and energy to train these pups, who, despite extensive preparation, still might miss a diagnosis if they're having a bad day, experts told Live Science.
All screening tests have false positives and false negatives. That's why they are screening tests. A good screening test is cheap, fast, and has few (close to zero) false negatives and a modest number of false positives. Anyone with a positive test gets sent to follow up with more accurate and costly testing.
That said the article is right in that dogs really aren't sufficiently reliable. Same problems exist with search and rescue dogs. If it isn't fun for them even the best dogs get bored and stop cooperating. A better approach would be to try to figure out what the scent is and to develop a mechanical nose to replicate the functionality. The dogs should be sufficiently reliable to help development of a sensor.
im not rich by any means. and im going to save about 2 grand a year under the new plan. over 80% of americans are going to save money.
No they aren't. It just means we're going to have to borrow more which will need to be repaid later. They didn't cut medicare or defense or social security which account for around 3/4 of the federal budget so all they did was incur additional debt, most likely to burden future generations. Collectively we save nothing and any "savings" you realize will simply have to be picked up by someone else somewhere down the line.
I'll admit I don't feel much twinge about losing a language.
Agreed with the exception that sometimes we lose historical information when we lose a language. But in most cases little of value is lost. If it wasn't important enough for people to learn, odds are good it wasn't important in general.
at some level I feel like more languages just leads to more confusion, and the fewer of them we have, the more likely it is we'll understand each other.
Excellent point. Speaking a different language makes it just a bit easier to engage in pointless tribalism and we really don't need more of that. If the cost of people getting along better is to lose a bunch of minor languages then that is a cost I'm more than willing to pay.
The black community does have a bitch, not getting it's fair share of police protection. That isn't fixed until at least 40% of those being shot by police are black (the % of violent crime they commit).
Are you actually arguing that MORE black people should be needlessly shot by police? Wow...
How about we fix our policing system so that FEWER people get shot by trigger happy police. It's curious that in the US we have police that shoot FAR greater numbers (both absolute and per capita) of citizens than pretty much any major industrialized country. That says our police are doing something terribly wrong in how they do their jobs. Yes I said it. Our police are collectively doing a shitty job and the crime statistics prove it.
...One of the most divisive Presidents in US history famous for his identity politics and class-warfare and attacks on political/ideological opponents using agencies of the Federal government like the IRS.
Thanks for self identifying as a far right republican. The only people who actually believe this are conspiracy minded loons who get all their news from Fox News or similar. I'm sure you genuinely wish all that were true but fortunately the facts do not actually support you. Obama was politically a moderate and your ideas about "identity politics" say far more about you and your beliefs than about his.
I ask because in my [limited] professional life, I know of exactly zero entities using this software.
Only ones that would are small companies. Thunderbird is a reasonable client but it pretty much ignored the server side and calendaring features that make Outlook and other applications popular. This was pointed out to them ages ago and they never bothered to put in the resources to make it an Outlook fighter.
Am I missing out on anything? Can someone more knowledgeable advise me of why I should use Thunderbird over Outlook or GMail?
Outlook is easy because it isn't of much use if you aren't running Windows. Thunderbird is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. If you want something consistent between operating systems Outlook won't be your weapon of choice.
As for Gmail, you can use Thunderbird with Gmail if you need/want a desktop client. That's more a matter of preference than utility.
It's difficult for me to admit, but this comment is lucid and downright Presidential compared to what comes out of the Oval Office currently.
Talk about damning with faint praise.
Indeed. I remember learning this in elementary school 40 years ago. You get way more radiation by living in Colorado than by living nextdoor to a nuclear power plant.
One important difference. There is essentially zero chance of the amount of natural radiation in Colorado changing. Living next to a nuke plant carries a small-but-not-zero chance of the amount of radiation going up substantially. Just ask the folks living near Chernobyl or Fukashima. Nuclear power has a pretty good safety record but when things go wrong they can go very wrong. To pretend that nuclear accidents aren't a serious concern is foolish.
That said I'll take the risk of fission power over coal and other fossil fuels any day of the week and twice on sunday.
He was shown to be wrong on gravity by Newton.
Earlier than that actually. Newton established the theory but experiments had proven Aristotle wrong about gravity before Newton was born.
I like how the early 1980s is repeating itself.
Speaking as someone who was around during the early 80s that statement is nonsensical. The political environment today bears almost no resemblance to the one in the early 80s. If you think it does then you either have a very selective memory or you weren't there.
Reagan was decried as an "idiot who would get us into a nuclear war" and the Japanese were buying up real estate left and right.
It is true that there was a lot of angst about Japan during the 80s but your assertion about Reagan was not widely held outside of a few far left kooks. Bear in mind that the Cold War was in full swing so Reagan building up our military substantially did bring a lot of justifiable concern about how the Soviets would respond. But love him or hate him, Reagan bore little resemblance to Trump and he certainly was a more decent human being and a far better president than Trump. (I say this as someone who doesn't particularly like Reagan or his politics) Trump is easily the least competent and worst performing president during my lifetime and that includes Nixon and W.
Today, Trump is going to say Mean Things that will make him somehow responsible for the Norks going off the deep end and the Chinese are the ones buying property. We're going to be fine.
China is a different animal than Japan. Japan is a smaller country than the US with limited natural resources. China has around 4X the people the US has and comparable natural resources. Japan has sort of reached a natural limit on their ability to grow. China has the second largest economy in the world and they have a HUGE amount of room to grow. All other things being equal one one expect China to be the dominant force the in the world economy. Yes the US will probably be fine but baring some catastrophe China is going to make a much bigger splash than Japan could ever hope to.
As for Trump, I think it is a very real concern that he does or says something stupid to get us into another shooting war needlessly. He clearly doesn't understand or have the patience to learn the intricacies of foreign policy. He already has managed to get the UN General Assembly to condemn his policy on Jerusalem. He also seems depressingly enthusiastic to get a fight started on the Korean peninsula which will be a huge problem if the shells start flying.
The US per wikipedia has a total of about 12 million illegal immigrants.
Which were absorbed over a long period of time and who came to work for depressingly low wages. It wasn't 12 million all at once. Many of them have been here literally for decades. The total number of illegal immigrants in the US hasn't risen for about a decade and in fact has declined somewhat from the peak.
Migration has been a relatively minor problem for Europe.
It isn't a minor problem. It's not to the scale justifying any sort of panic but any time you get a million new refugees in a relatively short time frame that creates a lot of very real problems. These people need to be fed, sheltered, to find work and school, etc. This isn't a trivial undertaking by an measure. It's made worse of course by the inevitable racists and xenophobes who want to shut the borders to keep anyone different out.
This wave of immigration has led to political upheaval, with the rise of right-wing political parties in Germany, Poland, Austria, and Hungary, among others.
Translation: Racist xenophobes are pissed.
And you can google for websites which independently test various vitamin/supplements.
Great. Some random website tells me its ok. I know it must be true because it is on the internet. [/sarcasm]
Also note that non-prescription vitamins and drugs ("capitalism in action") are dirt cheap, versus FDA approved prescription drugs (government in action) such as Niacor, Epipen, etc are only affordable to lottery winners.
Non prescription drugs are either extremely safe (like asprin) or aren't actually drugs. We have a prescription system because quackery is a real thing. What you get without regulations is something like homeopathics and other snake oil "cures" or fake vitamins that don't actually contain what's on the label. Prescription vitamins are a thing because the OTC versions are of undependable and unverified quality. For some people that isn't good enough.
Now that's no excuse for jacking up the price but quality control IS a real issue with drugs and vitamins.
Software giants Google, Microsoft, Apple and others release a major software update to their desktop and mobile operating system (and OS for other platforms they have) each year.
I'm fine with annual software updates if someone can explain to me the relationship between the need for a software update and the time it takes to orbit the Sun once. Otherwise just release the updates when they are ready to be released. If that is more often or less often than 1 year I don't care either way. Release it when it has been adequately tested and debugged and not a moment earlier except to consenting beta testers.