Most of the time, at least in the US, the term OTC is used to refer to non-prescription drugs that are stocked on the shelves.
Over-the-counter drug:
The term over-the-counter may be somewhat counter-intuitive, since, in many countries, these drugs are often located on the shelves of stores like any other packaged product. In contrast, prescription drugs are almost always literally passed over a counter from the pharmacist to the customer. Some drugs may be legally classified as over-the-counter (i.e. no prescription is required), but may only be dispensed by a pharmacy employee after an assessment of the patient's needs and/or the provision of patient education.
The obvious answer would be, not in the USA. But seriously, there are plenty of countries that try to "protect" it's citizens by legislating away any chemical that looks like it might potentially be dangerous. I simply live in one of those countries. For that matter, I have to get Aspirin over the counter.
While I know that this sort of research is ultimately aimed at improving human life, for some reason I can't shake the image of a mad scientist making super-smart dogs, the experiment going awry, and an apocalyptic future of human-pitbull wars.
On that note it won't matter even if they succeed. This country is almost certain to ban it on the basis that it gives the beneficiaries an "unethical advantage" over others. After all we already have piracetam which supposedly does something similar, and that's banned.
If you take their money, they get power over you. Sorry but it's true to at least some degree. It might be all above board for a while, but eventually some if not all are bound to get comfortable working for the government, and they wouldn't want to rock the boat once that happens. If they were the sort of people to be completely honest anyway, they would also have trouble working for the current, highly political, news landscape.
Huh, so maybe things wouldn't be that different after all.
I plan to move to Australia later this year. Don't fuck it up before I get there. (It already seems to be the only developed country with worse internet service than Canada, which makes me sad, although the weather looks better.)
I'm there now, a great country. The internet isn't that bad if you know where to look. You can get slow unlimited 512/512 but with NO limits on use, explicit or implied. Or ADSL2 with 150GB of transfer for $70. It's a matter of shopping around.
You didn't, but at least you're thinking about it. The question is about the nature of value with respect to money.
Try Freigeld to start with. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freigeld [wikipedia.org]
A blight on self-righteous reformers.
I am not interested in your material. If your cause isn't even worth your explaining; I won't dedicate my time to it.
Warning. Idealism ahead.
Let's extend demand for houses to demand for all things that are generally considered necessary to a dignified, healthy life: houses, food, clothing, etc. If demand for those things is being met for everybody, by whatever means, then people will no longer need to toil just to survive. At that point, is monetary gain really a necessary motivation? If one new person needs a house, don't you suppose that enough people would be motivated by altruism to help that person out? Right now, a large part of the reason why so many people are unmotivated to donate to charity is the mindset that their contribution can't make a difference. If the problem of poverty is made small enough that there's a clear and obvious way in which one person's contribution will make a difference, then I think you'll see more people willing to contribute.
I liken this idea to voluntary socialism. A system in which people take care of their neighbors even though they are not coerced into it by government. Unfortunately, we have a self-perpetuating problem of glamorizing unrestrained self interest. The two things I think we need to do first are 1) stop measuring "utility" in dollars and devise a philosophy that more accurately describes the good that those dollars actually generate and 2) stop telling ourselves that everybody else is selfish and our own wellbeing depends on us being selfish too.
After I responded I remembered why these things just irritate me. Because it's meaningless to sit at a computer and act all saintly theorizing about a better world. But your plan is unworkable.
You're acting as if the people of the world actively dislike happiness and act to suppress it. However much like Communism, you will likely find that several small parts of the plan will suddenly erupt into overwhelming issues when you actually try to implement your system. Don't sit there preaching about a better way, after three years of University I've heard plenty of those, if your idea is good and you really care, do it. If it works I'll go along with it.
I liken this idea to voluntary socialism. A system in which people take care of their neighbors even though they are not coerced into it by government. Unfortunately, we have a self-perpetuating problem of glamorizing unrestrained self interest. The two things I think we need to do first are 1) stop measuring "utility" in dollars and devise a philosophy that more accurately describes the good that those dollars actually generate and 2) stop telling ourselves that everybody else is selfish and our own wellbeing depends on us being selfish too.
Except there's a good chance that they won't. Of course some people will, for a while. But eventually it will get old for those people who are willing to bother. Dollars are still around beause they're the measure of utility that stuck.
It requires scarcity to function.
Which is why people are knocking down houses in the USA...
e.g.
http://www.yidio.com/unsold-houses-knocked-down/id/395665281 [yidio.com]
http://realestate.msn.com/article.aspx?cp-documentid=19580208 [msn.com]
If demand is ever satisfied, the value of the product tends to zero and therefore it is impossible to make profit or to pay the loans which make up our monetary system. This is why there will always be poverty, always be homelessness, and is of course insanity and stupidity of the highest order.
Silvio Gesell [wikipedia.org] identified this particular fundamental problem (and proposed a solution) with the nature of money itself nearly 100 years ago.
If I've read it right, the suggestion is that we abolish land costs and rent. But if people aren't getting paid, who's going to be motivated to get together all the materials to build anything bigger than a stick house? Unless they're already wealthy enough to pay everything upfront.
If Microsoft introduces an incompatible change in Windows 8 (so that, for example a given version of IE can no longer be installed, or a driver for a widely deployed device stops working), it can force a company into unbounded costs of updating their software and hardware. On the other hand, once initial migration to Ubuntu is done, only an effort of a dozen developers would be needed to compile Firefox 1.0 with new libraries, update a driver to work with 2.6 kernel and so on. While for an individual it may be acceptable - and cheaper - to buy new peripherals and applications - IBM can trivially afford custom development costs to keep an operating system running exactly the same way they want it.
Since there are still companies running DOS as part of their systems, I doubt Microsoft can force people to upgrade.
The problem is not how to compensate for "some degree of hardware failure", but how to avoid any data loss. I believe the answer is `keep full backups` and you can do this perfectly well on FAT32.
Even with full backups, you'll still lose the data you had between the last backup and the failure event
This seems a rather silly point to make. I know this is Slashdot and we have to suggest Open Source alternatives but throwing out random file systems as a suggestion to fix poor management and HARDWARE issues is some place between ignorant and silly.
Not as silly as it might appear. One of ZFS's main functions is that it can compensate for some degree of hardware failure.
I noticed you were careful not to include two of the words the person you were replying to used: From MS.
Ooh, burn. Well spotted.
So I'm going to do it now. "Neither is a revolutionary piece of software that re-sets the benchmark for everything to come and blasts all competition into dust all that strange coming from Microsoft."
I also want to ante up with the following.
It's totally understandable why people would say that OpenOffice fails because of Microsoft's plot. Otherwise they would have to admit that it (OpenOffice) kind of sucks in comparison.
Neither is a revolutionary piece of software that re-sets the benchmark for everything to come and blasts all competition into dust. I know you're working towards a point, but I just don't see what that point is.
I hope you're not planning to apply for a statistics degree with that little essay. It would be the definition of fair if they refused you. There's variability in which standardized questions any particular applicant is exposed to. The coverage of material is not exactly the same from test to test, and might impact one student differently than another. It's also possible to cross validate subjective appraisals, if one is willing to go to enough trouble. It's possible that the variability in the subjective appraisal is on roughly the same scale as variability due to test composition. That hardly strikes me as the definition of unfair. Usually we reserve the strong definition of "unfair" to systemic effects rather than random, impersonal, not every day is equal effects. Is the testing supposed to be less variable than life itself? In 500 words, explain how.
Yes
Also, it took me 3 attempts to parse that, I hope you're not planning to apply for anything with that little essay.
Also, 500 words is not a long essay. And standardized tests and grades are a poor judge of talent.
As compared to a 500 word essay that you probably wrote with outside assistance? The problem with subjective examinations is that they depend on the mindset of the marker, so you could well be marked down if they're having a bad day, or up if they're feeling generous. This is the very definition of unfair.
Also, I know I'm splitting hairs here; but the University doesn't want 'talent' . They want someone who is willing to dedicate themselves and work hard. Talent is nice to have, but ancillary.
Check your terms of service. If it's a typical consumer contract, then the company isn't legally obliged to actually perform any service for the money you give them, or reserve the right to change "at any time" the terms of service so what they promise doesn't matter anyway. Any service given is basically for PR purposes, to prevent too many customers from leaving.
True, but as I remember, these contracts don't actually stand up in court. They can write a contract that gives them ownership of your children if they want but that doesn't mean it will hold. The understanding is that when you give someone money, they will give you something in return.
If those contracts serve any purpose, it's that they discourage people from attempting to sue.
Technology will continue to make food production cheaper. We haven't even expanded into the oceans and large cities like Tokyo are still fairly rare on the earth's surface. We might have to give up some luxury foods for more efficiently produced goods. But I doubt that will be too crushingly widespread. More importantly; as people get wealthier the amount of children they have drops down, for example I am an only child and so is my cousin.
Beyond that; there's plenty of room among the stars.
That's some fine internet tough talk, but realistically the best solution open to the common man is to simply vote with your dollars and leave. Verizon is probably happy enough to let a squeaky wheel out of any time contract, if they really are in violation, knowing that the unwashed masses will not notice these kinds of failings.
Maybe, but the fact is they had a contract and they broke it. The best thing for someone to do is to sue them, which has the additional benefit of changing their long-term policy and drawing attention to their failings.Lawsuits aren't hard and you can find lawyers to take these kinds of cases for free.
Yeah, that was my first thought as well. It's very unlikely to actually happen in the real world. Still I recall a story from a while back where doctors were discussing the possibility of redefining "dead" from something like a 0.0001% recovery chance to 0.001% recovery chance. However, in the panic of a rush, I can believe a hurried doctor would fail to notice she's breathing.
Although I take no part in this debate, I would ask you not to mistake an appeal to authority as factual knowledge.
I begin to suspect that quoting "logical errors" is a new form of karma whoring. The appeal to authority only means that a person isn't automatically correct simply because they are in a position of power. What you failed to note in your flurry of smugness is that we have a person who actually has first-hand information on the subject. Thus making his perspective, while not automatically right, far more relevant to the subject than that of a thousand slashdotters.
Could delaying the inevitable onset of Alzheimer's be the biological function of sleep? Last I heard, the purpose of sleep wasn't entirely clear, and there were anecdotal reports of people basically eliminating it with drugs, sometimes with little ill-effect. I've long been of the opinion that if wakefullness promoting agents don't have short-term effects, there must be a longer-term negative impact, because if there weren't, the body would synthesise something similar, at least in people who are sufficiently well-fed not to mind the extra energy usage. Sleeping is basically a good chance to get eaten.
It's going to be a long time before we find out if regular modafinil users get early Alzheimer's.
I'd credit your theory; however there has been some research that shows Caffeine can also act against Alzheimer's. When consumed regularly it appears to slow it's progress as well as somewhat mitigating the symptoms.
Slashdot Mirror
Most of the time, at least in the US, the term OTC is used to refer to non-prescription drugs that are stocked on the shelves. Over-the-counter drug: The term over-the-counter may be somewhat counter-intuitive, since, in many countries, these drugs are often located on the shelves of stores like any other packaged product. In contrast, prescription drugs are almost always literally passed over a counter from the pharmacist to the customer. Some drugs may be legally classified as over-the-counter (i.e. no prescription is required), but may only be dispensed by a pharmacy employee after an assessment of the patient's needs and/or the provision of patient education.
Ok, what? Now you've lost me.
I think you might be confusing the meaning of over-the-counter. OTC drugs do not require prescriptions.
I'm not confusing them, I'm just irritated that I have to ask the staff for Aspirin, as if it's too dangerous to put on the shelf.
It's not banned in the USA. Where are you?
The obvious answer would be, not in the USA. But seriously, there are plenty of countries that try to "protect" it's citizens by legislating away any chemical that looks like it might potentially be dangerous. I simply live in one of those countries. For that matter, I have to get Aspirin over the counter.
While I know that this sort of research is ultimately aimed at improving human life, for some reason I can't shake the image of a mad scientist making super-smart dogs, the experiment going awry, and an apocalyptic future of human-pitbull wars.
On that note it won't matter even if they succeed. This country is almost certain to ban it on the basis that it gives the beneficiaries an "unethical advantage" over others. After all we already have piracetam which supposedly does something similar, and that's banned.
If you take their money, they get power over you. Sorry but it's true to at least some degree. It might be all above board for a while, but eventually some if not all are bound to get comfortable working for the government, and they wouldn't want to rock the boat once that happens. If they were the sort of people to be completely honest anyway, they would also have trouble working for the current, highly political, news landscape.
Huh, so maybe things wouldn't be that different after all.
I plan to move to Australia later this year. Don't fuck it up before I get there. (It already seems to be the only developed country with worse internet service than Canada, which makes me sad, although the weather looks better.)
I'm there now, a great country. The internet isn't that bad if you know where to look. You can get slow unlimited 512/512 but with NO limits on use, explicit or implied. Or ADSL2 with 150GB of transfer for $70. It's a matter of shopping around.
and good ol' Shiternet Explorer doesn't have spellcheck.
If it's the only thing that will run on your system, letting you get online without crashing, then it's not that shit is it?
You didn't, but at least you're thinking about it. The question is about the nature of value with respect to money. Try Freigeld to start with. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freigeld [wikipedia.org]
A blight on self-righteous reformers.
I am not interested in your material. If your cause isn't even worth your explaining; I won't dedicate my time to it.
Warning. Idealism ahead. Let's extend demand for houses to demand for all things that are generally considered necessary to a dignified, healthy life: houses, food, clothing, etc. If demand for those things is being met for everybody, by whatever means, then people will no longer need to toil just to survive. At that point, is monetary gain really a necessary motivation? If one new person needs a house, don't you suppose that enough people would be motivated by altruism to help that person out? Right now, a large part of the reason why so many people are unmotivated to donate to charity is the mindset that their contribution can't make a difference. If the problem of poverty is made small enough that there's a clear and obvious way in which one person's contribution will make a difference, then I think you'll see more people willing to contribute. I liken this idea to voluntary socialism. A system in which people take care of their neighbors even though they are not coerced into it by government. Unfortunately, we have a self-perpetuating problem of glamorizing unrestrained self interest. The two things I think we need to do first are 1) stop measuring "utility" in dollars and devise a philosophy that more accurately describes the good that those dollars actually generate and 2) stop telling ourselves that everybody else is selfish and our own wellbeing depends on us being selfish too.
After I responded I remembered why these things just irritate me. Because it's meaningless to sit at a computer and act all saintly theorizing about a better world. But your plan is unworkable.
You're acting as if the people of the world actively dislike happiness and act to suppress it. However much like Communism, you will likely find that several small parts of the plan will suddenly erupt into overwhelming issues when you actually try to implement your system. Don't sit there preaching about a better way, after three years of University I've heard plenty of those, if your idea is good and you really care, do it. If it works I'll go along with it.
I liken this idea to voluntary socialism. A system in which people take care of their neighbors even though they are not coerced into it by government. Unfortunately, we have a self-perpetuating problem of glamorizing unrestrained self interest. The two things I think we need to do first are 1) stop measuring "utility" in dollars and devise a philosophy that more accurately describes the good that those dollars actually generate and 2) stop telling ourselves that everybody else is selfish and our own wellbeing depends on us being selfish too.
Except there's a good chance that they won't. Of course some people will, for a while. But eventually it will get old for those people who are willing to bother. Dollars are still around beause they're the measure of utility that stuck.
It requires scarcity to function. Which is why people are knocking down houses in the USA... e.g. http://www.yidio.com/unsold-houses-knocked-down/id/395665281 [yidio.com] http://realestate.msn.com/article.aspx?cp-documentid=19580208 [msn.com] If demand is ever satisfied, the value of the product tends to zero and therefore it is impossible to make profit or to pay the loans which make up our monetary system. This is why there will always be poverty, always be homelessness, and is of course insanity and stupidity of the highest order. Silvio Gesell [wikipedia.org] identified this particular fundamental problem (and proposed a solution) with the nature of money itself nearly 100 years ago.
If I've read it right, the suggestion is that we abolish land costs and rent. But if people aren't getting paid, who's going to be motivated to get together all the materials to build anything bigger than a stick house? Unless they're already wealthy enough to pay everything upfront.
If Microsoft introduces an incompatible change in Windows 8 (so that, for example a given version of IE can no longer be installed, or a driver for a widely deployed device stops working), it can force a company into unbounded costs of updating their software and hardware. On the other hand, once initial migration to Ubuntu is done, only an effort of a dozen developers would be needed to compile Firefox 1.0 with new libraries, update a driver to work with 2.6 kernel and so on. While for an individual it may be acceptable - and cheaper - to buy new peripherals and applications - IBM can trivially afford custom development costs to keep an operating system running exactly the same way they want it.
Since there are still companies running DOS as part of their systems, I doubt Microsoft can force people to upgrade.
The problem is not how to compensate for "some degree of hardware failure", but how to avoid any data loss. I believe the answer is `keep full backups` and you can do this perfectly well on FAT32.
Even with full backups, you'll still lose the data you had between the last backup and the failure event
This seems a rather silly point to make. I know this is Slashdot and we have to suggest Open Source alternatives but throwing out random file systems as a suggestion to fix poor management and HARDWARE issues is some place between ignorant and silly.
Not as silly as it might appear. One of ZFS's main functions is that it can compensate for some degree of hardware failure.
I noticed you were careful not to include two of the words the person you were replying to used: From MS.
Ooh, burn. Well spotted.
So I'm going to do it now. "Neither is a revolutionary piece of software that re-sets the benchmark for everything to come and blasts all competition into dust all that strange coming from Microsoft."
I also want to ante up with the following.
It's totally understandable why people would say that OpenOffice fails because of Microsoft's plot. Otherwise they would have to admit that it (OpenOffice) kind of sucks in comparison.
Neither is a revolutionary piece of software that re-sets the benchmark for everything to come and blasts all competition into dust. I know you're working towards a point, but I just don't see what that point is.
I hope you're not planning to apply for a statistics degree with that little essay. It would be the definition of fair if they refused you. There's variability in which standardized questions any particular applicant is exposed to. The coverage of material is not exactly the same from test to test, and might impact one student differently than another. It's also possible to cross validate subjective appraisals, if one is willing to go to enough trouble. It's possible that the variability in the subjective appraisal is on roughly the same scale as variability due to test composition. That hardly strikes me as the definition of unfair. Usually we reserve the strong definition of "unfair" to systemic effects rather than random, impersonal, not every day is equal effects. Is the testing supposed to be less variable than life itself? In 500 words, explain how.
Yes
Also, it took me 3 attempts to parse that, I hope you're not planning to apply for anything with that little essay.
Also, 500 words is not a long essay. And standardized tests and grades are a poor judge of talent.
As compared to a 500 word essay that you probably wrote with outside assistance? The problem with subjective examinations is that they depend on the mindset of the marker, so you could well be marked down if they're having a bad day, or up if they're feeling generous. This is the very definition of unfair.
Also, I know I'm splitting hairs here; but the University doesn't want 'talent' . They want someone who is willing to dedicate themselves and work hard. Talent is nice to have, but ancillary.
Check your terms of service. If it's a typical consumer contract, then the company isn't legally obliged to actually perform any service for the money you give them, or reserve the right to change "at any time" the terms of service so what they promise doesn't matter anyway. Any service given is basically for PR purposes, to prevent too many customers from leaving.
True, but as I remember, these contracts don't actually stand up in court. They can write a contract that gives them ownership of your children if they want but that doesn't mean it will hold. The understanding is that when you give someone money, they will give you something in return.
If those contracts serve any purpose, it's that they discourage people from attempting to sue.
Technology will continue to make food production cheaper. We haven't even expanded into the oceans and large cities like Tokyo are still fairly rare on the earth's surface. We might have to give up some luxury foods for more efficiently produced goods. But I doubt that will be too crushingly widespread. More importantly; as people get wealthier the amount of children they have drops down, for example I am an only child and so is my cousin.
Beyond that; there's plenty of room among the stars.
That's some fine internet tough talk, but realistically the best solution open to the common man is to simply vote with your dollars and leave. Verizon is probably happy enough to let a squeaky wheel out of any time contract, if they really are in violation, knowing that the unwashed masses will not notice these kinds of failings.
Maybe, but the fact is they had a contract and they broke it. The best thing for someone to do is to sue them, which has the additional benefit of changing their long-term policy and drawing attention to their failings.Lawsuits aren't hard and you can find lawyers to take these kinds of cases for free.
That's the same thing I thought of when I read the summary.
I vote we give them these patents.
Yeah, that was my first thought as well. It's very unlikely to actually happen in the real world. Still I recall a story from a while back where doctors were discussing the possibility of redefining "dead" from something like a 0.0001% recovery chance to 0.001% recovery chance. However, in the panic of a rush, I can believe a hurried doctor would fail to notice she's breathing.
Or misdiagnose her if she isn't.
Although I take no part in this debate, I would ask you not to mistake an appeal to authority as factual knowledge.
I begin to suspect that quoting "logical errors" is a new form of karma whoring. The appeal to authority only means that a person isn't automatically correct simply because they are in a position of power. What you failed to note in your flurry of smugness is that we have a person who actually has first-hand information on the subject. Thus making his perspective, while not automatically right, far more relevant to the subject than that of a thousand slashdotters.
Could delaying the inevitable onset of Alzheimer's be the biological function of sleep? Last I heard, the purpose of sleep wasn't entirely clear, and there were anecdotal reports of people basically eliminating it with drugs, sometimes with little ill-effect. I've long been of the opinion that if wakefullness promoting agents don't have short-term effects, there must be a longer-term negative impact, because if there weren't, the body would synthesise something similar, at least in people who are sufficiently well-fed not to mind the extra energy usage. Sleeping is basically a good chance to get eaten. It's going to be a long time before we find out if regular modafinil users get early Alzheimer's.
I'd credit your theory; however there has been some research that shows Caffeine can also act against Alzheimer's. When consumed regularly it appears to slow it's progress as well as somewhat mitigating the symptoms.