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Comment Re:Good! (Score 1) 15

The US pharmacy model is oddly archaic: pharmacists still hand-count tablets from large stock bottles, repackage them, and print individual labels.

This labor-intensive process adds time, wages, and liability, and it’s one reason for higher dispensing costs, though not the main driver of overall drug prices, which mostly stem from manufacturer pricing, patent law, and the fragmented insurance system.

Most of Europe, Japan, and Canada use "unit-dose*" or "blister-pack systems", where drugs arrive factory-sealed in labeled doses, ensuring sterility and minimizing human handling.

The US sticks to the counting model largely due to historical regulation, pharmacy guild influence, and industry inertia.

So yes, the “somebody counting pills” step is a needless relic, and while not the core cause of America’s inflated drug prices, it perfectly illustrates the inefficiency of its healthcare infrastructure: high-tech medicine, 19th-century logistics.

Comment Ridiculous (Score 2) 81

"The G-Drive couldn't have a backup system due to its large capacity,"

**1. Tape libraries (LTO-9/10):**
Still the king for bulk, cold, or archival storage. An LTO-9 tape holds 18 TB native (45 TB compressed). A mid-range autoloader with 60–80 slots covers your 900 TB easily, costs under €100 k, and draws almost no power. Ideal for long-term off-site backups if latency isn’t critical.

**2. Object storage clusters:**
Systems like MinIO, Ceph, or AWS S3 Glacier equivalents can handle petabytes with redundancy (e.g., 3× replication = 2.7 PB raw). Hardware could be 12–24 bay servers with 22 TB disks on 100 Gb Ethernet. You can build on-prem with commodity nodes or rent from cloud providers (AWS, Wasabi, Backblaze B2).

**3. Enterprise backup appliances:**
Dell EMC Data Domain, HPE StoreOnce, Quantum DXi, or Veeam-driven scale-out repositories use deduplication to shrink footprint; 900 TB effective might need only ~300 TB physical if data repeats heavily.

A practical hybrid is active data mirrored to disk/object storage and cold copies vaulted to tape. The critical constraints are bandwidth (need ~10 Gbps just to back up 10 TB/hour) and verification time — at that scale, backup *integrity* becomes the bottleneck, not raw capacity.

Comment Sure (Score 1) 99

"To be clear, "Tilly Norwood" is not an actor, it's a character generated by a computer program"

We can't have that!

We now have a system that gives us actresses with fake hair, fake teeth, fake nose, fake eyebrows, fake eye-lashes, lenses with fake eye-color, skin covered in pancake make-up, tummy tucked and so on.

All natural, unlike that robot.

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