Unfortunately, somebody will have to be the first person to write the "Woke up in the morning upside down in a ditch with my pants missing. Would not use again." review.

The new singing telegram...

If it's an honest question, I'll give you an honest answer. The pharmacist is not just dispensing pills. They know more about drugs and medication than the doctors prescribing them in the first place, and are kind of the last check in the healthcare industry to make sure that you don't end up with a drug combination that will kill you. A lot of pharmacists have doctoral degrees, so they've spent 8 years studying chemistry and drugs compared to the semester or two required for an MD. You can also talk to a pharmacist and they'll recommend a course of treatment for you or steer you in the right direction. Pharmacists can give immunizations (you've noticed all of the flu shot, etc signs outside of Walgreens this time of year, haven't you?). It's also within a pharmacist's right to not give you drugs if, say, you're all whacked out and show up with a prescription for 100 vicodin, or you give them another reason to suspect that you are abusing or about to sell whatever you just showed up to purchase. There's a lot more judgement and critical thinking involved in the job than filling bottles with pills, and also a shit-ton of paperwork that monkeys are not very good at. That critical thinking part is where a database of drug interactions comes short.

You obviously have no idea how much a pharmacist makes.

I remember that one...I was in middle school at the time. In response, I refused to wear denim for a couple years until I realized that it really didn't make any sense sometime in high school.

Is today opposite day? Of all the bits of my life stored in databases, I think my medical records and financial data are the two where I absolutely want those things.

I was hoping to learn why/how they might be doing this somewhere in this thread, because their implementation seems to be the exact thing that you want a relational database for, and not where NoSQL shines. I also don't see what implementation they used since NoSQL is pretty non-descriptive, and at this point seems to basically mean that they aren't using Oracle, DB2, MySQL, Postgres, or MSSQL.

R isn't obscure, and for statistical analysis and data analytics is more likely the Right Tool for the Job. I was helping my stats friends in college setup Linux desktops and servers for R 14 years ago, so it isn't really a trendy language du jour either.
Your Erlang, Scala, and Ruby on Rails system sounds like a nightmare though.

I'm going to wager that the open source project successes are more due to the people involved than open source itself. Usually when somebody does that they have an open source cheerleader in a position of influence and a staff already familiar with open source. So you end up with a project led by somebody who is invested in the project's success at a level beyond "this will make the bosses happy". From my limited experience, the proprietary implementations result from those influential people going "we don't know how to do this, but this is what everybody else seems to be doing, and these guys we are paying to tell us what to do are saying to do that". The open source project is much more likely to have implementers and architects with more of a "let's figure this out" attitude instead of "this is what people say to do".

Isn't it inconvenient to keep pulling something out of your pocket whenever you want to check the time though? Wouldn't it be better if you could do the same exact thing by just looking at your wrist?

What is R less popular than? That's the only language I've ever really heard of stats and math-types seriously using.

For my money, slashdot is the best source of wild speculation by uninformed nobodies though.

But...what was your body composition like at 230lbs? How tall are you? If you're short and quite fat at 230, then such a diet will drop a lot quick, then level out and not do much from there. It's the zone between "overweight" and "fit" that is hard to cross. That's where you need to moderate what you eat along with activity since either one on its own will only get you so far.

I'm about 6' and can bounce between 210 and 195 or so pretty easily on diet alone and just mountain biking on the weekends, maybe jog a few miles a day or two during the week. I didn't below 190 until I started excersizing during the week regularly along with moderating my diet. On the diet side, I did nothing extreme, just got used to eating smaller portions, only eat out once or twice a week, and for the rest of the time cook stuff I make at home. On the excersize front, I try to either run 2.5 miles or so each day or swim 500 yards (not so great with the swimming yet) in addition to mountain biking on the weekends. Weight-wise, I'm pretty steady in the low 180s with high 170s sometimes, but I would still classify myself as "out of shape" and certainly not really fit. I'll save that for when I can run a 5k before breakfast without feeling tired, or swim those 500 yards without feeling like I'm going to drown at the end.

Yes

No, a lot changed. Everything you see and touch and do today, as yourself "did they have this way back when people weren't fat"? Food, activity, daily life. People also did not regularly stay up until 3am, so perhaps that is the problem.