The other poster was attempting to clarify that "Over The Counter" simply means "you can get it without a prescription". You're stating that where you live you must speak with a pharmacy technician to acquire aspirin. This doesn't make it "OTC" since it's "OTC" even if it's on the shelf. The fact that you need to ask at the counter is unrelated to the classification as a non-prescription medication.

So in actuality we're dealing with 3 different ways to acquire medication:
Over-the-counter on-the-shelf: These are over the counter medications that are just sitting on the shelf for you to pick up and purchase

Over-the-counter regulated: These are medications that you can get without a prescription, but for which you will have to inquire at a pharmacy counter.

Prescription: You need a prescription, and you need to inquire at the pharmacy counter.

Annoying, isn't it?

Unless things have changed in the past five years, that's not entirely accurate. What actually happened was: for mass market paperback books (the most common type), we'd strip the covers in the store, sort the covers by publishing house (to mail back once we had enough to be worth the time), then the employees would typically pick through the coverless books and take a couple for personal enjoyment, then the rest went out with the trash.

The same process was applied to magazines, except that was happening a lot more frequently (we'd get a shipment of magazines at least once or twice a week).

With hardcover and trade paper books, the unbought stock was mailed back to the publisher, or swapped between stores depending on quantity, age, and need.

At the location where I worked there was only one dumpster, and absolutely no recycling went on aside from the store employees picking through the piles and taking what they wanted before the remainder was thrown out.

Of course, if you ever special order anything then someone from corporate would decide there was a market for it and restock the store once you bought your copy; this frequently meant that after I would special order some title for myself, we would have 2 or 3 sit on the shelves for months before we had to strip-cover and discard them. Print-on-demand would have been very nice for those sorts of purchase.

Likewise. I don't own a gun, but that's not because I oppose gun ownership, it's because I haven't taken the time to first become competent with a gun and demonstrate my competence (in the form of taking the requisite gun-safety courses and obtaining a concealed-carry permit). Until such a time as I do that, I won't own a gun because I won't have demonstrated to myself the discipline needed to own that particular tool. I don't think every person needs a gun, but I also don't feel the least bit unsafe knowing that my neighbors are gun-owners and regulars at the range.

I agree that one of the multitude of breeder reactor options (FBR, IFR, etc) seems to be a more effective way to go. I was attempting to point out that modern civilian reactors (light water pressurized reactors) are not the type that are run to produce weapon-grade plutonium or uranium. One of the reasons we have so much "waste" material out of them is due to that consideration, actually. The biggest issue with the waste fuel is that it would need to be reprocessed to be any use at all, either as fuel or for weapons; whereas the output from most breeders can be immediately reinserted into the reactor and "burned" to produce more energy.

Actually, the reason nuclear power isn't "clean" at the moment is because all the commercial power-producing reactors have been built with the overriding purpose of -not- producing anything like weapon-grade plutonium.
The biggest objection to breeder reactors is that they produce or "breed" fissionable material under normal operating conditions. Ideally in a breeder reactor this material would then be used as fuel to produce more energy and less highly-radioactive waste, but objectors like to note that it could be extracted and used in weapons instead.

I think the point being made is: the photographs were created with the intention of being as faithful to the original paintings as possible without adding any new creative input. Doing that in photography is hard work, an incredible amount of time and expertise goes into the setup for the picture.

In the US, such a faithful duplication of a work that is in the public domain is also considered part of the public domain. The point isn't that the duplication was necessarily easy to perform, but that the duplication was performed with the minimum possible amount of new creative input so as to remain as faithful to the original as the duplicator could manage. This doesn't mean that any image that incorporates source material from the public domain is automatically impossible to copyright, but it does mean that in order to copyright it the new work would have to be something other than a maximally-faithful reproduction of the original.

You're right, the creation of the copies likely involved a significant expenditure of time and effort and requires a great deal of skill. However, in the US, the amount of effort required to do something has never been part of the test for whether a work can be copyrighted.

The fact that the portraits are in the UK, and the work was done by a UK photographer at the behest of a UK organization means that, in the UK, those works may be considered copyrighted. However the contention thus far has been: in the US they're not considered copyrighted.

and resemble... look like, butterfly. Bird.

It's nit-picky to be sure, but all modern handguns that I'm aware of are rifles (rifled barrel) as opposed to smooth-bores (no rifling). That said, the usage of "rifle" in common speech has come to mean "long barreled firearm intended to be fired from the shoulder".

Sorry, I must be new here. :)

Joking aside, I had noticed that the other responses to your argument basically break down to "people are too lazy to grow their own, of course they'll pay for it." Which really didn't answer your main point, or make a lot of sense when you compare the opportunity costs once illegality is no longer an issue.

The counterpoint to that argument would be: if would-be users of marijuana are no longer spending 1 billion dollars a year on it, then they will spend that billion elsewhere. If that elsewhere is industries that are taxed then, regardless of the feasibility of taxing marijuana sales, there should be a net increase in state and federal tax dollars. If, on the other hand, people continue to chose to purchase their marijuana and those sales are taxed as would be any other industry then we will see an increase in tax dollars from that source.

So yes; if you can just grow it you won't pay $3500/lb for it. Instead you'll take the money that used to go to your purchases of marijuana and spend it on snacks or big screen TVs.

Oh yeah, well I'm... I mean I know an American Perl Programmer. I... I mean he can even type illegibly!

One more agreement here. I use it for nearly all my programming regardless of language, and for all of my note-taking. My only regret is that it doesn't have a native Linux or OS-X port.