It seems to me that you are disagreeing about what "editing" is.
Would you object if each entry that a doctor made has a space attached to it where the patient could place their comments... and neither could alter the entries of the other? Think of it as a database where each record has a text field that is specifically for the use of the patient.
That's how it's supposed to work. I'm not sure that's how it does work. Habeas Corpus was "sort of" repealed, and I haven't yet heard that it was re-instituted.
Unnhh... you are arguing about Operating Systems, not access controllers. Where I live the choice is between DSL, Cable, and dial-up. DSL and Cable each have one provider. At least for DSL the phone company still leases the lines to other ISPs. I don't know about cable. But this is only because the government forced them to so lease the lines. (They took 6 months to connect my DSL line. This may have been incompetence, as it was several years ago, but it's worth noticing that my business was with an ISP that wasn't the phone company.)
I don't particularly trust the government, but this is a natural monopoly. I think that each city & town should run it's own wires, preferably by contracting with local businesses, but if no local business is capable, through an outside vendor, or even, if it has the technical competence, doing it themselves. Then they should make the lines available to ISPs.
This leaves the rural population. This is clearly the job of the state or county governments. Wireless seems a quite reasonable way for them to go to service this population.
I don't think the Feds should be involved, except by making it clear what the proper way to proceed is.
The "traditional" means of providing internet access is clearly a bad choice. And long term contracts are also clearly dysfunctional. 5 years renewable depending on good performance is the best choice.
Notice, however, that if "cell system" becomes the dominant mode of access, then my proposal becomes irrelevant. (Not that it'll ever happen anyway.) But the cell system doesn't depend on easements, so there is no natural monopoly. I don't know whether it still requires governmental intervention to yield coverage of the rural population, however. I suspect that it does. In this case, however, perhaps the intervention could be in the form of allowing higher broadcast power in rural areas. I don't know if that would work, but it seems plausible. Or perhaps allowing the use of a different band of frequencies. (A ham's 2-meter rig can occasionally cover 60 miles at fairly low power if there aren't obstructions in the way. And that's with a "rubber duck" antenna.) So say a hex or triangular grid with a cell tower loosely every 30 miles, and on top of hills where possible. That should be feasible and provide "pretty good" coverage. One would never be much more than 15 miles from a tower. Valleys would still be dead spots, but I live in a city, and I'm in a "pretty dead" spot.
It's better to avoid natural monopolies than to regulate them, but if they can't be avoided (wired connections within cities) then they should be reduced in size, and in such cases government operation is reasonable. But it should be as local as possible. Cities are a reasonable level.
And whether you can avoid the natural monopolies or not, the matter of how to provide services to people who are more than normally expensive to provide services to is present. In such cases the government should ensure that services are provided. And the services provided should be of good quality. Contracting such services out has a dubious history. The contracted party is generally under severe pressure to cut costs, and under very little pressure to provide good service. (Why am I reminded of HMOs? When I was a military dependent I got better care than I do now from a rather expensive health insurance policy. [Though I understand that currently dependents get much worse care than I experienced in the 1950's.])
You are assuming that they didn't just invent a number on the spot. I see no reason to give them any credence. Other representatives of the same industry are known liars, and they have done nothing to establish their credibility to me.
This all presumes that you believe their figures. I see no reason to believe the figures this time, when so many times previously they, or similar spokesmen for the same business, have been shown to invent numbers without any basis in fact.
I think that it was in a discussion of an article about featuring RIAA that I first encountered the phrase "95% of statistics are invented on the spot", and I've never seen any reason to believe that this didn't apply directly to the recording industry.
P.S.: In every case that I'm aware of, when an artist has been able to coerce a recording company into an external audit of it's books, it's turned out that they have been drastically underpaying the artist. But very few artists have the kind of leverage that enables them to force an audit.
Yeah, but it's not just light and radio. It's light, radio, microwave, Long wave radio, gigahertz radio, tetrahertz radio, infrared, UV, soft Xrays, hard Xrays, gamma rays...
Each with their own set of technological problems. All best for transmitting info under certain circumstances.
That's not a particularly good idea. This system can be counted upon to fail in fog, rain, snow, etc.
What you probably want is microwave repeaters. Possibly tetrahertz would be better, but I haven't heard of any working systems with much distance. And for microwaves, you'd need to be careful as to which band you used. Some of them are stopped by fog, others by snow, others by rain. You need a wavelength that penetrates all of the above. You MIGHT need gigahertz, but I think microwave is the right spectrum.
I think the doctrine of latches would apply here. By making the code available under a FOSS license, Sun is implicitly giving authorization to use and distribute it under the terms of that license. It's not as clean as the GPL3, but I think that there's a history of case law that says it works as I've stated. (But, of course, the fact that there's a history of case law implies that many times there have been attempts to not comply with the implied promise.)
There are those who say "Who cares?", but there will always be short-sighted ones.
I have no *personal* interest in the Netscape server, but I'm glad that it's open and available. It may someday be crucial, and if not, it's good insurance.
One needs to remember that the Roman Republic didn't fall until Julius C. crossed the Rubicon, defied the Senate, and captured Rome. This was only slightly before year 0. So most of these habits can be presumed to have continued. Augustus made notable efforts to "reform the morals" of the citizenry, but he met with massive resistance. Even his own family publicly flouted his orders. And the importance of the Arena was growing, even as Agustus tried to stand for morality. (Rome never became quite as "politicized" over the Arena as Byzantium did, but the phrase "bread and circuses" is still live, a witness to its impress on the mass consciousness.)
If I'm remembering my history correctly, you are misdating things. During the Roman Republic (well, the late Roman Republic) marriage was only common among the Patricians and was almost unheard of among the Pleblians. It was almost entirely concerned with inheritable property, but as a result it also involved chastity, etc. The Pleblians didn't have much inheritable property, so they didn't generally worry about such things. (Some merchants, of course, *did* have inheritable property...so it wasn't strictly Patrician.)
Among the Patricians it was, as you suggest, arranged by their families. Among the Plebeians...it was much more like today. (There may have been no official marriage, but there was community recognition of partnerships...and they could be dissolved when "irreconcilable differences" occurred.
Then there were the slaves. The slaves didn't even have the "right" to choose their sexual partners. And early christianity in Rome was originally most common among the slaves. So early christians didn't practice marriage, or fidelity, but looked up to them as aristocratic virtues.
(Most christian history is from Rome. The beliefs of the followers who remained in Judea was called Nestorianism [if not precisely that, something like it], I think, and was wiped out by a Roman army commanded by a christian general. [I'm presuming that this was after Constantine recognized christianity as not only an official religion, but as the official religion of the Roman empire. But I've never really checked out the dates.])
According to what I heard, the CIA told Bush shortly before he decided to invade that "Saddam wasn't a danger to anyone outside his country"(paraphrase of something not quite remembered). It was shortly after that that Bush decided to invade.
Now I can't remember where I originally read(heard ?) this, so I guess it has to count as rumor. But I believed it when I read it (before the war propaganda started) and I have continued to believe it.
I *HOPE* that you are correct. I'm very much not certain of it. And I don't know how much damage will occur before that happens (if it does). But I do know that those injured will never be recompensed.
OTOH, each law should only be about one topic. The joining of separate issues to gather votes should be abolished. Probably by a constitutional amendment...though I certainly couldn't write the appropriate phrasing.
1) This information is out of date, so don't rely on it. It's only for checkpoint use. 2) We had data stored on 800 BPI odd parity tapes. After 20 years most of them were still readable. Most of them had not been looked at in the intervening time. The tapes *were* stored in an air conditioned room, so there wasn't lots of thermal cycling, but it temperature wasn't closely controlled. Variations of 10 to 20 degrees were common occurrences.
However, saying the tapes were readable doesn't imply that there weren't any non-recoverable errors. There was an average of two or three per tape. This gives a grossly distorted picture, however. Most tapes were clean. Some had multiple errors throughout.
We did this check while moving to 9-track tapes. (The move was never completed, because about then the 6250 tapes came out, etc.)
I don't know what the tolerances of the current tapes are. I suspect that they've gotten increasingly sensitive. And with the introduction of block coding, an unrecoverable error means not the loss of a record, but rather the loss of a block, which probably bears no logical relationship to the data being stored. (Actually, in most cases a block is probably some large number of records, but one can't really presume that. Some programs have switched to writing an entire batch of output as a single record the size of the file that will hold it. In such cases losing a block or two may mean that nothing can be recovered from the file [given a proprietary file format]. Presumably there are specialist who could easily recover files that I would just give up on.)
Actually, based on my recent reading, the best backup media currently are external hard disks. But this is short term only.
Professional data librarians still seem to prefer tapes, but they aren't the tapes of yore. They seem to require more maintenance, and they store a tremendous amount more.
And as always, if you really care use multiple copies at different sites. (And thermostatically controlled rooms. And read the tapes every year or two to be sure that they're still legible. If they aren't, pull a copy from one of the other sites.)
20 years isn't a long time. Sometimes it's not long enough. We really regretted one of the tapes that turned out to be unreadable. But at the time automated tape verification wasn't an option...not with our budget. Now nearly anyone who can afford a tape could afford to verify it. (Not all do, admittedly. Small organizations frequently try to make too few people do too many different things.)
Sorry, but there are lots of necessary programs that no programmer is interested enough in to work on or maintain for free...or even for a merely competitive salary.
One example appears to be tax law programs. There are lots of good reasons why those programs are all commercial. One of them is that the legal requirements keep changing.
So commercial software will never disappear. Nor should it. This is the reason that the LGPL is available, and this is the reason that similar provisions were made in GPL3.
Interesting. I have to wonder what makes that code "*my* code". If the GPL restricts the licensing terms that you can use, I have to suspect you of knowingly copying the code from a GPL program. Even in the case where you want to do a static link you could compile and distribute the two sections separately and link them after they were on the end users machine. (Granted that would be a tremendous bother...so you'd normally be better off using a different library to link against.)
But if the GPL is "actually forbidding"(see next paragraph) the distribution of code that you are claiming as your own, then I must suspect you of illegal copying of copyrighted material. (Well, it's not illegal until you distribute it, because of how the GPL is written, but if you distribute it that it would become illegal.)
In that case what is doing the actual forbidding is the copyright law, and you should take your objections to the legislators.
I thought they used a different material that was significantly more resistant to radiation. Just how much "significantly" is, however, I haven't a clue. Something about gallium arsenide something or other. This may be only antique models, though.
Still, I thought some of the milSats were supposed to be hardened against close strikes by nuclear weapons, which ought to be hardened enough to resist this.
Not that that will help anyone very much. Those things aren't for public observation or use. And the ground stations probably wouldn't be able to either send to or receive signals from them. Just hope there's no "dead man switch".
Yeah. And I've done it too. But it's a bit different when one person does it and when a city attempts to do the same thing. Much less a metropolitan area.
E.g. During the last power outage it turned out that the fire trucks couldn't get out of the fire stations. The doors were electrically operated with no mechanical override. If this has been fixed, I didn't hear about it.
Well, that was a short problem, and if they'd had to the trucks could have just run through the doors. But how many such "fool killer" errors are just lying around waiting to be discovered? I suspect that if the power were off for long, water would stop flowing, and then having fire trucks available wouldn't help very much.
It's not the end of the world, but it could be a period of many many deaths and massive property destruction. And massive suffering. Fires are hard to stop when there's no water. And there are certain to be other problems that I haven't thought of.
Automation is still a work in progress. And it's still progressing.
As you note, Japan is currently one of the lead players. Currently a lot of their emphasis is on robotic attendants to care for the elderly and bed-ridden. It's still a work in progress, but it's progressing rapidly.
And what happens when Japan starts exporting robotic attendants and personal secretaries? Minimum wage jobs won't be the first to be affected, because they need cheaper replacements, but they're on the target too.
So now we have a society that only has jobs for for about 1/10th of it's people. (O, yes, I forgot. The US is building robot troops. So that job's gone too.)
I don't have any good answers, but I hope someone does. Unfortunately, bad answers are easy to come up with.
I generally agree with you. I'm just pointing out how, in this kind of case, it results in gross lack of justice.
P.S.: The doctor who lectures you about being overweight is, himself, likely to be overweight. This doesn't mean he's wrong, it means that it's a hard problem with no easy answers. Very few people are able to keep off any weight they loose. There's a national registry (U.S.) for those who are successful. That's how few are successful. (I know someone who's on the national registry. She finds it a continued effort to remain qualified.)
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It seems to me that you are disagreeing about what "editing" is.
Would you object if each entry that a doctor made has a space attached to it where the patient could place their comments... and neither could alter the entries of the other? Think of it as a database where each record has a text field that is specifically for the use of the patient.
Would that satisfy both of you?
That's how it's supposed to work. I'm not sure that's how it does work. Habeas Corpus was "sort of" repealed, and I haven't yet heard that it was re-instituted.
Unnhh... you are arguing about Operating Systems, not access controllers. Where I live the choice is between DSL, Cable, and dial-up. DSL and Cable each have one provider. At least for DSL the phone company still leases the lines to other ISPs. I don't know about cable. But this is only because the government forced them to so lease the lines. (They took 6 months to connect my DSL line. This may have been incompetence, as it was several years ago, but it's worth noticing that my business was with an ISP that wasn't the phone company.)
I don't particularly trust the government, but this is a natural monopoly. I think that each city & town should run it's own wires, preferably by contracting with local businesses, but if no local business is capable, through an outside vendor, or even, if it has the technical competence, doing it themselves. Then they should make the lines available to ISPs.
This leaves the rural population. This is clearly the job of the state or county governments. Wireless seems a quite reasonable way for them to go to service this population.
I don't think the Feds should be involved, except by making it clear what the proper way to proceed is.
The "traditional" means of providing internet access is clearly a bad choice. And long term contracts are also clearly dysfunctional. 5 years renewable depending on good performance is the best choice.
Notice, however, that if "cell system" becomes the dominant mode of access, then my proposal becomes irrelevant. (Not that it'll ever happen anyway.) But the cell system doesn't depend on easements, so there is no natural monopoly. I don't know whether it still requires governmental intervention to yield coverage of the rural population, however. I suspect that it does. In this case, however, perhaps the intervention could be in the form of allowing higher broadcast power in rural areas. I don't know if that would work, but it seems plausible. Or perhaps allowing the use of a different band of frequencies. (A ham's 2-meter rig can occasionally cover 60 miles at fairly low power if there aren't obstructions in the way. And that's with a "rubber duck" antenna.) So say a hex or triangular grid with a cell tower loosely every 30 miles, and on top of hills where possible. That should be feasible and provide "pretty good" coverage. One would never be much more than 15 miles from a tower. Valleys would still be dead spots, but I live in a city, and I'm in a "pretty dead" spot.
It's better to avoid natural monopolies than to regulate them, but if they can't be avoided (wired connections within cities) then they should be reduced in size, and in such cases government operation is reasonable. But it should be as local as possible. Cities are a reasonable level.
And whether you can avoid the natural monopolies or not, the matter of how to provide services to people who are more than normally expensive to provide services to is present. In such cases the government should ensure that services are provided. And the services provided should be of good quality. Contracting such services out has a dubious history. The contracted party is generally under severe pressure to cut costs, and under very little pressure to provide good service. (Why am I reminded of HMOs? When I was a military dependent I got better care than I do now from a rather expensive health insurance policy. [Though I understand that currently dependents get much worse care than I experienced in the 1950's.])
You are assuming that the figure represents something real. I have seen no evidence that such is the case.
(Otherwise, I'd consider your question a pertinent one, even though it makes no legal difference.)
You are assuming that they didn't just invent a number on the spot. I see no reason to give them any credence. Other representatives of the same industry are known liars, and they have done nothing to establish their credibility to me.
This all presumes that you believe their figures. I see no reason to believe the figures this time, when so many times previously they, or similar spokesmen for the same business, have been shown to invent numbers without any basis in fact.
I think that it was in a discussion of an article about featuring RIAA that I first encountered the phrase "95% of statistics are invented on the spot", and I've never seen any reason to believe that this didn't apply directly to the recording industry.
P.S.: In every case that I'm aware of, when an artist has been able to coerce a recording company into an external audit of it's books, it's turned out that they have been drastically underpaying the artist. But very few artists have the kind of leverage that enables them to force an audit.
Yeah, but it's not just light and radio. It's light, radio, microwave, Long wave radio, gigahertz radio, tetrahertz radio, infrared, UV, soft Xrays, hard Xrays, gamma rays...
Each with their own set of technological problems. All best for transmitting info under certain circumstances.
That's not a particularly good idea. This system can be counted upon to fail in fog, rain, snow, etc.
What you probably want is microwave repeaters. Possibly tetrahertz would be better, but I haven't heard of any working systems with much distance. And for microwaves, you'd need to be careful as to which band you used. Some of them are stopped by fog, others by snow, others by rain. You need a wavelength that penetrates all of the above. You MIGHT need gigahertz, but I think microwave is the right spectrum.
This sounds much more tuned to indoor uses.
CATUION: I AM NOT A LAWYER.
I think the doctrine of latches would apply here. By making the code available under a FOSS license, Sun is implicitly giving authorization to use and distribute it under the terms of that license. It's not as clean as the GPL3, but I think that there's a history of case law that says it works as I've stated. (But, of course, the fact that there's a history of case law implies that many times there have been attempts to not comply with the implied promise.)
There are those who say "Who cares?", but there will always be short-sighted ones.
I have no *personal* interest in the Netscape server, but I'm glad that it's open and available. It may someday be crucial, and if not, it's good insurance.
AGGH! Hit the wrong button.
One needs to remember that the Roman Republic didn't fall until Julius C. crossed the Rubicon, defied the Senate, and captured Rome. This was only slightly before year 0. So most of these habits can be presumed to have continued. Augustus made notable efforts to "reform the morals" of the citizenry, but he met with massive resistance. Even his own family publicly flouted his orders. And the importance of the Arena was growing, even as Agustus tried to stand for morality. (Rome never became quite as "politicized" over the Arena as Byzantium did, but the phrase "bread and circuses" is still live, a witness to its impress on the mass consciousness.)
If I'm remembering my history correctly, you are misdating things. During the Roman Republic (well, the late Roman Republic) marriage was only common among the Patricians and was almost unheard of among the Pleblians. It was almost entirely concerned with inheritable property, but as a result it also involved chastity, etc. The Pleblians didn't have much inheritable property, so they didn't generally worry about such things. (Some merchants, of course, *did* have inheritable property...so it wasn't strictly Patrician.)
Among the Patricians it was, as you suggest, arranged by their families. Among the Plebeians...it was much more like today. (There may have been no official marriage, but there was community recognition of partnerships...and they could be dissolved when "irreconcilable differences" occurred.
Then there were the slaves. The slaves didn't even have the "right" to choose their sexual partners. And early christianity in Rome was originally most common among the slaves. So early christians didn't practice marriage, or fidelity, but looked up to them as aristocratic virtues.
(Most christian history is from Rome. The beliefs of the followers who remained in Judea was called Nestorianism [if not precisely that, something like it], I think, and was wiped out by a Roman army commanded by a christian general. [I'm presuming that this was after Constantine recognized christianity as not only an official religion, but as the official religion of the Roman empire. But I've never really checked out the dates.])
According to what I heard, the CIA told Bush shortly before he decided to invade that "Saddam wasn't a danger to anyone outside his country"(paraphrase of something not quite remembered). It was shortly after that that Bush decided to invade.
Now I can't remember where I originally read(heard ?) this, so I guess it has to count as rumor. But I believed it when I read it (before the war propaganda started) and I have continued to believe it.
I *HOPE* that you are correct. I'm very much not certain of it. And I don't know how much damage will occur before that happens (if it does). But I do know that those injured will never be recompensed.
OTOH, each law should only be about one topic. The joining of separate issues to gather votes should be abolished. Probably by a constitutional amendment...though I certainly couldn't write the appropriate phrasing.
1) This information is out of date, so don't rely on it. It's only for checkpoint use.
2) We had data stored on 800 BPI odd parity tapes. After 20 years most of them were still readable. Most of them had not been looked at in the intervening time. The tapes *were* stored in an air conditioned room, so there wasn't lots of thermal cycling, but it temperature wasn't closely controlled. Variations of 10 to 20 degrees were common occurrences.
However, saying the tapes were readable doesn't imply that there weren't any non-recoverable errors. There was an average of two or three per tape. This gives a grossly distorted picture, however. Most tapes were clean. Some had multiple errors throughout.
We did this check while moving to 9-track tapes. (The move was never completed, because about then the 6250 tapes came out, etc.)
I don't know what the tolerances of the current tapes are. I suspect that they've gotten increasingly sensitive. And with the introduction of block coding, an unrecoverable error means not the loss of a record, but rather the loss of a block, which probably bears no logical relationship to the data being stored. (Actually, in most cases a block is probably some large number of records, but one can't really presume that. Some programs have switched to writing an entire batch of output as a single record the size of the file that will hold it. In such cases losing a block or two may mean that nothing can be recovered from the file [given a proprietary file format]. Presumably there are specialist who could easily recover files that I would just give up on.)
Actually, based on my recent reading, the best backup media currently are external hard disks. But this is short term only.
Professional data librarians still seem to prefer tapes, but they aren't the tapes of yore. They seem to require more maintenance, and they store a tremendous amount more.
And as always, if you really care use multiple copies at different sites. (And thermostatically controlled rooms. And read the tapes every year or two to be sure that they're still legible. If they aren't, pull a copy from one of the other sites.)
20 years isn't a long time. Sometimes it's not long enough. We really regretted one of the tapes that turned out to be unreadable. But at the time automated tape verification wasn't an option...not with our budget. Now nearly anyone who can afford a tape could afford to verify it. (Not all do, admittedly. Small organizations frequently try to make too few people do too many different things.)
Sorry, but there are lots of necessary programs that no programmer is interested enough in to work on or maintain for free...or even for a merely competitive salary.
One example appears to be tax law programs. There are lots of good reasons why those programs are all commercial. One of them is that the legal requirements keep changing.
So commercial software will never disappear. Nor should it. This is the reason that the LGPL is available, and this is the reason that similar provisions were made in GPL3.
Interesting. I have to wonder what makes that code "*my* code". If the GPL restricts the licensing terms that you can use, I have to suspect you of knowingly copying the code from a GPL program. Even in the case where you want to do a static link you could compile and distribute the two sections separately and link them after they were on the end users machine. (Granted that would be a tremendous bother...so you'd normally be better off using a different library to link against.)
But if the GPL is "actually forbidding"(see next paragraph) the distribution of code that you are claiming as your own, then I must suspect you of illegal copying of copyrighted material. (Well, it's not illegal until you distribute it, because of how the GPL is written, but if you distribute it that it would become illegal.)
In that case what is doing the actual forbidding is the copyright law, and you should take your objections to the legislators.
I have to presume that you haven't read either the GPL or the CDDL. Possibly both.
Either that, or you have poor reading comprehension skills.
And in any of the above cases, you don't seem to be able to clearly explain your objections.
Or you could be a troll.
Unnnh... these days *I* am city folk. I have sleep apnea, and without electricity for a few days I'm barely conscious.
Whiskey would be a better post-apocalypse trade good than gold. Just be careful that when you practice distilling and aging it you don't get caught.
I thought they used a different material that was significantly more resistant to radiation. Just how much "significantly" is, however, I haven't a clue. Something about gallium arsenide something or other. This may be only antique models, though.
Still, I thought some of the milSats were supposed to be hardened against close strikes by nuclear weapons, which ought to be hardened enough to resist this.
Not that that will help anyone very much. Those things aren't for public observation or use. And the ground stations probably wouldn't be able to either send to or receive signals from them. Just hope there's no "dead man switch".
Yeah. And I've done it too. But it's a bit different when one person does it and when a city attempts to do the same thing. Much less a metropolitan area.
E.g. During the last power outage it turned out that the fire trucks couldn't get out of the fire stations. The doors were electrically operated with no mechanical override. If this has been fixed, I didn't hear about it.
Well, that was a short problem, and if they'd had to the trucks could have just run through the doors. But how many such "fool killer" errors are just lying around waiting to be discovered? I suspect that if the power were off for long, water would stop flowing, and then having fire trucks available wouldn't help very much.
It's not the end of the world, but it could be a period of many many deaths and massive property destruction. And massive suffering. Fires are hard to stop when there's no water. And there are certain to be other problems that I haven't thought of.
P.S.: Sorry about confusing "loose" and "lose". I didn't catch it until the 3rd reading.
Automation is still a work in progress. And it's still progressing.
As you note, Japan is currently one of the lead players. Currently a lot of their emphasis is on robotic attendants to care for the elderly and bed-ridden. It's still a work in progress, but it's progressing rapidly.
And what happens when Japan starts exporting robotic attendants and personal secretaries? Minimum wage jobs won't be the first to be affected, because they need cheaper replacements, but they're on the target too.
So now we have a society that only has jobs for for about 1/10th of it's people. (O, yes, I forgot. The US is building robot troops. So that job's gone too.)
I don't have any good answers, but I hope someone does. Unfortunately, bad answers are easy to come up with.
I generally agree with you. I'm just pointing out how, in this kind of case, it results in gross lack of justice.
P.S.: The doctor who lectures you about being overweight is, himself, likely to be overweight. This doesn't mean he's wrong, it means that it's a hard problem with no easy answers. Very few people are able to keep off any weight they loose. There's a national registry (U.S.) for those who are successful. That's how few are successful. (I know someone who's on the national registry. She finds it a continued effort to remain qualified.)