The problem is, not that long ago, the Indonesians didn't consider Australia, a 'colonial outpost, a listening station for the UK and USA' but rather 'South Irian'.
I actually went to a talk by a Prof. Michelle Simmons on this last night, and asked that question. My understanding is that it would just does all the calculations at once, in a massively parallel operation (which obviously isn't efficient). I'm no computer scientist (just a mechanical and mechatronic engineer) and I don't really know anything behind quantum mechanics, but the other thing mentioned in the talk about a quantum computer is that it would have perfect security (her words), because, and now i'm relying on memory, a quantum computer doesn't store data like a classic computer, as it can't be perfectly replicated, so the quantum computer needs to keep the qubits active for as long as possible in the computer (hence the importance of the coherence time, as stated in the article). Because a quantum computer is an adiabatic system, it sends the 'energy' from one place to another. Eavesdropping would mean you reroute that energy, and it doesn't go to its intended place.
A lot of it went over my head, so take this with a spoon of salt, as I could have botched it up, but that's the gist of my understanding, and off-topic info
It's not slavery, it's basically illegal migration by claiming to be a refugee. Rather than engage in the orderly process of getting a visa by getting approval of refugee status from the UN, they decide to go to Indonesia, pay a "people smuggler" who will organise things to get them into Australian waters, then ring some government department to send the navy to go pick them up because their little dingy is probably going to sink soon. Before getting picked up, they discard all their identification papers. Once being processed, they claim they're refugees, escaping persecution, ignoring the fact that they would have passed through four or five different countries who aren't persecuting them.
If they were neighbouring countries, it would be a different matter, but because they're travelling to Australia, I don't think a lot of them are genuine refugees, after all, they're not being persecuted in Indonesia. It's quite a terrible joke what the people smugglers do. If you look on a map to see where 'Christmas Island" is, in relation to Indonesia, you will see why they do it; because it's not ridiculously far from Indonesia and once in Australian waters, our government is compelled to do something. Unlike the US-Mexican border, where many people try to get into the USA and evade detection, in our case, there is absolutely no compulsion to avoid detection, they actually want to be picked up and processed, that way they can get legal entitlements (read: welfare).
Australia is a well-to-do country, and, while some of the immigrants will be escaping some form of persecution worthy of resettlement, a lot of them are economic migrants who are arriving by boat to avoid having to go through the proper, overly bureaucratic procedures. This is unfair to the people who haven't got the money to pay a smuggler. Apparently it's in the vicinity of ~$AU10,000 that people smugglers charge. It's not an insignificant sum of money.
With that brief background, my opinion is that the bribing, and general expenses around people smuggling, means that a lot of that cost is parked in the Indonesian economy. A few thousand Australian dollars is a huge amount in Indonesia, considering their largest currency denomination is worth about $AU10. I just get the feeling that the diplomatic problem is that they know it's happening, they know it's wrong, but they're on the beneficiary side to it, so they don't want it to change.
The NSA has very little to do with this. It's a broader issue with two countries playing politics and politicians trying to win elections. There's that underlying sentiment of the public, and politicians will generally play to nationalistic tendencies, to appear strong. It happened here, and the Indonesians, with an impending election, are doing same.
That's basically why Indonesia isn't liking what's happening. The people smuggling trade brings a lot of money into Indonesia; buying boats, bribing police and officials. Cutting it off is going to annoy quite a lot of people.
It's not the system though, it's the culture. Australia has historically been a fairly egalitarian society; far more so than the UK or the USA. That counts for a lot to this issue, because as a generalisation, for a lot of the time politicians actually worked to make the place better. I really don't think the system does anything when you have a country built around respect for your fellow citizen, because the system only serves as a constraint to prevent "bad things" from happening.
I think we are seeing a culture struggle, where you have the inner city middle class, who either directly or indirectly, work for the government, and then the suburban working class, who are engaged in small business, trades, manufacturing, pretty much everything else which isn't government work or something where you can maybe apply a communication or arts degree. The pendulum is swinging to those inner city people who invariably are in bureaucracies, government consultants, journalists and media people; positions of influence, and they have far more ready access to politics than your average dunny diver. As a result, they are writing the script to which politics is played. I think it's resulting in a culture struggle, and it's quite noticeable that you are starting to see that broad generalisation of inner city people feel superior to other Australians, and in a Randian manner, feel that their superiority entitles them to a greater say.
"Don't think it can't happen in Australia, It does."
What a lot of Australians don't even realise is that anything can happen, our political system guarantees almost no rights to citizens, with only one real recourse; you can vote for another politician at the next election. Problem is, when the two-party system moves in step, there's pretty much nothing that can be done, and the general apathy of the public ensures that nothing will be done.
It is my understanding, that in the USA, the spying conducted by the NSA is probably illegal. The problem in Australia is, as far as I'm aware, there's no problem with the parliament passing a law permitting or compelling third parties to spy or provide data, so whatever had been happening, is perfectly legal here, and the public at large doesn't care.
While what you say is true, the reality is features such as GPS or any other feature they could clamp down on for an income stream are also the easiest features to implement unofficially. It's like the smart tv, adding that 'smart' functionality is the easiest thing to do compared to things such as full hd or 3D, where you can add either dedicated hardware (media centre box) or having more powerful hardware (htpc or latop). In the case of vehicles, they are competing against phones and dedicated gps or audio players. That's why so many cars now have ipod docks or usb and aux inputs. Bluetooth starts adding more user friendly features, but most people won't really care if they have to change tracks on their own device whilst stopped at the lights.
Giving a negative response, is seen as a positive thing?
That is to say, in some online communities, a dissenter to what may otherwise be a fairly homogeneous opinion in that community, may be poured upon by scores of people going for revenge. It's something which I've observed in the gaming community; Bioware games, of late, have been quite popularly pilloried or more often hated, and that is reflected in metacritic user scores.
I'm not really a fan of half life, i don't get what all the hype is about. I've still got to finish ep2, although I found ep1 moderately enjoyable because it was short, and you had Alyx the whole time. I find HL odd, because I've always enjoyed games that work to make other NPC's really make the game 'alive' so to speak. Half life on the other hand, sort of turned FPS games back to doom and wolfenstein 3d, in that sense. Lots of people are fans of HL, but when I've asked around, what they like about it, they can't answer.
I think HL3 might be used to launch steamOS, just like HL2 launched steam. Whether it will be exclusive to steamOS (like HL2 required steam), i have my doubts.
They won't have significantly less repairs though. Maybe people erroneously think that because the most frequent, yet simplest oil and filter changes are gone, but it won't be the case of all maintenance. Most of the components that require critical safety maintenance are still there such as steering, suspension, tyres and to a lesser extent friction brakes due to regenerative braking.
I have a bit of difficulty following this issue, because our ISP's invariably try to sell their customer for an internet plan where you get a connections speed and data allowance. There are some variations in the limitations, for instance some ISP's charge for excess data, most shape, or throttle the speed to 64k/64k or 256k/64k, some count upload data, some don't. Where they're all consistent is that you are paying for an internet connection and you get that service without any problems regarding what you use your data on.
I'm not sure how the ISP's feel that they should be panelising their customers. I also don't know whether our local ISP's shape certain sites, youtube for one doesn't work brilliantly for me all the time, but reading comments that these content providers, which also aren't generally available here, but surely rather than charging for specific usage, wouldn't it be better to change the service so that it reflects the changes in usage patterns? If the content providers are abusing the network, basically make the customer accountable for that use, after all they are using it.
One thing I have noticed with the telecommunications industry, more broadly is that placing limits on their customers appears to be an anathema; they always want to put the customer in a situation where you could go over and be charged excess usage fees. Bill shock has been a problem here, particularly with international roaming and the extortionate fees Telco's have been charging.
I still think compulsory voting is still a good idea, in the same sense compulsory elementary schooling is. As a society, you just don't accept kids to give school a miss, why should one accept giving the elections a miss?
And I might agree with all you said above, would you be to change the wording of the last phrase from "stupid" into "ignorant" - I would even accept "wifully ignorant" or "lazy" ("stupid" does carry the connotation of "mental dullness". While being stupid will most likely cause ignorance, being ignorant may not be caused always caused by stupidity). Shall we settle on it?
Well it's one of those conundrums. I agree with the reasoning you mention, but again, in practice, it doesn't appear to be working. The ideal situation would be that it doesn't matter whether you have compulsory voting or not, because everyone would be engaged. Since that isn't the case, with or without compulsory attendance, it raises the question of whether you want to politically informed to just vote by allowing the politically lazy to stay at home, or if you still want everyone to vote. I'm still battling with the concept as I haven't set my mind one way or another.
With respect to stupid, in the context that I'm using it, it is pretty much interchangeable with ignorant. It's not at all implying 'mental dullness' just that they're doing something which is probably adversely affecting them while they think otherwise.
One thing i generally do detest is something that left wing politics here displays regularly, is that other people are not smart enough to determine themselves what they want, so other people need to rule over them (it's virtually a green party mantra here, where the greens represent the extreme left of politics and feel they have a mandate with what is now about 8% of the vote). I think it's also worth pointing out, that inspite of the 14 or so percent informal rate in my electorate, we do get about 95% attendance, and as a result, approximately 80% of constituents do have their say (be it informed or habitual), so the group I may be whingeing about, ultimately is a small minority (people who stuff an empty or defaced informal ballot, I consider to be making an informed decision; they don't like anyone of them), and don't necessarily change anything.
Well, if you think that it's far right wing, you are probably just a greens voter, where anything that isn't your position, is right wing. Most of australia is relatively speaking, right wing. It's just the highly urbanised and inner city areas which are populated by wealthy professionals who don't produce anything where the left wing ideologies are popular. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-09-04/vote-compass-left-right-electorates/4929064
Most people just couldn't care less. They don't inform themselves, they don't attempt to read things through properly, and after having a few people argue with me about voting, when I'm explaining to them what they have to do to vote formally, because if they did what they wanted to do, then their vote wouldn't count. I'm quite disenchanted with my electorate.
Yes calling them stupid is over the top, particularly for people who don't speak english well.
As for the liberal democrats, I enjoy shooting, so a part of me likes that this error occurred, but the media fallout (and just see the comment above about "ultra right" parties. I have no clue how enjoying vehicles, sport, shooting or fishing makes someone right wing, but as soon as it's something the green left don't agree with, they immediately label it as right wing) is not helping certain causes, most of all shooting rights (of which Australians don't really have any rights to). Because of this, another part of me thinks that it might be a backward step that they were promoted, basically through an error because they have a similar name to a popular party; I think it would be much better if it grew organically. Fact of the matter is, most of the electors still wouldn't have a clue that they voted, in error, for the liberal democrats.
I once thought that compulsory voting attendance was a good idea, because in theory it tries to make voters accountable and politically informed, but after working at a few elections, I can plainly see that almost all the people do not give a shit. They have absolutely no idea who their candidates are, and they don't even know which electorate they are in. The theory behind compulsory voting just doesn't apply in practice. Since the overwhelming majority of them, if it was optional voting, they wouldn't have come. The most important step for so many people is making sure their name is crossed off so that they don't get a fine. Because of that, I do think they're stupid.
Once the count was on and I started to see a few more votes in that pile for the liberal democrats, I knew it was going to take a sizable proportion off the mainstream party in error. Having a look at statistics though, where I was working and surrounding regions had informal vote rates of 12% to 15% (much higher than the national average). It's also a labor party stronghold, which is the party who just got knocked out.
It's also worth pointing out that the particular ballot paper was enormous, over 1m long, 110 candidates for 6 positions, 35 parties and can be very confusing to explain to people who barely speak english, on how to make their vote formal, let alone read the 6.5 point print on who they're voting for.
Moral of the story is, you can't help stupid people, but you can let them to vote... (NB: Australia has compulsory attendance to vote and compulsory preferential voting in federal elections)
I had a tough time comprehending the summary of this article, because my brother has a PhD in Biochemistry, and he told me this years ago, but he said fatties (being both of us) have more efficient gut bacteria. Your comment clears up the perspective problem.
In any case though, the summary appears to have spun it around the other way, suggesting that skinny people have more desirable gut flora because it makes out more efficient to sound like more miles to the gallon. Sure being a fatty isn't a great thing in the first world, but this whole issue is an evolutionary trait since gut bacteria is inherited from your mother. It sort of now sounds a bit like a eugenics idea, but going the other way around.
The worst thing I had was I went on a ski trip with some friends. A few of them would have been half my weight, and quite a bit shorter than me (i'm 189cm and 120kg). We had three days of the slopes, all ate the same food, including portion size, and I'm the one who put on weight.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean ex-prime minister Kevin Rudd's toy boy list. Abbott has only been PM since September. This is a problem he inherited.
The problem is, not that long ago, the Indonesians didn't consider Australia, a 'colonial outpost, a listening station for the UK and USA' but rather 'South Irian'.
I actually went to a talk by a Prof. Michelle Simmons on this last night, and asked that question. My understanding is that it would just does all the calculations at once, in a massively parallel operation (which obviously isn't efficient). I'm no computer scientist (just a mechanical and mechatronic engineer) and I don't really know anything behind quantum mechanics, but the other thing mentioned in the talk about a quantum computer is that it would have perfect security (her words), because, and now i'm relying on memory, a quantum computer doesn't store data like a classic computer, as it can't be perfectly replicated, so the quantum computer needs to keep the qubits active for as long as possible in the computer (hence the importance of the coherence time, as stated in the article). Because a quantum computer is an adiabatic system, it sends the 'energy' from one place to another. Eavesdropping would mean you reroute that energy, and it doesn't go to its intended place.
A lot of it went over my head, so take this with a spoon of salt, as I could have botched it up, but that's the gist of my understanding, and off-topic info
Stubborn IE users should be treated as addicts and sent to rehab.
Better do what he says...
It's not slavery, it's basically illegal migration by claiming to be a refugee. Rather than engage in the orderly process of getting a visa by getting approval of refugee status from the UN, they decide to go to Indonesia, pay a "people smuggler" who will organise things to get them into Australian waters, then ring some government department to send the navy to go pick them up because their little dingy is probably going to sink soon. Before getting picked up, they discard all their identification papers. Once being processed, they claim they're refugees, escaping persecution, ignoring the fact that they would have passed through four or five different countries who aren't persecuting them.
If they were neighbouring countries, it would be a different matter, but because they're travelling to Australia, I don't think a lot of them are genuine refugees, after all, they're not being persecuted in Indonesia. It's quite a terrible joke what the people smugglers do. If you look on a map to see where 'Christmas Island" is, in relation to Indonesia, you will see why they do it; because it's not ridiculously far from Indonesia and once in Australian waters, our government is compelled to do something. Unlike the US-Mexican border, where many people try to get into the USA and evade detection, in our case, there is absolutely no compulsion to avoid detection, they actually want to be picked up and processed, that way they can get legal entitlements (read: welfare).
Australia is a well-to-do country, and, while some of the immigrants will be escaping some form of persecution worthy of resettlement, a lot of them are economic migrants who are arriving by boat to avoid having to go through the proper, overly bureaucratic procedures. This is unfair to the people who haven't got the money to pay a smuggler. Apparently it's in the vicinity of ~$AU10,000 that people smugglers charge. It's not an insignificant sum of money.
With that brief background, my opinion is that the bribing, and general expenses around people smuggling, means that a lot of that cost is parked in the Indonesian economy. A few thousand Australian dollars is a huge amount in Indonesia, considering their largest currency denomination is worth about $AU10. I just get the feeling that the diplomatic problem is that they know it's happening, they know it's wrong, but they're on the beneficiary side to it, so they don't want it to change.
The NSA has very little to do with this. It's a broader issue with two countries playing politics and politicians trying to win elections. There's that underlying sentiment of the public, and politicians will generally play to nationalistic tendencies, to appear strong. It happened here, and the Indonesians, with an impending election, are doing same.
That's basically why Indonesia isn't liking what's happening. The people smuggling trade brings a lot of money into Indonesia; buying boats, bribing police and officials. Cutting it off is going to annoy quite a lot of people.
It's not the system though, it's the culture. Australia has historically been a fairly egalitarian society; far more so than the UK or the USA. That counts for a lot to this issue, because as a generalisation, for a lot of the time politicians actually worked to make the place better. I really don't think the system does anything when you have a country built around respect for your fellow citizen, because the system only serves as a constraint to prevent "bad things" from happening.
I think we are seeing a culture struggle, where you have the inner city middle class, who either directly or indirectly, work for the government, and then the suburban working class, who are engaged in small business, trades, manufacturing, pretty much everything else which isn't government work or something where you can maybe apply a communication or arts degree. The pendulum is swinging to those inner city people who invariably are in bureaucracies, government consultants, journalists and media people; positions of influence, and they have far more ready access to politics than your average dunny diver. As a result, they are writing the script to which politics is played. I think it's resulting in a culture struggle, and it's quite noticeable that you are starting to see that broad generalisation of inner city people feel superior to other Australians, and in a Randian manner, feel that their superiority entitles them to a greater say.
"Don't think it can't happen in Australia, It does."
What a lot of Australians don't even realise is that anything can happen, our political system guarantees almost no rights to citizens, with only one real recourse; you can vote for another politician at the next election. Problem is, when the two-party system moves in step, there's pretty much nothing that can be done, and the general apathy of the public ensures that nothing will be done.
It is my understanding, that in the USA, the spying conducted by the NSA is probably illegal. The problem in Australia is, as far as I'm aware, there's no problem with the parliament passing a law permitting or compelling third parties to spy or provide data, so whatever had been happening, is perfectly legal here, and the public at large doesn't care.
While what you say is true, the reality is features such as GPS or any other feature they could clamp down on for an income stream are also the easiest features to implement unofficially. It's like the smart tv, adding that 'smart' functionality is the easiest thing to do compared to things such as full hd or 3D, where you can add either dedicated hardware (media centre box) or having more powerful hardware (htpc or latop). In the case of vehicles, they are competing against phones and dedicated gps or audio players. That's why so many cars now have ipod docks or usb and aux inputs. Bluetooth starts adding more user friendly features, but most people won't really care if they have to change tracks on their own device whilst stopped at the lights.
The sad thing is Kodak actually invented the digital camera. I guess it wouldn't really matter what could have happened.
It's simple, Microsoft doesn't make any money from WinXP anymore, so support is pointless, whereas, google still does make money from it.
Our nanny state won't let this at all. I really doubt it's even legal at the moment, since there have been many laws governing UAV's already.
Giving a negative response, is seen as a positive thing?
That is to say, in some online communities, a dissenter to what may otherwise be a fairly homogeneous opinion in that community, may be poured upon by scores of people going for revenge. It's something which I've observed in the gaming community; Bioware games, of late, have been quite popularly pilloried or more often hated, and that is reflected in metacritic user scores.
I'm not really a fan of half life, i don't get what all the hype is about. I've still got to finish ep2, although I found ep1 moderately enjoyable because it was short, and you had Alyx the whole time. I find HL odd, because I've always enjoyed games that work to make other NPC's really make the game 'alive' so to speak. Half life on the other hand, sort of turned FPS games back to doom and wolfenstein 3d, in that sense. Lots of people are fans of HL, but when I've asked around, what they like about it, they can't answer.
What happened to it? Some time ago, all the talk turned to HL3 instead.
I think HL3 might be used to launch steamOS, just like HL2 launched steam. Whether it will be exclusive to steamOS (like HL2 required steam), i have my doubts.
They won't have significantly less repairs though. Maybe people erroneously think that because the most frequent, yet simplest oil and filter changes are gone, but it won't be the case of all maintenance. Most of the components that require critical safety maintenance are still there such as steering, suspension, tyres and to a lesser extent friction brakes due to regenerative braking.
I had a lecturer, last semester who did this. Put up 15 minute videos which no one watched. Not sure whether it worked out too well.
I have a bit of difficulty following this issue, because our ISP's invariably try to sell their customer for an internet plan where you get a connections speed and data allowance. There are some variations in the limitations, for instance some ISP's charge for excess data, most shape, or throttle the speed to 64k/64k or 256k/64k, some count upload data, some don't. Where they're all consistent is that you are paying for an internet connection and you get that service without any problems regarding what you use your data on.
I'm not sure how the ISP's feel that they should be panelising their customers. I also don't know whether our local ISP's shape certain sites, youtube for one doesn't work brilliantly for me all the time, but reading comments that these content providers, which also aren't generally available here, but surely rather than charging for specific usage, wouldn't it be better to change the service so that it reflects the changes in usage patterns? If the content providers are abusing the network, basically make the customer accountable for that use, after all they are using it.
One thing I have noticed with the telecommunications industry, more broadly is that placing limits on their customers appears to be an anathema; they always want to put the customer in a situation where you could go over and be charged excess usage fees. Bill shock has been a problem here, particularly with international roaming and the extortionate fees Telco's have been charging.
I still think compulsory voting is still a good idea, in the same sense compulsory elementary schooling is. As a society, you just don't accept kids to give school a miss, why should one accept giving the elections a miss?
And I might agree with all you said above, would you be to change the wording of the last phrase from "stupid" into "ignorant" - I would even accept "wifully ignorant" or "lazy" ("stupid" does carry the connotation of "mental dullness". While being stupid will most likely cause ignorance, being ignorant may not be caused always caused by stupidity). Shall we settle on it?
Well it's one of those conundrums. I agree with the reasoning you mention, but again, in practice, it doesn't appear to be working. The ideal situation would be that it doesn't matter whether you have compulsory voting or not, because everyone would be engaged. Since that isn't the case, with or without compulsory attendance, it raises the question of whether you want to politically informed to just vote by allowing the politically lazy to stay at home, or if you still want everyone to vote. I'm still battling with the concept as I haven't set my mind one way or another.
With respect to stupid, in the context that I'm using it, it is pretty much interchangeable with ignorant. It's not at all implying 'mental dullness' just that they're doing something which is probably adversely affecting them while they think otherwise.
One thing i generally do detest is something that left wing politics here displays regularly, is that other people are not smart enough to determine themselves what they want, so other people need to rule over them (it's virtually a green party mantra here, where the greens represent the extreme left of politics and feel they have a mandate with what is now about 8% of the vote). I think it's also worth pointing out, that inspite of the 14 or so percent informal rate in my electorate, we do get about 95% attendance, and as a result, approximately 80% of constituents do have their say (be it informed or habitual), so the group I may be whingeing about, ultimately is a small minority (people who stuff an empty or defaced informal ballot, I consider to be making an informed decision; they don't like anyone of them), and don't necessarily change anything.
Well, if you think that it's far right wing, you are probably just a greens voter, where anything that isn't your position, is right wing. Most of australia is relatively speaking, right wing. It's just the highly urbanised and inner city areas which are populated by wealthy professionals who don't produce anything where the left wing ideologies are popular. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-09-04/vote-compass-left-right-electorates/4929064
Most people just couldn't care less. They don't inform themselves, they don't attempt to read things through properly, and after having a few people argue with me about voting, when I'm explaining to them what they have to do to vote formally, because if they did what they wanted to do, then their vote wouldn't count. I'm quite disenchanted with my electorate.
Yes calling them stupid is over the top, particularly for people who don't speak english well.
As for the liberal democrats, I enjoy shooting, so a part of me likes that this error occurred, but the media fallout (and just see the comment above about "ultra right" parties. I have no clue how enjoying vehicles, sport, shooting or fishing makes someone right wing, but as soon as it's something the green left don't agree with, they immediately label it as right wing) is not helping certain causes, most of all shooting rights (of which Australians don't really have any rights to). Because of this, another part of me thinks that it might be a backward step that they were promoted, basically through an error because they have a similar name to a popular party; I think it would be much better if it grew organically. Fact of the matter is, most of the electors still wouldn't have a clue that they voted, in error, for the liberal democrats.
I once thought that compulsory voting attendance was a good idea, because in theory it tries to make voters accountable and politically informed, but after working at a few elections, I can plainly see that almost all the people do not give a shit. They have absolutely no idea who their candidates are, and they don't even know which electorate they are in. The theory behind compulsory voting just doesn't apply in practice. Since the overwhelming majority of them, if it was optional voting, they wouldn't have come. The most important step for so many people is making sure their name is crossed off so that they don't get a fine. Because of that, I do think they're stupid.
Once the count was on and I started to see a few more votes in that pile for the liberal democrats, I knew it was going to take a sizable proportion off the mainstream party in error. Having a look at statistics though, where I was working and surrounding regions had informal vote rates of 12% to 15% (much higher than the national average). It's also a labor party stronghold, which is the party who just got knocked out.
It's also worth pointing out that the particular ballot paper was enormous, over 1m long, 110 candidates for 6 positions, 35 parties and can be very confusing to explain to people who barely speak english, on how to make their vote formal, let alone read the 6.5 point print on who they're voting for.
Moral of the story is, you can't help stupid people, but you can let them to vote... (NB: Australia has compulsory attendance to vote and compulsory preferential voting in federal elections)
I had a tough time comprehending the summary of this article, because my brother has a PhD in Biochemistry, and he told me this years ago, but he said fatties (being both of us) have more efficient gut bacteria. Your comment clears up the perspective problem.
In any case though, the summary appears to have spun it around the other way, suggesting that skinny people have more desirable gut flora because it makes out more efficient to sound like more miles to the gallon. Sure being a fatty isn't a great thing in the first world, but this whole issue is an evolutionary trait since gut bacteria is inherited from your mother. It sort of now sounds a bit like a eugenics idea, but going the other way around.
The worst thing I had was I went on a ski trip with some friends. A few of them would have been half my weight, and quite a bit shorter than me (i'm 189cm and 120kg). We had three days of the slopes, all ate the same food, including portion size, and I'm the one who put on weight.