Usually when someone on slashdot makes a claim like that, they provide a link.
Sure thing. It's on page three of
this white paper-- the same page, incidentally, where they list as one of the advantages of their PIPEs "the ability to conduct transactions confidentially".
I hit Baystar and have yet to find anything about Paul Allen.
"There are only two investors in this deal: BayStar Capital and the Royal Bank of Canada."
Baystar's own website claims Paul Allen, Microsoft, etc. in their list of top ten investors. IIRC, four of the top ten were Microsoft or close friends of Microsoft.
The simplest law I can think of that would kill the GPL would be to say that you can not 'exclusively' give away copyrighted material. That is, you can't make something free for a certan class of people, but not others.
This wouldn't affect anything. The GPL doesn't "give away" anything, to any class of people, exclusively or otherwise. It offers a trade--you may have a copy of the software to use and/or modify, if and only if you agree to abide by certain terms. This is known as "a valueble consideration" and is just as much payment as if you had to fork over cash. GPL'd software isn't "free" (in the no strings attached sense) to anyone.
What your proposed law would do is mess up all sorts of academic licences (e.g. the "free for non-comercial use" ones) and a lot of promo-ware for closed source software (e.g. stuff given away free to "qualified customers").
Because if you get a receipt to take with you out of the polling place, you can prove who you voted for, and purchasing votes then becomes feasible. The only thing preventing buying votes right now is that the people would take the money then vote for who they were going to vote for anyway.
I can't help but thinking that this is a very weak argument. Buying votes that way would require an enormous conspriracy, and would be discovered in a heart beat (in order to get people to sell the votes in the first place, the buyers would have to get the word out to a large number of people...the chance that at least one of them would rat on them is about 100%).
Instead, we get the nice quiet "all in the family" conspiracy of rigged voting machines, which is much easier to keep quiet.
I think it's highly unlikely that this market manipulation is SCO, Canopy, Microsoft, Sun or anyone else. It's probably just independant brokers who know a goldrush when they see one.
I don't know who/what it is, but it doesn't act independent. Watch the moment to momement bid/ask volume, etc. compared to a typical "goldrush." At the very least, whoever's keeping this turkey afloat has 1) quite a bit of money to thow away on the project, and 2) if there is more than one of them, they at least have each other's cell phone numbers or all read the flags on the same signal tower.
A goldrush acts like a swarm of flies; this acts more like a team of ants.
Big companies like IBM, Microsoft, et al don't act in a single-minded way like we individuals tend to.
That's because when individuals act the way big companies do, we call them things like "nut cases" and "psycopaths." An individual that dumped toxic waste into a river or FUD into the media (at what would be a modest rate by corporate standards) would be locked up. An individual who was insulting someone while kissing up to them would seem (at best) socialy maladroit.
This is what makes corporate characterization of hackers as social outcasts so ironic. The most nerdly hacker is still an order of magnitude more sane & sociable than the average mega-corp.
No. It makes it better for YOU. 0.5% of people who use a computer. How is that BETTER?
Nuts. It makes it better for everyone. Look at it this way: would you rather take a drug that has been tested by hundereds or thousands of independent testing labs around the world, who published their results for all to see, or one that was produced by some big company who assured you that theirs was safe and effective, but wouldn't tell anyone what was in it?
You don't have to be an independent testing lab to benefit from the existence of independent testing labs. Likewise, you don't have to be a coder to benefit from open source software.
Thank you for your troll. Did it really take you six days to think it up and/or type it, or were you just hoping that if you waited long enough you could get in some unsubstantiated linux bashing without getting called on it?
To wit:
Your first "sentence" is a non sequitur; apart from that, I beg to differ with your claim that "windows beats the pants of linux." In my experience, the beating goes the other way.
I am sorry if my use of the phrase "a few years ago" threw you. I know our perception of time changes as we age; to me, two decades seems like a few years ago while to you it may well seem a lifetime.
Your third, forth and fifth "sentences" are gibberish, laced with ad hominem attacks. What little meaning there seems to be ("linux should not come with source; rather, the source should be available from some repository") I disagree with.
Your sixth sentence is clear enough, but I disagree with it, both in point and implication. No one is "asking" users to compile anything, but I see no harm in doing so. What seems frightening and alien to this generation may well seem commonplace to the next, provided that there is some advantage to it. One might as well say that the common man will never accept the horseless carriage if they are expected to learn how to put that smelly fuel into it themselves.
Your seventh string of words abruptly terminated by a period is meaningless.
The eighth sentence is mostly harmless.
The ninth and final sentence shows your lack of understanding of the software industry. Very few people are trying to "port" applications from other operating systems to run under linux. Instead, they are writing applications that run under linux to do things that they need done. If these seem similar to the applications written for other operating systems it is because the needs of the users are similar. This is the same thing that happens under any operating system.
Thanks again for the troll, & tell Bill we said "Hi".
There's an easy answer to the nuclear waste "problem", but it isn't politically correct: dilute with the mine tailings from when you refined the initial material and put it back in the hole you dug it out of.
Yeah, but this runs contrary to current/. thinking: that SCO is full of hot air, and once the source code is made available to knowledgable scrutiny, it'll be shown that they have nothing. Assuming this is true, SCO has to know this, and I can't imagine a lawfirm agreeing to this unless they had a VERY strong belief that either a) SCO will win, or b) SCO will get bought. Unless they plan on dragging this out ad infinatum, and hope that IBM will buy them to stop the annoyance, which IBM does not seem inclined to do. So.... what do they know that we don't?
You obviously aren't a scumbag. Why should they care about the merits of the case, it the only goal is to make noise and rattle bucks loose from whomever they can. As others have noted here, they already got US$10,000,000 (their share of the US$50M "from" BayStar). And they may well get more before it's over.
Look at it this way (and try to think like a scumbag): if you are attempting extortion, do you really care if the threat you use is factual? Of course not. You only care that it be sufficiently annoying to your target that they will pay rather than endure it. Moreover, if you are being paid to harrass someone (as they clearly are, from the public record), do you care that your claims are true, or meerly that they are sufficently harrassing to satisfy your patron(s) that you are doing your job?
Windows is usable, Standard GNU/Linux distros aren't.
That's nuts. I'm writting this on a perfectly usable RH9 laptop that I haven't tweaked in the slightest. It came with everything installed and it worked right out of the box.
It will never become popular if it isn't usable.
Nuts again. Cell phones became popular long before they were really usable, because people wanted to believe that they would work.
My mom can open and save a file in Windows... my mom does not care to do a chmod first...
(And believe me, I've done the experiemnt...)
What in the heck does she need to chmod for? And could she copy a hidden file into a write protected folder on Windows?
That's not what I got out of it at all. Christensen's point was that established companies in a given market are good at making incremental improvements their existing product lines, because that's what gets rewarded by their existing customers. They are also good at (and rewarded for) moving up-market, as their products improve, to take bussiness away from "the big guys" who have (from their perspective) grown fat & lazy on the high profit margins they have been able to take in the absense of scrapy competition.
But they are vulnerable to competition from smaller companies willing to sell inferior products for lower margins since it is never in their immediate interests to challenge them. Thus the small fry comming up from the bottom can grow to the point where they are unstopable. Think mainframes --> minicomputers --> microcomputers -->...
The significance here is that by moving up market, RH is leaving a niche which some other OSOS distro can fill, but that market will not go to MS for the simple reason that there is nothing they can afford to offer it.
I think the difference between then (i.e. home computers leaving geekdom and entering the home) and now (Linux leaving geekdom and hitting the home desktop) is that home computing has become a consumer item, an entertainment machine.
Perhaps. I tend to think the difference is more one of hindsight vs. foresight. Computers aren't actually all that much easier to use (they do more, sure, but the amount you need to know has gone up, if anything). What has changed is the the general public's perception and background knowledge. The question has never really been "how would I do that?" (to which the answer has actually gotten more complex) but rather "why would I do that?".
For example, learning the ins and outs of swapping MP3s under MS Windows requires a lot more knowledge and effort than learning all of Northstar DOS on an IMSAI 8080; the key difference is that most people know why they'd want to swap MP3s. The computer hasn't "become an entertainment machine" so much as mainstream people have discovered a purpose for the computer they can understand.
No one saw this coming ("You'll use it to store recipies and ballance your checkbook" was the standard answer; "you'll use it to controll the lights in when you aren't home" was the oddball answer). At the coresponding stages, no one saw spam killing e-mail, or porn fueling web growth, or using cell phones to pirate books, or...
*smile* Maybe all linux needs to take over on the desktop is integrated DRM in MS Windows. But more likely it'll be something neither of us have thought of.
...the small fractions of nerds in the community that will use Linux will never make it popular.
Funny, it wasn't that many years ago I heard basically the same argument aimed at home computers. Why would you want a computer in your home, anyway? The small fraction of nerds in the community that build their own will never make them popular.
And a few years later I heard the "they are going to go with a large, reputable company" argument too, except back then it was used to explain why the clone makers were doomed and IBM was going to rule.
Try as they might, companies (and especially big companies) don't cause trends. They follow them, and attempt to profit from them.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. RedHat's progression shouldn't be suprising to anyone who's read "The Innovator's Delima".
I was pretty much a typical programming lump who didn't move unless absolutely necessary, and I maintained a diet that would have scared the daylights out of my Mom. Except that through high school and those early college years I was considered too skinny. Then without any change in my lifestyle, I began to pick up weight, and have to fight to keep it off. Ain't growing up fun?:)
I'm in a simmilar boat. Or was, until I discovered I could revert by going back to my old ways. As much as I though of myself as "inert" what I really meant was I wasn't into sports. But I did have two (bike) paper routes in HS, and I used to pace when I was debugging, and squirm a lot in dull classes, etc., etc. The problem wasn't a change in the physics of my metabolism, but in patterns of micro behaviour. For example, working in a cube felt awfully constraining, because I was used to moving around a lot without realizing it.
Now I have a job where I get to pull cable and dig through warehouses and clamber around in empty office buildings as well as program, and I take my 2 year old toddler to work with me every day. Guess what? I'm back to being "metabolically skinny" again.
I have occasionally gone through fairly long periods of being a total lazy fucker and moving very little
This is the kicker. "Moving very little" means different things to different people. They took video tapes of people "just sitting" and "doing nothing" and there is a huge difference in the amount of motion (and thus callories burned) between the "metabolically" skinny and fat people.
In other words, it isn't that you poop more, it's that you fidgit more. You may also tend to sleep less, or be clumsy, or restless--there are a lot of ways to burn off excess food without putting it on as muscle mass.
nothing pisses me off more than some lazy fucker who happens to not have to lift a finger to lose weight thinking that i just haven't taken responsibility for myself.
You're correct, that "lazy fucker" doesn't lift a finger to stay slim. They lift their whole body, many times a day. Rather than working out (which often results in increase in muscle & thus body mass) try following one of those "lazy fuckers" around, matching them movement for movement, and eating what they eat mouthful for mouthful.
Yes, genetics plays a large part. Some people are naturally more sedentary. Some people tend to eat more than others. But unless the genetic differences include some sort of bowel obstruction or the abillity to transmute matter, weight is still subject to the usual conservation laws.
I wasn't so much taking a side in the argument (I do, however, think no-carb diets are unhealthful, and advocate moderation & exercise instead) as I was pointing out that the parent to my post was taking a silly stand, IMHO.
"The metabolocally skinny"? Give me a break. You could make just as strong a case for individual differences in the desire to rape and pillage.
I challenge you to do so.
You may find it difficult to do so. Studies of seperated-at-birth twins, for example, strongly support the idea that genetics is far and away the most important factor in determining one's body weight and other health indicators.
Easy. Look at the same studies you cite. The genetic links are just as strong for many psycological traits, including tollerence for violence (in movies, and presumably in real life). For that matter, the enjoyment of both rape and pillage are strongly sex linked. But this does not mean that all men are doomed to rape and pillage, even those with unmet twins doing hard time in sing-sing. It is possible to refrain from burning down your rivals home, no matter how much you might enjoy seeing it burn, or jumping a girl just because she's cute & you are horny.
I am not saying that there isn't a genetic component. I am saying that the fact should not be construed to in any way diminish individual responsibility.
Ah, here we go, the "moral superiority" of the metabolically skinny.
"The metabolocally skinny"? Give me a break. You could make just as strong a case for individual differences in the desire to rape and pillage. Some people just don't like to rape women and burn the homes of their foes as much as others. For them, maintaining the peace isn't really a matter of "strong will" any more than it's a matter of strong will for me not to eat broccoli. Does that mean that someone who goes around raping and looting is just "weak willed"? And so forth...
Whatever happened to taking responsibility for yourself?
Slashdot Mirror
Usually when someone on slashdot makes a claim like that, they provide a link.
Sure thing. It's on page three of this white paper-- the same page, incidentally, where they list as one of the advantages of their PIPEs "the ability to conduct transactions confidentially".
I hit Baystar and have yet to find anything about Paul Allen.
Ah. You do know that Vulcan Ventures == Paul Allen, right?
-- MarkusQ
Since when has Microsoft 'feared' Linux?
Well, October 31, 1998 comes to mind.
-- MarkusQ
And of course, Paul Allen was a big investor in Transmeta, who employed Linus for quite a while...
True, though IIRC that deal was done long before microsoft started fearing linux.
-- MarkusQ
"There are only two investors in this deal: BayStar Capital and the Royal Bank of Canada."
Baystar's own website claims Paul Allen, Microsoft, etc. in their list of top ten investors. IIRC, four of the top ten were Microsoft or close friends of Microsoft.
-- MarkusQ
The simplest law I can think of that would kill the GPL would be to say that you can not 'exclusively' give away copyrighted material. That is, you can't make something free for a certan class of people, but not others.
This wouldn't affect anything. The GPL doesn't "give away" anything, to any class of people, exclusively or otherwise. It offers a trade--you may have a copy of the software to use and/or modify, if and only if you agree to abide by certain terms. This is known as "a valueble consideration" and is just as much payment as if you had to fork over cash. GPL'd software isn't "free" (in the no strings attached sense) to anyone.
What your proposed law would do is mess up all sorts of academic licences (e.g. the "free for non-comercial use" ones) and a lot of promo-ware for closed source software (e.g. stuff given away free to "qualified customers").
-- MarkusQ
Because if you get a receipt to take with you out of the polling place, you can prove who you voted for, and purchasing votes then becomes feasible. The only thing preventing buying votes right now is that the people would take the money then vote for who they were going to vote for anyway.
I can't help but thinking that this is a very weak argument. Buying votes that way would require an enormous conspriracy, and would be discovered in a heart beat (in order to get people to sell the votes in the first place, the buyers would have to get the word out to a large number of people...the chance that at least one of them would rat on them is about 100%).
Instead, we get the nice quiet "all in the family" conspiracy of rigged voting machines, which is much easier to keep quiet.
I, for one, would rather see reciepts.
-- MarkusQ
I think it's highly unlikely that this market manipulation is SCO, Canopy, Microsoft, Sun or anyone else. It's probably just independant brokers who know a goldrush when they see one.
I don't know who/what it is, but it doesn't act independent. Watch the moment to momement bid/ask volume, etc. compared to a typical "goldrush." At the very least, whoever's keeping this turkey afloat has 1) quite a bit of money to thow away on the project, and 2) if there is more than one of them, they at least have each other's cell phone numbers or all read the flags on the same signal tower.
A goldrush acts like a swarm of flies; this acts more like a team of ants.
IMHO, of course.
-- MarkusQ.
Big companies like IBM, Microsoft, et al don't act in a single-minded way like we individuals tend to.
That's because when individuals act the way big companies do, we call them things like "nut cases" and "psycopaths." An individual that dumped toxic waste into a river or FUD into the media (at what would be a modest rate by corporate standards) would be locked up. An individual who was insulting someone while kissing up to them would seem (at best) socialy maladroit.
This is what makes corporate characterization of hackers as social outcasts so ironic. The most nerdly hacker is still an order of magnitude more sane & sociable than the average mega-corp.
-- MarkusQ
Smitty825: AvantLegion: --
Now hold on. Just because his sig is "Doh!" doesn't automatically mean he's anti-Bush.
It might just mean that he's pro-Homer Simpson.
-- MarkusQ
No. It makes it better for YOU. 0.5% of people who use a computer. How is that BETTER?
Nuts. It makes it better for everyone. Look at it this way: would you rather take a drug that has been tested by hundereds or thousands of independent testing labs around the world, who published their results for all to see, or one that was produced by some big company who assured you that theirs was safe and effective, but wouldn't tell anyone what was in it?
You don't have to be an independent testing lab to benefit from the existence of independent testing labs. Likewise, you don't have to be a coder to benefit from open source software.
-- MarkusQ
Thank you for your troll. Did it really take you six days to think it up and/or type it, or were you just hoping that if you waited long enough you could get in some unsubstantiated linux bashing without getting called on it?
To wit:
- Your first "sentence" is a non sequitur; apart from that, I beg to differ with your claim that "windows beats the pants of linux." In my experience, the beating goes the other way.
- I am sorry if my use of the phrase "a few years ago" threw you. I know our perception of time changes as we age; to me, two decades seems like a few years ago while to you it may well seem a lifetime.
- Your third, forth and fifth "sentences" are gibberish, laced with ad hominem attacks. What little meaning there seems to be ("linux should not come with source; rather, the source should be available from some repository") I disagree with.
- Your sixth sentence is clear enough, but I disagree with it, both in point and implication. No one is "asking" users to compile anything, but I see no harm in doing so. What seems frightening and alien to this generation may well seem commonplace to the next, provided that there is some advantage to it. One might as well say that the common man will never accept the horseless carriage if they are expected to learn how to put that smelly fuel into it themselves.
- Your seventh string of words abruptly terminated by a period is meaningless.
- The eighth sentence is mostly harmless.
- The ninth and final sentence shows your lack of understanding of the software industry. Very few people are trying to "port" applications from other operating systems to run under linux. Instead, they are writing applications that run under linux to do things that they need done. If these seem similar to the applications written for other operating systems it is because the needs of the users are similar. This is the same thing that happens under any operating system.
Thanks again for the troll, & tell Bill we said "Hi".-- MarkusQ
I voted a few times in the contest.
Let me guess, you work for Diebold, right?
-- MarkusQ
There's an easy answer to the nuclear waste "problem", but it isn't politically correct: dilute with the mine tailings from when you refined the initial material and put it back in the hole you dug it out of.
-- MarkusQ
Yeah, but this runs contrary to current
You obviously aren't a scumbag. Why should they care about the merits of the case, it the only goal is to make noise and rattle bucks loose from whomever they can. As others have noted here, they already got US$10,000,000 (their share of the US$50M "from" BayStar). And they may well get more before it's over.
Look at it this way (and try to think like a scumbag): if you are attempting extortion, do you really care if the threat you use is factual? Of course not. You only care that it be sufficiently annoying to your target that they will pay rather than endure it. Moreover, if you are being paid to harrass someone (as they clearly are, from the public record), do you care that your claims are true, or meerly that they are sufficently harrassing to satisfy your patron(s) that you are doing your job?
-- MarkusQ
Windows is usable, Standard GNU/Linux distros aren't.
That's nuts. I'm writting this on a perfectly usable RH9 laptop that I haven't tweaked in the slightest. It came with everything installed and it worked right out of the box.
It will never become popular if it isn't usable.
Nuts again. Cell phones became popular long before they were really usable, because people wanted to believe that they would work.
My mom can open and save a file in Windows... my mom does not care to do a chmod first... (And believe me, I've done the experiemnt...)
What in the heck does she need to chmod for? And could she copy a hidden file into a write protected folder on Windows?
-- MarkusQ
That's not what I got out of it at all. Christensen's point was that established companies in a given market are good at making incremental improvements their existing product lines, because that's what gets rewarded by their existing customers. They are also good at (and rewarded for) moving up-market, as their products improve, to take bussiness away from "the big guys" who have (from their perspective) grown fat & lazy on the high profit margins they have been able to take in the absense of scrapy competition.
But they are vulnerable to competition from smaller companies willing to sell inferior products for lower margins since it is never in their immediate interests to challenge them. Thus the small fry comming up from the bottom can grow to the point where they are unstopable. Think mainframes --> minicomputers --> microcomputers --> ...
The significance here is that by moving up market, RH is leaving a niche which some other OSOS distro can fill, but that market will not go to MS for the simple reason that there is nothing they can afford to offer it.
-- MarkusQ
I think the difference between then (i.e. home computers leaving geekdom and entering the home) and now (Linux leaving geekdom and hitting the home desktop) is that home computing has become a consumer item, an entertainment machine.
Perhaps. I tend to think the difference is more one of hindsight vs. foresight. Computers aren't actually all that much easier to use (they do more, sure, but the amount you need to know has gone up, if anything). What has changed is the the general public's perception and background knowledge. The question has never really been "how would I do that?" (to which the answer has actually gotten more complex) but rather "why would I do that?".
For example, learning the ins and outs of swapping MP3s under MS Windows requires a lot more knowledge and effort than learning all of Northstar DOS on an IMSAI 8080; the key difference is that most people know why they'd want to swap MP3s. The computer hasn't "become an entertainment machine" so much as mainstream people have discovered a purpose for the computer they can understand.
No one saw this coming ("You'll use it to store recipies and ballance your checkbook" was the standard answer; "you'll use it to controll the lights in when you aren't home" was the oddball answer). At the coresponding stages, no one saw spam killing e-mail, or porn fueling web growth, or using cell phones to pirate books, or...
*smile* Maybe all linux needs to take over on the desktop is integrated DRM in MS Windows. But more likely it'll be something neither of us have thought of.
-- MarkusQ
Everyone should read it, IMHO: The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail
The reviews and reader comments (5 star average from readers) on the linked page should convince you if my bare word doesn't.
-- MarkusQ
Funny, it wasn't that many years ago I heard basically the same argument aimed at home computers. Why would you want a computer in your home, anyway? The small fraction of nerds in the community that build their own will never make them popular.
And a few years later I heard the "they are going to go with a large, reputable company" argument too, except back then it was used to explain why the clone makers were doomed and IBM was going to rule.
Try as they might, companies (and especially big companies) don't cause trends. They follow them, and attempt to profit from them.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. RedHat's progression shouldn't be suprising to anyone who's read "The Innovator's Delima".
I was pretty much a typical programming lump who didn't move unless absolutely necessary, and I maintained a diet that would have scared the daylights out of my Mom. Except that through high school and those early college years I was considered too skinny. Then without any change in my lifestyle, I began to pick up weight, and have to fight to keep it off. Ain't growing up fun?
I'm in a simmilar boat. Or was, until I discovered I could revert by going back to my old ways. As much as I though of myself as "inert" what I really meant was I wasn't into sports. But I did have two (bike) paper routes in HS, and I used to pace when I was debugging, and squirm a lot in dull classes, etc., etc. The problem wasn't a change in the physics of my metabolism, but in patterns of micro behaviour. For example, working in a cube felt awfully constraining, because I was used to moving around a lot without realizing it.
Now I have a job where I get to pull cable and dig through warehouses and clamber around in empty office buildings as well as program, and I take my 2 year old toddler to work with me every day. Guess what? I'm back to being "metabolically skinny" again.
-- MarkusQ
I have occasionally gone through fairly long periods of being a total lazy fucker and moving very little
This is the kicker. "Moving very little" means different things to different people. They took video tapes of people "just sitting" and "doing nothing" and there is a huge difference in the amount of motion (and thus callories burned) between the "metabolically" skinny and fat people.
In other words, it isn't that you poop more, it's that you fidgit more. You may also tend to sleep less, or be clumsy, or restless--there are a lot of ways to burn off excess food without putting it on as muscle mass.
-- MarkusQ
nothing pisses me off more than some lazy fucker who happens to not have to lift a finger to lose weight thinking that i just haven't taken responsibility for myself.
You're correct, that "lazy fucker" doesn't lift a finger to stay slim. They lift their whole body, many times a day. Rather than working out (which often results in increase in muscle & thus body mass) try following one of those "lazy fuckers" around, matching them movement for movement, and eating what they eat mouthful for mouthful.
Yes, genetics plays a large part. Some people are naturally more sedentary. Some people tend to eat more than others. But unless the genetic differences include some sort of bowel obstruction or the abillity to transmute matter, weight is still subject to the usual conservation laws.
-- MarkusQ
Agreed on pretty much all points.
I wasn't so much taking a side in the argument (I do, however, think no-carb diets are unhealthful, and advocate moderation & exercise instead) as I was pointing out that the parent to my post was taking a silly stand, IMHO.
-- MarkusQ
Easy. Look at the same studies you cite. The genetic links are just as strong for many psycological traits, including tollerence for violence (in movies, and presumably in real life). For that matter, the enjoyment of both rape and pillage are strongly sex linked. But this does not mean that all men are doomed to rape and pillage, even those with unmet twins doing hard time in sing-sing. It is possible to refrain from burning down your rivals home, no matter how much you might enjoy seeing it burn, or jumping a girl just because she's cute & you are horny.
I am not saying that there isn't a genetic component. I am saying that the fact should not be construed to in any way diminish individual responsibility.
-- MarkusQ
Ah, here we go, the "moral superiority" of the metabolically skinny.
"The metabolocally skinny"? Give me a break. You could make just as strong a case for individual differences in the desire to rape and pillage. Some people just don't like to rape women and burn the homes of their foes as much as others. For them, maintaining the peace isn't really a matter of "strong will" any more than it's a matter of strong will for me not to eat broccoli. Does that mean that someone who goes around raping and looting is just "weak willed"? And so forth...
Whatever happened to taking responsibility for yourself?
-- MarkusQ