I'm actually quite sad to read this. I have little interest in so-called smart phones. I have computers and tablets for running serious software and for web browsing. I don't use a lot of cloud services like those hosted by Google and Facebook, and I have little need for the kind of software that exists only as a smartphone app.
So, for many years, I have just bought a cheap and cheerful Nokia feature phone. They invariably have good battery life compared to any smartphone. They are much smaller in my pocket. They run reliably for their entire useful lifetime, without breaking or shifting everything around arbitrarily during some dramatic firmware update. They don't come with the same level of creepware that smartphones from all the major brands now do. I can buy one for next to nothing at any phone shop, without signing up to pay half my salary on a phone plan with a multi-year lock-in to the same network. And they still let me do what I actually need a phone for: pushing a couple of buttons and then talking with someone, or maybe sending the occasional text message.
I realise that smart phones rule the universe these days and I'm some sort of technological Neanderthal (aside from all the other bleeding edge tablets, computers and software I work with everyday, obviously) but I for one will miss Nokia feature phones. I guess I'll go back to hoping for a resurgent BlackBerry that at least has a business focus and therefore something resembling security and not assuming I want a Facebook icon on my home screen that can't be deleted.
Meanwhile, someone who isn't Google and doesn't have offices in the EU will surely make up a page of links to this information. If the page generates traffic, someone will pay for add space there.
And then the next logical step is for the EU to impose some sort of sanctions on the infrastructure and payment services involved if any of them have any connection to the EU -- just as the US government has done with things like DNS and payment services that are conveniently within its jurisdiction.
I'm not sure I like where this is all going. I'm sure we can all agree that overall the Internet has been a great advance for humanity, and in recent years governments from all over the world have presumed to carve it up and control it in their own interests, almost invariably to the detriment of people somewhere else (or, in some cases, their own people).
However, we are going to have to confront some difficult philosophical and ethical differences sooner or later, because clearly we also can't have a situation where the Internet is somehow above the law, but we don't always agree on what that law should be. Frankly, the US government have been throwing their own weight around for years, and Google have been doing things that push the boundaries of typical European legal and ethical standards for a long time too. Neither has shown any particular concern or remorse about the effects of their actions abroad, and neither has suffered any significant negative consequences so far, with the possible exception of the Snowden fallout. Sooner or later the rest of the world was going to push back.
In as much as this marks a change in the general acceptance that the US can export its laws and ethics but won't be subject to anyone else's, that is probably a good direction to move in. It will force the issues of Internet governance and extra-territorial law enforcement into the open, where at least we can scrutinise and debate them honestly, instead of everyone's government doing sneaky things often without much public scrutiny and often because of coincidences involving which infrastructure happened to fall somewhere they could get at it.
I don't disagree in general, but please remember the original context here was whether going it alone as a start-up might be a liability if Big Players declined to let you into those programmes, i.e., we are talking about precisely the situation where the platform maintainer might not have that implicit interest in your success.
The key difference IMHO is that I don't need Microsoft to care about me. I can write Windows-based software and sell it to Windows-using customers with no help from Microsoft except selling us Windows and any related tools in the first place, and all three parties win on the deal. If I want to sell an iPhone app, my entire revenue stream is entirely dependent on Apple, and Apple are not known in these parts for the care with which they examine new apps or the caution or neutrality they exhibit when banning something they decide they don't like.
No... The H1-B program is a way of making people more successful in their home country not to bring that knowledge and talent into the U.S. on a permanent basis.
As an outsider with no bias here, it occurs to me that the above is probably in the long-term interests of the US as well. India is a big place, with lots of people, many of whom today are struggling with things we take for granted in the West. Helping to improve things like education standards and technological advancement potentially develops a vast export market for US products and services in the future and/or a mutually advantageous trading partner.
People often look at international aid schemes as charity, and support them on that basis, but the truth is that there is often a level of "enlightened self-interest" behind government support for those schemes, because things like global security and having stable economies in your trading partners are in everyone's interest. Much the same arguments could be made, as I understand it, for the US H1-B programme.
Re: Just let me do brain surgery!
on
'Just Let Me Code!'
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Programmers are just cogs in a machine nowadays.
Code monkeys are, and that's the way that managers who hire code monkeys like it.
There are plenty of programmers out there creating interesting and useful new software, and plenty of customers/clients willing to pay serious money for the value that software offers them without all the unnecessary bureaucratic overheads and middle management crap.
If you are a good programmer and professional in your general conduct, you owe it to yourself not to be a code monkey for anyone, IMHO. You have to be really, really unlucky with the time and place when your current gig(s) run out not to have better options in 2014.
If you're developing on a platform as developer-hostile as that and you're locked into it so your business can't port to other platforms if necessary, I would submit that you have bigger strategic problems and long-term risks than merely being a small company. An arrangement like that is an axe hanging over the head of almost any size of company and you have absolutely no control over when it might fall.
(No, I don't develop iOS apps or write console games, despite occasionally getting enquiries in those fields, and this is why.)
HP don't seem to have ditched Windows 8 in the UK, at least not for consumer machines you buy in stores. (Source: Multiple friends and family have recently been in the market for laptops and we looked at several HP models via multiple suppliers. I can't comment on what their on-line or business sales are doing right now though.)
I do think they care about hardware OEM's shipping old versions of their OS.
That seems to be one area where Microsoft have actually been successful so far. I know a handful of friends and family who have bought new desktop/laptop PCs since Windows 8 was released. The ones actually running Windows 8 are those who didn't have a reasonable alternative, because what they bought came with version 8 preinstalled by the manufacturer and for one reason or another upgrading to Windows 7 wasn't a practical option. Several of them have been extremely vocal about their views on Windows 8, which are typically not things you would repeat in polite company, but buying a good laptop that even has the option of Windows 7 preinstalled instead of 8 now seems very difficult, at least here in the UK.
I didn't say I couldn't see a reason, nor did I say they should be outlawed. I just said if they're outlawed for everyone else for whatever reason, no-one should get a free pass just by claiming they're somehow in a different category.
There is already technology available in some high-end models that will monitor the driver and take steps to warn them if they appear to be losing concentration. That technology is surely going to save lives sooner or later, given the amount of road accidents caused by tiredness or falling asleep at the wheel.
I'm as concerned about creepy surveillance and illusory security as much as the next geek, but image recognition technology does have positive applications as well.
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you -- in fact, I suspect from your choice of phrase that we would very much agree on the basic principles of how laws should work -- I'm just saying the law should apply equally to everyone. If certain areas are acceptable for this kind of hobby, they should be acceptable for other similar "drone" flights. Equally, if for whatever reason certain areas are not acceptable in law for general "drone" flights or if the default in law is that these devices aren't considered acceptable but they are then allowed under specific conditions, the same rules should apply for hobby aircraft with similar characteristics.
It flies like a drone, it watches like a drone...
on
That Toy Is Now a Drone
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I'm sorry for those losing out here, but I also don't see why they should be allowed to operate unmanned aerial vehicles with surveillance capabilities any more than anyone else.
They're saying after you've been accused x times, you go to jail. I think they missed a few steps.
And for that reason alone, there is absolutely no chance this is going anywhere.
No British government is actually going to pass a law saying you can be sent to jail without having your day in court less than a year before a general election. They get enough flak for pushing in that direction with terrorism-related laws that are only used against a tiny number of people in practice, because of the principle and the risk of later abuse, and that's a subject where a significant fraction of the population will give them a free pass for one reason or another.
Even if some British governments might try anyway, the current administration is a coalition, with a junior partner desperate to prove they are still politically relevant in the face of potentially being wiped out for a generation at the next election. A juicy civil liberties debate would play right into their hands.
And even if they did somehow manage to pass such a law, the chances that it would stand up to the inevitable human rights lawsuit the first time anyone actually tried to use it are slim to none.
This is almost certainly just a relatively unknown MP trying to make a name for himself in the run up to the aforementioned general election. In this case, he's pandering to potential donors from Big Media, possibly because there are finally some changes coming into force that make copyright laws (marginally) less anachronistic in the UK and Big Media inevitably don't like them (despite having managed to water them down to being almost meaningless anyway).
Wikipedia won't go anywhere just because some celebrities have opinions.
It doesn't have to, nor should it. But to create a potentially chilling effect on future contributions to Wikipedia, all you really need is for one life-destroying lawsuit against one contributor to succeed. That would remove any doubt that contributors are still responsible for what they say and can't hide behind the Internet, and in particular that Wikipedia has to cooperate in identifying contributors who break the law.
Frankly, being subject to legal action if you illegal defame someone is what should happen, because being on the Internet is not an excuse to be a dick. Still, several legal systems in the West can and sometimes do impose severe penalties for defamation, and rather like the threats of suing people for made-up copyright infringement in the US, there is unwelcome scope for abuse here even if there is also an underlying grain of truth and the intent of the law being abused is not in itself unreasonable.
I've long believed that the ad-supported model killed both micro-payments and distributed development.
I don't know about "killed", but I'd certainly agree with "arrived first and captured the market".
IMHO the most honest and transparent way to support worthwhile (but possibly worth-serious-money) content on-line would probably be some sort of universal micropayments system. Unfortunately, we don't have one yet, so the main commercially viable alternatives right now are free access (inevitably requiring funding some other way, such as advertising or affiliate fees) or charging significant amounts for access (paywalls).
If you want to force people into it, then put your content behind a paywall. Then you will find out what it is really worth.
Be careful what you wish for. Without taking sides on the ad blocker debate, I'm just going to point out that:
1. the most valuable content that is available freely (not behind a paywall) today is exactly the content that could successfully be moved behind a paywall tomorrow, and
2. a lot of significant parts of the modern web, from discussion sites like this one to services like search engines and social networks, provide indirect benefits rather than content of their own that can be similarly monetized, and if you take away their funding model we don't yet have distributed, community driven alternatives of the same quality to fill the gaps.
The others act outraged when foreign governments or Facebook spy on them but are a-ok with our own government doing it.
Why would you think that? Just because a majority of people voted for a certain political party, it certainly doesn't mean they necessarily support all of that party's policies. If you only get one vote every few years at a general election, then it is almost certain that you will have bigger concerns than "mere" spying activity that is potentially going to be harmful to you if abused or if someone makes a mistake. For example, you might be concerned about your child's education, or having a roof over your family's head tonight, or being able to afford to buy food without working three jobs at once.
The curse of modern party politics is that it reduces a very complicated issue (national government) to a single decision between a small number of often similar choices. Elections are dominated by a very small number of very high profile issues, even though the people elected will be responsible for a very large number of issues that can still affect many people during their term in office.
This is why I am increasingly in favour of a power of recall (where any individual elected office holder who isn't doing a satisfactory job can be kicked out by the same electorate) and of an overriding power of referendum (where a sensibly large proportion of the population can force a national vote on any single issue they want, and the result is then binding on the government).
I suspect most non-geeks who have SSDs get them as part of pre-built systems and have no choice about which parts to use.
Geeks tend to overestimate their influence dramatically in this sort of situation.
Now, system manufacturers, on the other hand, have their own reputations and margins to protect. If they are buying units by the thousand of a device that wasn't the one they previously evaluated, and then they start seeing a surprisingly high rate of failure, that is not good news for the device vendor at all.
Strange that I've never seen or even heard of it, then. I do keep seeing qualified doctors and other healthcare professionals talking about the developing obesity crisis in the UK and what needs to be done about it, though. Can you cite any actual research that supports a theory that more than a minority of cases of obesity, such as those with eating disorders or mental health issues such as we mentioned earlier, are involuntary?
The same way I explain global warming. Partly manmade, partly natural.
Interesting parallel. The scientific evidence about global warming is also very clear: while there are some natural factors that affect our climate over extended periods, the current situation is almost entirely caused by human behaviour and the only way to start reversing the effect is to change human behaviour.
You're conflating the language with the runtime environment. There is nothing that prevents you from compiling C code to target Machine Language, or JVM Bytecode, or.Net bytecode.
But you can't write an OS kernel in C compiled to run under the JVM or.Net. Even if you could, it wouldn't run as efficiently as C compiled to optimised native assembly, an argument that more realistically affects other system software like device drivers and networking stacks.
We're talking about using programming languages in practice here, not just the theoretical properties of a bunch of syntax and semantics with a particular label attached. In that context, it doesn't make sense to treat the practical properties of a programming language as completely independent of its runtime environment in the way you're suggesting.
You keep coming back to this idea that large numbers of people are involuntarily obese, but if it's really down to genetics to that extent, how do you explain the dramatic discrepancies in body weights and weight-related medical conditions in different countries? Sure, it seems very likely there is some element of genetics involved, as with just about any other health matter, but the idea that you can just blame the whole situation on circumstance and genetics is still crazy. The Japanese and Southern Europeans aren't slimmer on average than people from say the US because they have vastly superior genetics, they're slimmer because they have much healthier diets.
Your argument is about the cold reality of obesity from a public health and public finances perspective, but we were discussing the practicality from an employer's perspective. If someone obese has a significantly higher likelihood of abruptly leaving your employment due to ill health or worse, that is an argument against hiring them.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm actually quite sad to read this. I have little interest in so-called smart phones. I have computers and tablets for running serious software and for web browsing. I don't use a lot of cloud services like those hosted by Google and Facebook, and I have little need for the kind of software that exists only as a smartphone app.
So, for many years, I have just bought a cheap and cheerful Nokia feature phone. They invariably have good battery life compared to any smartphone. They are much smaller in my pocket. They run reliably for their entire useful lifetime, without breaking or shifting everything around arbitrarily during some dramatic firmware update. They don't come with the same level of creepware that smartphones from all the major brands now do. I can buy one for next to nothing at any phone shop, without signing up to pay half my salary on a phone plan with a multi-year lock-in to the same network. And they still let me do what I actually need a phone for: pushing a couple of buttons and then talking with someone, or maybe sending the occasional text message.
I realise that smart phones rule the universe these days and I'm some sort of technological Neanderthal (aside from all the other bleeding edge tablets, computers and software I work with everyday, obviously) but I for one will miss Nokia feature phones. I guess I'll go back to hoping for a resurgent BlackBerry that at least has a business focus and therefore something resembling security and not assuming I want a Facebook icon on my home screen that can't be deleted.
Meanwhile, someone who isn't Google and doesn't have offices in the EU will surely make up a page of links to this information. If the page generates traffic, someone will pay for add space there.
And then the next logical step is for the EU to impose some sort of sanctions on the infrastructure and payment services involved if any of them have any connection to the EU -- just as the US government has done with things like DNS and payment services that are conveniently within its jurisdiction.
I'm not sure I like where this is all going. I'm sure we can all agree that overall the Internet has been a great advance for humanity, and in recent years governments from all over the world have presumed to carve it up and control it in their own interests, almost invariably to the detriment of people somewhere else (or, in some cases, their own people).
However, we are going to have to confront some difficult philosophical and ethical differences sooner or later, because clearly we also can't have a situation where the Internet is somehow above the law, but we don't always agree on what that law should be. Frankly, the US government have been throwing their own weight around for years, and Google have been doing things that push the boundaries of typical European legal and ethical standards for a long time too. Neither has shown any particular concern or remorse about the effects of their actions abroad, and neither has suffered any significant negative consequences so far, with the possible exception of the Snowden fallout. Sooner or later the rest of the world was going to push back.
In as much as this marks a change in the general acceptance that the US can export its laws and ethics but won't be subject to anyone else's, that is probably a good direction to move in. It will force the issues of Internet governance and extra-territorial law enforcement into the open, where at least we can scrutinise and debate them honestly, instead of everyone's government doing sneaky things often without much public scrutiny and often because of coincidences involving which infrastructure happened to fall somewhere they could get at it.
I don't disagree in general, but please remember the original context here was whether going it alone as a start-up might be a liability if Big Players declined to let you into those programmes, i.e., we are talking about precisely the situation where the platform maintainer might not have that implicit interest in your success.
The key difference IMHO is that I don't need Microsoft to care about me. I can write Windows-based software and sell it to Windows-using customers with no help from Microsoft except selling us Windows and any related tools in the first place, and all three parties win on the deal. If I want to sell an iPhone app, my entire revenue stream is entirely dependent on Apple, and Apple are not known in these parts for the care with which they examine new apps or the caution or neutrality they exhibit when banning something they decide they don't like.
No... The H1-B program is a way of making people more successful in their home country not to bring that knowledge and talent into the U.S. on a permanent basis.
As an outsider with no bias here, it occurs to me that the above is probably in the long-term interests of the US as well. India is a big place, with lots of people, many of whom today are struggling with things we take for granted in the West. Helping to improve things like education standards and technological advancement potentially develops a vast export market for US products and services in the future and/or a mutually advantageous trading partner.
People often look at international aid schemes as charity, and support them on that basis, but the truth is that there is often a level of "enlightened self-interest" behind government support for those schemes, because things like global security and having stable economies in your trading partners are in everyone's interest. Much the same arguments could be made, as I understand it, for the US H1-B programme.
Programmers are just cogs in a machine nowadays.
Code monkeys are, and that's the way that managers who hire code monkeys like it.
There are plenty of programmers out there creating interesting and useful new software, and plenty of customers/clients willing to pay serious money for the value that software offers them without all the unnecessary bureaucratic overheads and middle management crap.
If you are a good programmer and professional in your general conduct, you owe it to yourself not to be a code monkey for anyone, IMHO. You have to be really, really unlucky with the time and place when your current gig(s) run out not to have better options in 2014.
If you're developing on a platform as developer-hostile as that and you're locked into it so your business can't port to other platforms if necessary, I would submit that you have bigger strategic problems and long-term risks than merely being a small company. An arrangement like that is an axe hanging over the head of almost any size of company and you have absolutely no control over when it might fall.
(No, I don't develop iOS apps or write console games, despite occasionally getting enquiries in those fields, and this is why.)
HP don't seem to have ditched Windows 8 in the UK, at least not for consumer machines you buy in stores. (Source: Multiple friends and family have recently been in the market for laptops and we looked at several HP models via multiple suppliers. I can't comment on what their on-line or business sales are doing right now though.)
I do think they care about hardware OEM's shipping old versions of their OS.
That seems to be one area where Microsoft have actually been successful so far. I know a handful of friends and family who have bought new desktop/laptop PCs since Windows 8 was released. The ones actually running Windows 8 are those who didn't have a reasonable alternative, because what they bought came with version 8 preinstalled by the manufacturer and for one reason or another upgrading to Windows 7 wasn't a practical option. Several of them have been extremely vocal about their views on Windows 8, which are typically not things you would repeat in polite company, but buying a good laptop that even has the option of Windows 7 preinstalled instead of 8 now seems very difficult, at least here in the UK.
I didn't say I couldn't see a reason, nor did I say they should be outlawed. I just said if they're outlawed for everyone else for whatever reason, no-one should get a free pass just by claiming they're somehow in a different category.
There is already technology available in some high-end models that will monitor the driver and take steps to warn them if they appear to be losing concentration. That technology is surely going to save lives sooner or later, given the amount of road accidents caused by tiredness or falling asleep at the wheel.
I'm as concerned about creepy surveillance and illusory security as much as the next geek, but image recognition technology does have positive applications as well.
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you -- in fact, I suspect from your choice of phrase that we would very much agree on the basic principles of how laws should work -- I'm just saying the law should apply equally to everyone. If certain areas are acceptable for this kind of hobby, they should be acceptable for other similar "drone" flights. Equally, if for whatever reason certain areas are not acceptable in law for general "drone" flights or if the default in law is that these devices aren't considered acceptable but they are then allowed under specific conditions, the same rules should apply for hobby aircraft with similar characteristics.
I'm sorry for those losing out here, but I also don't see why they should be allowed to operate unmanned aerial vehicles with surveillance capabilities any more than anyone else.
They're saying after you've been accused x times, you go to jail. I think they missed a few steps.
And for that reason alone, there is absolutely no chance this is going anywhere.
No British government is actually going to pass a law saying you can be sent to jail without having your day in court less than a year before a general election. They get enough flak for pushing in that direction with terrorism-related laws that are only used against a tiny number of people in practice, because of the principle and the risk of later abuse, and that's a subject where a significant fraction of the population will give them a free pass for one reason or another.
Even if some British governments might try anyway, the current administration is a coalition, with a junior partner desperate to prove they are still politically relevant in the face of potentially being wiped out for a generation at the next election. A juicy civil liberties debate would play right into their hands.
And even if they did somehow manage to pass such a law, the chances that it would stand up to the inevitable human rights lawsuit the first time anyone actually tried to use it are slim to none.
This is almost certainly just a relatively unknown MP trying to make a name for himself in the run up to the aforementioned general election. In this case, he's pandering to potential donors from Big Media, possibly because there are finally some changes coming into force that make copyright laws (marginally) less anachronistic in the UK and Big Media inevitably don't like them (despite having managed to water them down to being almost meaningless anyway).
We'll, I'm glad someone got it... :-)
*rimshot*
Wikipedia won't go anywhere just because some celebrities have opinions.
It doesn't have to, nor should it. But to create a potentially chilling effect on future contributions to Wikipedia, all you really need is for one life-destroying lawsuit against one contributor to succeed. That would remove any doubt that contributors are still responsible for what they say and can't hide behind the Internet, and in particular that Wikipedia has to cooperate in identifying contributors who break the law.
Frankly, being subject to legal action if you illegal defame someone is what should happen, because being on the Internet is not an excuse to be a dick. Still, several legal systems in the West can and sometimes do impose severe penalties for defamation, and rather like the threats of suing people for made-up copyright infringement in the US, there is unwelcome scope for abuse here even if there is also an underlying grain of truth and the intent of the law being abused is not in itself unreasonable.
I've long believed that the ad-supported model killed both micro-payments and distributed development.
I don't know about "killed", but I'd certainly agree with "arrived first and captured the market".
IMHO the most honest and transparent way to support worthwhile (but possibly worth-serious-money) content on-line would probably be some sort of universal micropayments system. Unfortunately, we don't have one yet, so the main commercially viable alternatives right now are free access (inevitably requiring funding some other way, such as advertising or affiliate fees) or charging significant amounts for access (paywalls).
If you want to force people into it, then put your content behind a paywall. Then you will find out what it is really worth.
Be careful what you wish for. Without taking sides on the ad blocker debate, I'm just going to point out that:
1. the most valuable content that is available freely (not behind a paywall) today is exactly the content that could successfully be moved behind a paywall tomorrow, and
2. a lot of significant parts of the modern web, from discussion sites like this one to services like search engines and social networks, provide indirect benefits rather than content of their own that can be similarly monetized, and if you take away their funding model we don't yet have distributed, community driven alternatives of the same quality to fill the gaps.
The others act outraged when foreign governments or Facebook spy on them but are a-ok with our own government doing it.
Why would you think that? Just because a majority of people voted for a certain political party, it certainly doesn't mean they necessarily support all of that party's policies. If you only get one vote every few years at a general election, then it is almost certain that you will have bigger concerns than "mere" spying activity that is potentially going to be harmful to you if abused or if someone makes a mistake. For example, you might be concerned about your child's education, or having a roof over your family's head tonight, or being able to afford to buy food without working three jobs at once.
The curse of modern party politics is that it reduces a very complicated issue (national government) to a single decision between a small number of often similar choices. Elections are dominated by a very small number of very high profile issues, even though the people elected will be responsible for a very large number of issues that can still affect many people during their term in office.
This is why I am increasingly in favour of a power of recall (where any individual elected office holder who isn't doing a satisfactory job can be kicked out by the same electorate) and of an overriding power of referendum (where a sensibly large proportion of the population can force a national vote on any single issue they want, and the result is then binding on the government).
I suspect most non-geeks who have SSDs get them as part of pre-built systems and have no choice about which parts to use.
Geeks tend to overestimate their influence dramatically in this sort of situation.
Now, system manufacturers, on the other hand, have their own reputations and margins to protect. If they are buying units by the thousand of a device that wasn't the one they previously evaluated, and then they start seeing a surprisingly high rate of failure, that is not good news for the device vendor at all.
Intel, Samsung, Crucial, Corsair, G.Skill, OCZ, SanDisk, Toshiba, and Zalman are all reputable brands.
I trust that was only there for contrast and not because you would say it verbatim to anyone asking for advice!
which is supported by current medical science.
Strange that I've never seen or even heard of it, then. I do keep seeing qualified doctors and other healthcare professionals talking about the developing obesity crisis in the UK and what needs to be done about it, though. Can you cite any actual research that supports a theory that more than a minority of cases of obesity, such as those with eating disorders or mental health issues such as we mentioned earlier, are involuntary?
The same way I explain global warming. Partly manmade, partly natural.
Interesting parallel. The scientific evidence about global warming is also very clear: while there are some natural factors that affect our climate over extended periods, the current situation is almost entirely caused by human behaviour and the only way to start reversing the effect is to change human behaviour.
You're conflating the language with the runtime environment. There is nothing that prevents you from compiling C code to target Machine Language, or JVM Bytecode, or .Net bytecode.
But you can't write an OS kernel in C compiled to run under the JVM or .Net. Even if you could, it wouldn't run as efficiently as C compiled to optimised native assembly, an argument that more realistically affects other system software like device drivers and networking stacks.
We're talking about using programming languages in practice here, not just the theoretical properties of a bunch of syntax and semantics with a particular label attached. In that context, it doesn't make sense to treat the practical properties of a programming language as completely independent of its runtime environment in the way you're suggesting.
You keep coming back to this idea that large numbers of people are involuntarily obese, but if it's really down to genetics to that extent, how do you explain the dramatic discrepancies in body weights and weight-related medical conditions in different countries? Sure, it seems very likely there is some element of genetics involved, as with just about any other health matter, but the idea that you can just blame the whole situation on circumstance and genetics is still crazy. The Japanese and Southern Europeans aren't slimmer on average than people from say the US because they have vastly superior genetics, they're slimmer because they have much healthier diets.
Your argument is about the cold reality of obesity from a public health and public finances perspective, but we were discussing the practicality from an employer's perspective. If someone obese has a significantly higher likelihood of abruptly leaving your employment due to ill health or worse, that is an argument against hiring them.