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?

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.

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.

You say I don't care about people who have problems I don't have. You know what? My not having them wasn't an accident. I've put on a bit of weight at some times in my life, usually when I wasn't doing my normal level of physical activity for one reason or another. I enjoy a burger or kebab now and then too. And yet somehow I never wound up obese, because like most adults I know how to eat salad for lunch instead of a burger and I understand that sugary drinks are bad for me.

Let's be clear about this. Being clinically obese isn't just a slight loss of control over your weight, it's a serious condition that develops over an extended period with obvious symptoms. If you really can't control your junk food cravings, you should be seeking proper medical help as soon as possible, because being severely overweight is a condition that can severely harm or even kill you. If you really do have a clinical eating disorder, treatment at work is the least of your worries. But of course there won't be any doubt that you have a genuine medical condition in this case, because obviously you'll be seeing your healthcare providers and undergoing treatment.

With the possibility of genuine medical problems acknowledged, let us be equally clear about reality. Almost everyone who is obese could control their cravings. Most obese people do not have an addiction in the sense of a dependency where cutting down on the junk will cause serious harm or medical complications. They could choose not get that 500 calorie drink from Starbucks on the way to work, not to go to McDonalds for lunch, and not to live off microwave ready meals at home. They could get off a stop or two earlier and walk the last quarter mile to work or the shops. Their problem is not addiction, it is simply a lack of willingness to look after themselves properly if it means giving up something they like or doing something they don't enjoy.

I don't see why anyone else should lose out because of those people, just because they can't find the time or the willpower to cook a decent meal or eat a salad for lunch like the rest of us. You want inhuman and cowardly? That would be the guy who refuses to take the most basic responsibility for their own health and then expects the entire world to adapt to the inevitable consequences.

IMNSHO, by arguing that these people are somehow the victims here, you are the one doing a disservice to the unfortunate few who really do have medical conditions that cause similar symptoms and really do struggle to overcome their unlucky disadvantages.

I think I was clear that if someone is obese for a genuine medical reason they can't avoid then we should look after them, as we would anyone else suffering from a medical problem. That includes people with clinical eating disorders or other mental health problems where obesity results.

The fact remains that most people who are obese are obese because they eat junk and don't exercise. Their condition is entirely voluntary, the solution to their condition is to eat a healthier diet and do more physical activity, and it really is as simple as that. I see no reason that anyone else, whether employers, coworkers, or any other relevant party, should have to pick up the slack for these people.

Assuming that was a serious question, the first thing that comes to mind is that clinical obesity appears to significantly increase the risk of quite a few serious medical conditions. In much (all?) of Europe, employers are directly on the hook financially when employees take time off sick. Moreover, there are indirect consequences, such as unfairly increasing the workload on other staff when someone is off work, possibly putting up the price for the employer and/or all of their staff if the employer offers benefits like subsidised private health insurance, and even little resentment-breeding things like reserving scarce parking spaces for specific staff necessarily at a loss to everyone else.

To me, the moral position here seems very simple. If someone is obese for a genuine medical reason they can't avoid then everyone should try to accommodate them in reasonable ways. If someone is obese for any other reason, perhaps they should try going to the park or the gym instead of going to court. Employers should no more be forced to accommodate a voluntarily obese person's laziness than they should be forced to grant smokers longer breaks than everyone else and provide dedicated facilities for the smokers to poison themselves in.

Whether it is worth hiring an obese person anyway because they are good at doing a certain job is a separate question, of course. I'm just trying to show some reasonably objective arguments for why an employer might wish to discriminate on the basis of obesity.

You're certainly not alone in that. When I've seen Facebook campaigns running, it's not unusual to have a spike in visits originating directly from Facebook but also spikes in direct traffic and in visits via a search engine looking for the name of the product/company/whatever.

The buzzword for this is "retargeting", and it can reportedly be very effective.

To give a somewhat balanced view, like most forms of targeted advertising, it can also be better for the person seeing the ad, in the sense that if they're going to see an ad anyway then it might as well be for something they might actually be interested in.

Personally, I have no moral problem with Facebook showing ads targeted based on the freely declared details and interests of its users. The users chose to provide that information, Facebook is offering its service for free in exchange for showing the ads, everyone knows the deal. Whether you choose to hide those ads some other way is between you and Facebook; we pay for clicks.

However, I find the cross-site tracking a bit too creepy. None of the sites I work on have things like trackable 'like' buttons or retargeting cues, because helping Facebook to covertly track its users around other sites seems to cross a line. Even if it would be a profitable line to cross, I'm not comfortable with imposing that on our visitors without some sort of explicit consent, which almost by definition isn't going to be practical in this kind of situation.

Sure there is. For one thing, a sandbox by its very nature must always impose some overhead, which is anathema to systems programmers. Another paradox is that when you're building the layers in your system, something has to be at the bottom, and that can't be sandboxed.

To take on your more general point, even if you could write a kitchen sink language in which it would be possible to do just about anything, that doesn't mean it would actually be a good language to do any of those things in. Trying to be the Jack of all trades makes you something like C++ or Scala, very flexible, but also so complicated that bugs lurk in every corner case and almost no-one truly understands the entire language and all its subtleties because there are so many interacting and sometimes ill-fitting programming models at work.

A good tool should serve its purpose well, but a good craftsman probably has a very large tool box and picks the right tool for each job. If you have a screwdriver as well as a hammer, you don't have to insert screws like a nail. A programmer who is working on embedded firmware and concerned with things like memory mapped I/O and meeting hard real time constraints is going to have very different priorities to a programmer who writes a lot of CRUD applications to automate business processes and is concerned with implementing things like event-driven user interfaces and DB queries as quickly as possible and in an easily maintainable form. You could write a language with enough features to serve both, but it would be horrendously complicated and feature a diverse range of traps so all types of programmer could get caught in something. Why would you do that? What possible advantage could it offer?

The frustrating thing is that there are all kinds of interesting ideas out there that could help with developing more capable, more efficient, more robust, more secure software. We could be developing new languages and other programming tools that let us write software in very different and potentially much better ways.

But we aren't. The momentum is firmly with developing new languages for the Web that get incrementally closer to supporting what we had in general programming languages years or even decades ago. And that, we really don't need.

Thank you. That was the first realistic assessment I've noticed so far in this discussion.

There is no programming language that is ideal for all contexts, nor any VM that supports all use cases well. There can't be, because there are some fundamentally contradictory goals that simply can't be fully reconciled. For example, you can't have a language that efficiently manipulates hardware for systems programming yet which also lets you run general applications downloaded from untrusted sources in a safe sandbox. The trick is to pick out the common elements and principles that are shared by some of the cases, and pool that work as much as possible so the maximum resources can go into making each tool better in its particular niche.

It's good that people who have grown up with "web apps" are starting to notice these issues that are old friends in the wider programming world, and that the Web world is starting to run into hard problems and realise that there aren't always easy solutions to them. This will inevitably lead to greater maturity in the technologies we use on the Web. But that doesn't mean the Web world somehow magically has answers that no-one else who's been working on this for the last 30/40/50 years has found.

Ironically, possibly the biggest lost opportunity in recent years is that Microsoft could have shifted the whole industry for the better just by having a decent, standardised install/upgrade process for native applications on Windows desktops. If they had produced something with the ease of use we now expect from mobile app stores, but the range of grown up applications we expect from a serious operating system and the freedom and support for developers that Microsoft used to champion for many years, then they might have disrupted the killer feature of Web apps -- which IMHO is the near zero friction ease of getting hold of them -- almost overnight. Throw in a decent set of tools for supporting client/server communications, and what advantages do Web apps really have left over native-but-distributed development?

Sadly, MS never really solved that problem, and so instead of today's new programmers growing up with a wide variety of native languages and run-time environments that built on decades of successful language and VM evolution, we get stuck with the joke that is Javascript, a bunch of server-side languages that all look much the same when you strip away trivial syntactic differences, and worst of all, insane amounts of development effort going into building several variations of ad-hoc, informally specified, bug-ridden, slow implementations of half of what a cutting edge VM should have been by now, all locked up in different browsers where nothing but Web apps can even use it. The rise of Web apps has probably regressed the software industry by at least a decade and counting. :-(

This is why allowing vague terms like "national security" or "terrorism" as a justification for any penalty in law is dangerous. There is a certain irony in this news arriving on the same day that there are moves to hold a terrorism trial completely in secret. It's not so long after the Gary McKinnon fiasco, either.

The strange thing is that this isn't even a very good strategy, at least not in the UK. Blair's administration only just retained power at the general election after going to war in Iraq, and even that was because of a combination of quirks in our electoral system. At the following election, it was closer to "Labour? Who are they?".

Remember that the law in question does not give anyone some arbitrary and complete power of censorship.

For example, in the UK a conviction that leads to a prison sentence longer than four years never becomes spent under the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974, while convictions with shorter sentences eventually become spent after a period of time that depends on how serious the sentence was. Other things being equal, it seems likely that the "right to be forgotten" would not extend to allowing someone to remove references to an unspent conviction but might allow references to spent convictions to be suppressed.

Where offences involve taking advantage of vulnerable people or are of a sexual nature, as in the scenario you described, there may be other considerations as well as the general principle of spent convictions, which might also override any generic "right to be forgotten".

So while, predictably, the first batch of deletion requests reported in the media are mostly people with genuinely dubious histories trying to do a bit of selective rewriting, that doesn't necessarily mean that they will succeed, nor that even if they succeed for now, in the sense that Google decide to err on the side of caution and delete by default for the immediate future, they will continue to succeed in the long run.

This could all change in light of other recent moves at EU level that could render the current ECJ judgement academic anyway, and if the general plan is to move forward with explicit statute law in this area but it turns out that the previous ECJ judgement was being abused, the issues of proportionality and balancing individual privacy with public interest will surely be reviewed.