Bullshit. I've lost 26 pounds last year over the course of 7 months, and have not regained them in the 12 months since I reached my chosen weight (and I see no reason this should change). I now oscillate by 2 pounds around my chosen weight, depending on whether I'm indulging in some rich tasty food for a couple of days, or make a slight effort to go back to my chosen weight.

Losing 26 pounds wasn't that hard by the way (thankfully). I reduced or stopped the obvious bad habits (soda and pastry at noon every day, too rich breakfast, too many restaurants), monitored my weight (the most important part), did some light exercice (to ensure the few muscles I had would not disappear during the diet), and that's it. I was helped by the fact that I had quite a lot of work to do at the same time, so I could concentrate on it and forget the slight hunger I sometimes felt.

You should read The Hacker's Diet.

And unless Google *forces* updates to the plugin, security patches will never be applied

As far as I know, most if not all Google desktop apps use an auto-updater that does its job in utter silence (to the fury of control freaks, of course). This is definitely the case for Google Chrome, Google Talk, and Google Gears (which is a browser plugin).

It's been well documented for seven years now: http://www.ibmandtheholocaust.com/

Your comment is hard to understand. Apparently, from three persons you know, two were great problem solvers, one became an engineer, the other did medicine. The third one was not a great problem solver, and you won't tell what became of him. Weird.

My anecdotal evidence is that one of my friends is a great problem solver (and tinkerer), and is a dentist. Several of his dentist friends are good problem solvers. I believe he's a better problem solver than me, and I'm an engineer. Several of my engineer coworkers are not that good at problem solving, but can cram quite a lot.

Let me guess. You are not a doctor, and you are a natural engineer, whatever that means. You are so prejudiced, it's not funny.

> Computers have gotten MUCH faster at user response.

No. It all depends on what you run on the computer. Maybe you used to run programs that were (relatively) more demanding than what you run now, maybe most programs are now relatively less demanding than most programs were, but it is not the general case that computers have gotten MUCH faster at user response. They've mostly stagnated, barely improved.

> these days the printer has it's own processor and RAM

They've always had that. Actually in the mid-90s my printer was more powerful than my computer. It's just that the printers processors and RAM have vastly improved, too.