and

So basically, you are generalizing from your own experience in assuming your metabolism and appetite are typical, and that obese people are much the same but they just make poor choices. Briefly, I disagree not just with your conclusions but with your inferential process. You've wandered into epistemological territory where truth is established by personal testimonial. Snake oil of all varieties is sold by almost exactly the same logic.

Anyway, the "I'll do X later" is an effective self-deception because at the heart lies the kernel of truth: It really isn't the "candy bar" per se that you eat at 11 a.m. that gets you, it's the caloric excess overall when you total across a larger interval. So, yes, you really can go ahead and have that candy bar, or that Ben & Jerry's pint, or whatever so long as you compensate appropriately later, either by increasing caloric burn (exercise) or decreased consumption.

If I can come clean on the topic, I'm actually on the side of the "get off your fat butt and make changes to your life" camp. However, one of the things I find fascinating is that the side I am most in agreement with is nevertheless largely ignorant about the biology of obesity and curiously resistant to fact. People who take strong positions against obesity I think have their hearts in the right place, but not much else. For example? For most mammals about 80% of observed variation in weight (by various measures) is heritable -- i.e. genetic, in some form. There is almost no trait easier to breed up or down in animals. And guess what: Humans are no different.

But people don't like hearing this, perhaps because it smacks of biological determinism. Well, it's not -- deterministic, that is. Fat people from fat families manage to lose and retain weight loss all the time. It's just pretty damnably tough, and failures outweigh (heh) successes by a large margin. Think less than 1 in 10 if you want to talk about long term success, and this with outside support, such as a physician or a weight loss group.

Speaking as someone who has studied metabolic disorders for about a decade, the two things that I would really like lean people to understand are these:

1) Most fat people do not (as per the original poster) have an eating problem in the way that is immediately obvious (e.g. consuming multiple hamburgers, orders of fries, shakes at every meal). This is important for lean people to know not just because of the potential ignorant and harmful stereotypes they might buy into and perpetuate otherwise, but because many fat people start out lean at a younger age. And young lean people need to know that personally using "absence of gluttony" as an indicator that they are eating right can get them into serious trouble. It simply does not take much of a caloric imbalance to lead to long term accumulation and, eventually, middle age obesity. Better by far to track your weight and adjust your diet and exercise accordingly

2) Obesity is not, however much we would like it to be, a simple matter of choosing a desired outcome or of spot decision making every now and then. People who are fat do not typically look at themselves in the mirror and go, "oh yeah baby, on me these rolls look good" nor do they look at a pile of food and say, "you know, screw this diet; I'm thinking about 10 lbs of lard sounds really tasty about now." It's about longer term trends, and making the right choices in spite of continuous pressure from one's appetite to make unhelpful decisions. Bear in mind that the neurological processes linking appetite and satiety are very closely coupled with processes involved in addictions (which, aside, is one of the reasons it is so tough to pharmacologically alter appetite without causing additional problems). But, unfortunately, unlike most harmful addictions, an obese individual does not have the option of going "cold turkey." They have to keep eating, every day, and they have to keep dealing with a body that is sending them unhelpful signals. (And also, despite what you might learn on "paid for" TV, appetite is not easily manipulated either through weight loss or diet.

Bottom lines? If you aren't fat, congratulations, but don't let it go to your head. Age is against you and if you don't take your weight seriously you may find that the fat accumulates. If you are fat, you probably have a tough road ahead of you. You probably received a dose of unhelpful genes from one or both parents, and odds are you were raised in an environment that didn't help much either, but don't pretend you have no say in the matter either. From your hand to your mouth to your hips, as it were. Take charge, review your diet and exercise, and talk with a physician if necessary.

I don't see where I said that choice wasn't involved. I agree that eating that extra candy bar or drinking that coke involves choice. In any case, I might as well reply to your point even though it is misdirected:

Yes, people make a conscious choice when they consume. However, individuals do not have much control over their appetite, despite what you might have hear from diet advertisers. And people who's bodies tell them they are hungry constantly find it difficult to just, you know, ignore the biological signals. As for eating disorders and solutions, unfortunately this is not the case. Without reviewing pharmacologic history and alternatives (such as counseling), I'll just say that effective appetite suppressants are typically illegal in the US due to highly addictive qualities and side effects. Those that are FDA approved generally focus on minimizing caloric uptake (as opposed to altering appetite) and have minimal efficacy (e.g. Orlistat I believe offers something like a 5-10 lbs sustained weight loss after a year of consistent usage). This area has been a holy grail for pharmaceutical researchers for several decades now. I see no indication (and I've worked in the field) that any solutions are pending. Surgical interventions are available and currently represent probably the most effectivity, but these are costly and come with their own risks.

You ask a fair question, but the problem is that you have to not eat those hypothetical two candy bars every week for the rest of your adult life. Do you have any notion how difficult it is to regulate your caloric balance to that degree especially when your body, every day and most every hour, tells you you are hungry? When hunger becomes a distraction of work or entertainment? We learn at an early age to trust our bodies. When they say we are tired, we sleep. When they tell us our hand burns, we take it out of the fire. When they tell us we are hungry ... well, you get the picture.

Anyway, I congratulate you on your well-balanced metabolism. Not every one has one. But yes, eating is a choice, and yes being obese represents some exercise of choice. Let's just be clear about what: It is not about stuffing your face with hamburgers and a large milk shake every time you go to McD's. While currently an acceptable belief (and vehicle for bigotry) it nevertheless lacks the virtue of truth.

So fat people are fat because they eat obscene amounts of food?

Let's do some math: What does it take to turn a healthy 20 year old into a 40 year old who is 100 lbs over weight? At (approximate numbers follow) 4000 calories per pound, 100 lbs is 400,000 calories, which divided by roughly 50 weeks per year times 20 years (1000 weeks) is about 400 calories per week. That's less than two candy bars per week excess.

So, to get fat, all you need is a modest caloric excess plus time. [Of course, occasional gorging -- e.g. at holidays -- doesn't hurt either.]

/shrug. Data on server, yes; application on PC server, generally no. And it's funny, really. I've worked in a research environment where PCs were used as analytical instruments and, yes, we had users VPN'ing into the network and remote accessing their PCs to check on jobs at night to make sure they were still executing, and I had to deal with IT about this and single PC policies, etc. and after getting a bunch of push-back, I said, no problemo -- let me describe the needs of my department and you tell me how you want to solve them. And I worked with a couple of nice IT reps and they devised a server with various VM environments where we could run our long computationally intensive jobs, and I helped build the business case, etc. and at the end of the day, hey, it turned out they didn't have the budget and they decided to leave things the way they were.

Which is fine. My position is simply that IT shouldn't whine about atypical user behavior patterns unless/until they are ready to address their underlying business needs . . . which, frankly, IT is often ignorant of or indifferent towards.

Yeah, I love policies like this. I'll be setting in some seminar and in the middle of the speaker's presentation there will be a forced reboot after a background install. Lovely. Convenient for IT, yes. Inconvenient for the audience of 100+ who get to wait through a 5 minute restart. Or, hah, I'll turn on my PC at the beginning of the day and run through the ungodly boot times imposed by who knows how much crap that's been layered on by IT, followed by the obligatory virus scan, installs, reboots etc. Some days, it's 30 minutes to an hour before I can get to work. Of course IT doesn't mind about stuff like this because opportunity cost is unmeasured and in any case doesn't hit their books. For all the processes I had to deal with in a large corporate environment, I never saw a full requirements analysis run before IT rolled out a policy, or an impact analysis afterwords. Lesson learned: IT cares about IT and not much else.

But life is good. I'm in a smaller company now, the IT people actually care if projects and work are getting done, and the users try not to make life miserable for IT (and sometimes succeed) -- so much more comfortable than having to fight IT day by day just to do the work I was hired to do.

"All the old keybindings still work."

Even MS doesn't claim that all of the old key combos carry over from 2003, and with a little web browsing you can find a number (most obscure) that do not. They only matter, of course, if you use key combos routinely. I do. MS 2007 mostly works for me but I still run into the occasional stumbling block.

" If you wilfully insist on doing things inefficiently"

You think key combos are inefficient? Do you not know how to type without looking at a keyboard?

"They did their best. It even lights up the first time you launch an Office 2007 app, in a desperate attempt to draw your attention to it."

Many people who run Office 2007 still run it on Windows XP (e.g. those forced to run Word 2007 for document compatibility, but on the enterprise XP standard). I for one didn't pay any attention to the "help" that Word 2007 provided when it first launched because I've been conditioned by MS to ignore their generally useless help and hint system (remember Clippy?). So for me also it was a surprise to discover the button, and it took me a while to figure out what functionality it replaced from MS 2003. I've been using 2007 now for about 6 months and I don't hate it or anything, but I'm not going to give the MS dev team any kudos for helping users make the transition. The new system doesn't strike me as superior -- now that I use it, I don't find myself able to do old things faster or many new things. Looks to me like your typical empty product change so you can slap a "new and improved" label on it for witless consumers.