First what?

First time you'll ever see me actually root for Verizon? If so, yes. First.

Soda has around 100 calories per 8 fluid ounces (varies slightly with type of soda). So you get a 32 ounce drink, that's 400 calories. That's a fair bit, even by fast food standards. Most fast food burgers are in the 800-1200 calorie range (a double quarter pounder with cheese is 740 calories for reference). So you are adding 33-50% more calories to a meal with a 32oz soda.

Well the thing is, the calories in that soda won't do much if anything to fill you up. Drink as much as you like, you still feel hungry. Not so with a hamburger. While it isn't high quality nutrition, it is still plenty of protein, fat, and carbs and your body is going to be satisfied by the consumption of it.

Thus cutting out the soda really can help. You reduce a non-trivial amount of calories and it isn't likely to make you feel less full. Ya, you are still eating fast food and it is not high quality nutrition, and it is high calorie for what you get, but it is better than just drinking sugar water which is more or less what soda is.

Weight loss and eating healthy isn't an all or nothing proposition. There is better and worse, and cutting out soda is doing better than leaving it in.

Have you seen a doctor about that?

Aspartame is known to cause health problems in a small subset of the population - those with PKU.

I forgot to mention though that saccharin is still dead in the market because it has a really strong aftertaste.

Last I heard, the saccharin mess was a combination of two things:
1) They used insanely high doses for that study too, if you replaced the saccharin with sugar you would've killed the rats rather quickly.
2) The findings that DID occur were later proven to be specific to rat metabolism that did NOT apply to monkeys including the "human" subvariant.

"also triggers insulin production"

If you're a Type I diabetic like myself, this is not an issue.

Diet soda is a miracle for Type I diabetics.

I am disappointed at how Pepsi is giving in to the perception that aspartame is dangerous in any way. A good question is - sales of "Diet Pepsi" were falling - was this ALL variants of "Diet Pepsi" (such as Pepsi MAX and... I forget the other variant. Last I checked there were three variants of "Diet" Pepsi, there was "original diet", Max, and something else.) "Original diet" used aspartame exclusively, others used different sweeteners (Acesulfame K, Splenda). In many cases, those sweeteners were used simply because *they tasted better* and that's likely why sales were falling.

Well one of the biggest limitations for wind and solar is that they're unreliable in terms of availability. We don't have the storage technology available to achieve greater than around 20% grid penetration of wind/solar anywhere except for a small handful of places (namely Denmark, who is next to Norway, who have a HUGE hydro power reserve that they can throttle up/down in response to Denmark's supply/demand.)

If this new process can throttle efficiently depending on how much input power is available, it might be a solution to the storage problem.

I don't think the 7" Android tablet was unprofitable or niche - I think both the first-gen and next-gen Nexus 7s did very well.

Unfortunately the first-gen one was crippled by Tegra3.

I'm really hoping a replacement comes along this summer, because a 9" 4:3 tablet is something I have zero interest in.

The article was pretty poor.

There were two Nexus 7 devices:
1) The 2012 Nexus 7 (often referred to by its internal codename, grouper), using an NVidia Tegra3 chipset. This did get Lollipop, although it was kind of "meh", mostly with performance issues, showing that the hardware was getting a little on the old side. Google may have been trying to make up for the Galaxy Nexus getting dropped prematurely due to TI by keeping a different Nexus device supported for as long as absolutely possible. This device was discontinued in Summer 2013 when its successor was announced.
2) The 2013 Nexus 7 (often referred to by its internal codename, flo), using a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro (APQ8064), pretty much the same as the Snapdragon 600 at a slightly lower clock speed. This runs Lollipop well due to newer hardware. This is the device that was just discontinued.

grouper was always a bit "meh" - I don't know if it was the fault of Asus or NVidia, but Tegra3 tablets from Asus were always notorious for poor storage performance. I think other Tegra3 tablets had similar issues, but honestly - Asus was the largest Tegra3 customer by far thanks to grouper and the Transformer series of tablets, so it's hard to tell who was at fault.

The fact that flo didn't have grouper's storage performance issues (same device manufacturer, different chip inside) indicates it was probably the Tegra3.

Cooling the magma into stone could have long-term negative effects - a lot of this magma has quite a bit of dissolved gases.

The end result is that when it erupts, the gases come out of solution and frequently drive the eruption (think shaken-up soda bottle)

Cooling the magma will stop progression initially, but will cause the gases to accumulate - this could lead eventually to an even more catastrophic BOOM.

No, "sunsetted" has been around for a long time. Although historically it's been used to describe systems that are old and obsolete and getting replaced with new ones.

You'll hear "sunsetted" frequently in the military to describe systems being retired, usually after decades of service because they're falling apart and their replacement has been in production for nearly a decade.

Google's system will likely penalize tactics like this as not truly "mobile-friendly"

Should have included this, but: They explicitly describe their criteria for a "good" mobile site, which I'm guessing the "mobile sites" that are receiving so much hate don't meet:

https://developers.google.com/...

https://developers.google.com/...

Their criteria is not "has a mobile site", their criteria is "site doesn't look like shit when rendered on a mobile device".

It isn't rating a site positively for having a mobile version. It is rating it positively for "not looking like shit on mobile".

It's not just saying "oh this site claims to have a mobile version, great!" or "I don't see a mobile-specific version, ding it in the results!", it's "Does the site render well on mobile?" with various criteria for "renders well on mobile".

If anything it's pretty lenient, in many cases rating sites which people say suck on mobile as "mobile-friendly" - including slashdot.org itself. https://www.google.com/webmast...