"Aspartame has been found to be safe for human consumption by more than ninety countries worldwide, with FDA officials describing aspartame as "one of the most thoroughly tested and studied food additives the agency has ever approved" and its safety as "clear cut""

So.... no. Probably not. But judging by the comments on here, you're not alone.

Have sugar. If you don't want sugar, but you want your drink to taste sweet, you can have natural sugars. Otherwise, you're fucked and eating synthetic stuff no matter what?

Almost all of those substances - in moderation - are food-safe and no more dangerous than eating sugar, or any other natural food. Some people might collapse and die from a single exposure, others it will make ill, others it will upset them a bit, but the vast majority will just eat it and get on with life.

If it worries you, go back to eating sugar.

Super Bowl XLIX was broadcast on NBC. What was your point? That people subscribe to ESPN for the Super Bowl?

Not. Reset. Try again.

Your response is typical FB-style. I know how to limit posts and such. I keep lots of people on FB visible to me and skip past the noise, while it seems easier to do so on G+.

On the other hand, plenty of my FB friends point out to me blah blah blah. Your post missed my point, that my G+ circles have more content, and the unspoken point, that G+ gives me more control over content.

But have at it, since if I disagree with you, I must have misunderstood...

Actually, I focus on G+, and mostly ignore the noise on FB.

look: to turn one's attention to; to search

see: to sense with the eyes; to perceive; to understand

"What do you see when you look at the Mona Lisa?"

Seasoned programmers that "know their stuff" that have been told to keep their un-maintained junk out of the kernel before now? And in no polite terms?

"Worked beautifully" resulting in many unbootable (or, worse, variably bootable) systems over the years. It's far from perfect (I'm not expecting perfect, but it's far from it).

Though I don't doubt that there are entire swathes of people happy with it, that there is so much opposition is not only indicative that it's far-from-perfect, but that many people may be avoiding using it altogether?

I'm by no means a stick-in-the-mud when it comes to new stuff but systemd still appears a backward step and even the DISCUSSION of systemd generating such heat is indicative of underlying problems that aren't being addressed (even if those problems are entirely political, which I doubt).

And I agree that there's little competition but things like upstart were in fact the middle-ground. Systemd has a huge headstart, but also keeps hitting political brick-walls in its race to be default and little is done to appease or even acknowledge the criticisms

"We know better" is not the basis of any argument for either side. But "We're never going to change either" is just head-banging nonsense. I don't think anyone is opposed to change on the SysVInit side (the very existence of upstart and a variety of other projects), they just don't think this is the right change. However, the systemd crowd are very much in the "We know best, so you need to get onboard" arena.

And when you're dealing with critical areas like even being able to boot a kernel, you need to dial back to the users and say "What do you need?", not "This is all you'll ever be given, deal with it"

Systemd is one of those thing that people know will end in disaster. Sure, it works at the moment. But a personality will jump into it, or a bug will catch up with their design, or something else. And it will all come crashing down.

What bugs me about systemd is not the idea behind systemd. It's the implementation. Using cgroups and other kernel-provided features, it's able to provide functionality that we don't have elsewhere. But rather than break-down that functionality and make each part replaceable, and use "old" methods to do some things while they are replaced with "new" methods.

It's the all-or-nothing nature of systemd that I hate. There's no reason it can't be done in some other way. There's no reason that, even at a base level, you can't write scripts that do the same as it does - for all functions, but also for parts of the functions. As such, it's not modular, not changeable, it's just a lump of code that you accept having complete control of your machine or not. And I don't.

Honestly, I'm waiting for the crash-and-burn moment at which someone steps up, gives us the same features, using predictable, modular code or even scripts, and we can put in the bits we like and leave out the bits we don't like and replace any bit and NOBODY will know or care that we've done that.

The biggest edits I ever did on Wikipedia, many years ago now, were to the articles about ZX Spectrum games.

I spent hours loading up games in emulators, capturing screenshots, writing out information, etc. Most of the articles for those games existed already, I just did things like link the developers, publishers, etc. categorised them, added screenshots where they were missing.

By a year later, every screenshot I'd done had been removed. Not because of copyright - but because when I'd first done them, I'd tagged them as per the required tags for copyright (e.g. fair usage, etc.). I'd spent forever putting all the tags on after being told for one article. The next month, my images were removed because a new tag had been introduced and I hadn't updated the images with it. So I updated the tags. Repeat ad infinitum for nearly a year. Every time, warnings about tags, copyright-tag bots spamming my talk page, new tags popping out of nowhere and serving no new purpose but those same bots stripping any images that did not have them.

In the end, I gave up. I stopped editing. I stopped categorising. I stopped screenshotting. All my screenshots (despite being perfectly fine for a year while I was tagging them) disappeared within a month. Most of those articles never got even a title screenshot back and are now either plain-text or the entire article is history.

And every "new" game article I added was removed for being "non-notable", when tiny little indie game articles stayed up for years, and the article were about huge, mainstream, industry-changing games.

Sorry, but my time and effort was wasted, not by fans of the games, readers of the articles, or even the article curators. Just by random paranoid spamming bots and people who - at first - I presumed were editors and moderators but actually were most likely just random people who wanted to criticize and break the articles for their own stats(?), I don't know.

All that happened is that the articles turned to dust and rotted over the years while the talk pages filled up with arguments.

You wanted to compete with Facebook. Which you took to mean that I should be shoved onto it forcibly even though I have a fully-functioning social network with all my details, photos and friends plugged in anyway. You thought I should be badgered into submission until I moved all that content over, and have to go via roundabout routes to opt out of this stuff - on a GMail account I'd have since the first days of invite-only accounts.

And you didn't listen or care at the time. If you're that forcible with getting the information out of me, imagine how forcible you'll be when I try to get that information on me back.

Wouldn't touch it with a bargepole (despite being quite Google-centric in my services otherwise) just because of the "YOU MUST SIGN UP NOW" attitude.

If you'd just done what you did with Google Mail, slowly adding in features (e.g. Google Talk, Google Drive, Google Calendar, etc.) quietly that I can choose to use as I see fit, and just stumble across them as I need, and can just use them without being required to fill out EVERY DAMN BOX every time, then it would have taken off much nicer. And if I don't want to use them... well, they're still there any time I do.

Fact is, my Google Account is still the same one and STILL does not have a Google+ profile. Not even an image. Because, sorry, it doesn't work that way. I choose to use the service, you don't choose who must use it. When you tried to force me to fill out and use that part of my Google profile, I did everything I could NOT to. And look who won.

That's almost funny. The program wasn't as successful as expected because they didn't share the data widely enough.

Almost funny. Like, they couldn't do useful analysis because they didn't share it with all the CIA analysts they should have?

Unconstitutional much?

Ya think?

As if Hillary's server was any more secure than the White House UNclassified system?

If you think Hillary's server wasn't compromised by any government, corporation, or force that cared to, you are naive. It was surely pwned over and over. It was also probably so pwned that it was a good place to study the various attacks.

But I LIKE Google+.

I have much more meaningful discussions on G+ than I do FB, partly because the number of followers on G+ is less, so less crap. But FB is full f people who genuinely can't think. It's sad how hard it is to have useful discussions on FB.

G+ also has much more interesting users. Maybe because they choose to participate, I don't know or care.

I can decline to have photos shared, etc, not much worse than FB.

If they truly hose up G+ in this split, I'll miss it.