IANAL, but afaik that is correct on both counts. Namely, the person who didn't write the contract can easily misconstrue what was written, so the burden is on the party that wrote it to iron out those ambiguities.

That said, I could easily see a situation where ESPN left something out.

In the United States, contracts are understood by the letter, so if it isn't explicitly written, then it isn't enforceable (as opposed to say high context cultures, where there's strong enforcement of "implied" language.)

That said, it's entirely possible that Verizon's contract with ESPN is worded in such a way that they can get away with doing this. Verizon seems to think so, but ESPN seems to disagree. So that's where an impartial (theoretically) judge decides the result of how its worded, and how it will be enforced.

Forced inclusion of expensive channels that I never watch was the primary driver of me dropping my cable sub. I was thinking about doing Dish's Sling TV, but it has guess what as part of the base package? ESPN. I don't want to give that fucking company a dime, even if Sling TV is cheap.

Citation needed.

Even if that is the case though, I rarely have aspartame. I honestly hate the way it tastes, and I don't like things that have it in general. This is the main reason I hate diet soda, and truth be told I probably consume even less of it than I do regular soda. Given the low quantity of aspartame I consume, it's extremely unlikely that it has anything to do with it.

And besides, googling it I don't see any research linking the two, only one NIH article that mentions people with NAFLD that also happen to consume diet soda, but they consume much more of other stuff that is known to trigger it.

Which by the way, "natural" fruit juice is among the list of things known to cause NAFLD, so from that standpoint alone, the traditional naturopathic medicine dogma that "natural juice" is healthy for you is actually false. In fact, every now and then you hear stories about people dying from consuming organic juice because the (rather insane) belief that pasteurizing it is "unnatural" and somehow bad for you.

I go to McDonalds somewhat often, and typically I order a spicy chicken sandwich off of the dollar menu with instructions to go light on the mayo (otherwise they glob it on there) and add mustard and a slice of tomato and a small fry with no salt. (The main purpose of asking for no salt is so they make it fresh rather than from the pile that's been sitting there. The sodium content otherwise doesn't bother me.) I also get a courtesy water cup.

Total is somewhere like $2.50 and typically leaves me satisfied. The spicy chicken in particular helps with that (I've always found that spicy foods help me feel sated.) I think in all its 400 calories, which is slightly higher than the chicken salads I get from subway even more often.

I guess I'm just one of those weirdos who doesn't go calorie crazy at fast food joints, nor do I eat sugary breakfasts (usually a 250 calorie Jimmy Dean turkey sausage, cheese, and egg biscuit.) But in my defense, I work in an office type environment with little physical activity (until I get home and then do a 6 mile daily bike ride, and then dinner always has less than 1,200 calories.)

And yes, this is all a part of my ongoing weight loss plan (which is succeeding rather well and has been ongoing for a year. Whoever says you can't diet and eat fast food is dead wrong.)

This message brought to you by the Organic Food Lobby, and the Church of Homeopathic Medicine.

Seriously, Aspartame is very safe. All of the anecdotes about it killing ants and whatnot are really just shitty science (somebody was able to repeat the same result using just a puddle of water, which also kills ants.) It's a non-nutrative sweetener, which means as far as your body is concerned, it is inert. There have already been decades of investigation into aspartame, and none have linked any kind of illness to it (except of course the bunk materials spread by the Church of Homeopathic Medicine.)

I still drink regular soda as part of my diet, but instead of once a day it's more like once a month. I can't stand diet soda, and will only occasionally have it.

But diet soda is certainly better from a nutrition standpoint. The sheer volume of sugar in regular soda I think is the reason I developed Non-Alchoholic Fatty Liver Disease, and is probably why my cholesterol/triglyceride count is so high without statin drugs. I'll be able to test that theory after another 6 months or so because I've been off of high sugar foods for about 6 months so far, and the cholesterol/triglyceride figures have already dropped even on a low dose of lovastatin.

I don't recall complaining about personal attacks.

Are you just dumb or something? I said in many ways, which exclude only those two things. Everything else she's getting is definitely called for.

In many ways Anita Sarkeesian is asking for what she's getting. The rape/death threats are uncalled for, but she basically goes around slapping the misogyny label on everything and anything, even when there isn't, and it's just fucking annoying.

For example, she railed against Fox for canceling Terminator: Sarah Conner Chronicles and renewing Dollhouse, when the first is supposedly empowering females and the later isn't. I'm a huge fan of the Terminator franchise, but that show was so lame I couldn't even watch past the first episode. The writing sucked terribly, and the actors totally failed to live up to their characters from the movies, making the show a total let-down, so how does that make it misogynistic to cancel it?

Further, this whole tropes vs women thing is super exaggerated. I remember one time looking at Japanese animation and wondering why all of the characters looked white and not Asian/Japanese. When you look at the history of it, you notice that it isn't because their culture favors being white (like China currently does in many places,) because it still looked that way even during the WWII days when Japan saw themselves as a supreme race/culture and the white people were just a bunch of incompetents that they'd easily conquer in the coming years. It turns out that all human beings draw a mental picture of what the "default human" is, and for Japanese cartoons the default human *is* Asian. So when they draw a cartoon, they don't put much thought into it other than to make it look like a person. Think like how the Simpsons draws their characters as yellow, but in your mind you're thinking "white family." Anyways to the Japanese, white people have big noses, so when they draw people who are supposed to be white, you always see pronounced noses in the artwork, because it's the token "white feature." It's not racist, it's just saying: See this guy? He's white, so you know, you now have a better mental picture of what kind of character he is.

Likewise, with just about everybody in the world, the "default human" is a male. This is even true of female gamers. So when the creator of Pac-Man wanted to show that Mrs. Pac-Man was a female, what does he do? Attaches a token of Japanese girls to her, in this case, a bow. The purpose of the bow is just to say: This is a female, so now you have a better mental picture of what kind of character she is. He had no intention at all of trying to be sexist. (And this isn't even getting into the limits of what you are able to do with those low resolution sprites.)

This guy also says it pretty well:

https://youtu.be/v04IdNPuMlc?t...

SGX sounds like malware heaven. Who needs a rootkit when a normal process can hide itself in plain site? The NSA would have a field day.

Which by the way, that last part might be a good rallying point to nip that technology in the bud.

What they're saying is "If you want to enjoy your content unencumbered, it's probably best to just pirate it."

That depends on the food and how exactly it rotted. Normal molecular decay can yield certain nutrients in some cases that your body doesn't produce on its own, but in most cases existing nourishments are broken down. Bacterial consumption (i.e. biodegrading) typically results in a reduction in nourishment as well, depending on how (i.e. aerobic vs anaerobic, such as fermentation.)

Did I say it was?

It isn't not eating well either. The mistake most people tend to make at places like these is they consume too many calories (the worst part tends to come from the beverages and oversized burgers) and not enough nourishment. One of the staple menu items at KFC for example is sweet corn on a cob, which isn't at all bad for you. The salads at McDonalds are healthy provided you don't go overboard with the saturated fats found in the dressings. Having a normal sized burger twice a week won't kill you either.

This is purely a religious statement as it has zero basis in empirical evidence. If you had just said "to live right, one must search for Jesus" you'd sound every bit as credible and sane.

In fact, prior to the existence of agriculture, "natural" meant whatever you could pick up off of the ground that doesn't happen to smell like ass yet, which is exactly what humans have evolved to live with. Fresh might taste better, but unless it's outright rotten, it hasn't lost its nutritional value.

You could eat starbucks and krispy kreme as part of every meal so long as you included nourishment along with them, and then burned those calories off later with exercise, and it wouldn't negatively impact your immune system. The concern here is that the high quantity of sugar found in those donuts could lead to Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease, which can lead to cirrosis, and the sugar could also raise your triglycerides and lower your HDL cholesterol, which can lead to heart disease, while the saturated fats would raise your LDL cholesterol.

However, your immune system would be fine.

And everything I said it based on empirical evidence, not superstition and guessing like the supposition you posted above.