When you imply that sucrose is not "artificial," then obviously what you say is not scientifically justified.

Sucrose doesn't occur naturally in significant quantities -- it needs to be extracted from cane or sugar beets. If you actually tried to eat the amount of sugar cane required to equal a can of Coke, you'd probably end up screwing up your bowel from excessive fiber intake.

The reality is most sugars occur in nature in contexts where they have significant amounts of fiber or other nutrients that affect how our bodies process them. Honey is one of the few exceptions, and its composition is basically equivalent (other than trace minerals) to something like high-fructose corn syrup. Just that last statement can cause you to question the arbitrary divisions in the "nature" vs. "artificial" idea.

Anyhow, to address your question directly -- there are limited scientific studies that show various downsides to artificial sweeteners compared to sucrose, though they do exist. But there are also plenty of studies that show better results for various populations consuming sweeteners instead of sucrose (mostly in terms of weight gain, diabetes, etc.). As for "corn syrup" (which I assume means "high-fructose corn syrup," rather than the mostly-glucose stuff used in candy-making), I'm aware of only 1 or 2 studies that seem to indicate some sort of negative effect compared to sucrose -- most studies find no difference or don't actually compare HFCS to sucrose directly.

For Europeans, the problem with the American diet regarding sweeteners mostly has to do with excess sweetener consumption everywhere -- hidden sugars in all sorts of processed foods, etc. Whether those sugars are sucrose or corn syrup or some sweetener is often irrelevant, because there are simply too much of them, and even when some calories are saved by sweeteners, they are often made up by excess other calories or bad things.

In sum, if we ate quantities of sweeteners or corn syrup that would replicate the amount of sweetness we'd experience naturally eating most "whole foods" in nature (fruits, vegetables, etc.), we'd probably be fine. But most people are addicted to the excess sweetness found in everything...

THIS.

The whole discussion in this subthread seems to presuppose that everyone would obviously WANT to drink regular soda. But that's not a good assumption.

I rarely drink soda, but if I'm in a situation where it's the main drink being offered, I drink diet -- mainly because I can't stand the level of sweetness in normal soda. I've had many conversations with other people (both normal weight and obese) who feel the same way. "Regular" soda just tastes terrible to a lot of people, particularly if you don't like sweet things.

Diet soda also tastes really sweet, but somehow it's not as bad. AND you know that you're not ingesting hundreds of empty calories for a drink you detest.

I think it's what you're used to. I never grew up drinking a lot of soda. But I know people who grew up drinking loads of soda or syrupy iced tea, and they just love the stuff -- they think it's refreshing to have a cold Coke or iced tea loaded with multiple tablespoons of sugar per cup.

Me -- I can't stand the stuff. But once in a while, I do like the fizz in a drink. And since one can't typically order soda with a quarter of the normal sugar (which would be about the level I'd want), diet soda's really the only commonly available option.

Or, to put it another way, what is "worth the calories" to somebody? I don't like fast food -- most of it tastes horrible to me as well. If I want a burger, I want a REAL burger (I often grind my own meat fresh at home), not a processed calorie-bomb that has to have loads of sauce on it and flavor-enhancers to convince you to eat it.

Anyhow, to me it's "worth the calories" to have a homemade burger sometimes that might have the same calories as a Big Mac or whatever. To others, they might think it's "worth the calories" to eat the Big Mac, because they like the taste, but they might not like overly sweet sugary soda enough to make it "worth the calories."

Maybe there are some people out there who order diet soda even though they hate it, just to save calories. But I also bet there are a significant number of people who just don't really like regular soda that much. Frankly, I know very few adults beyond college age who do -- maybe it's just the people I hang out with, though.

Although this neologism is suspect on etymological grounds, one could only hope that this word will become more popular and overtake the various misuses or imprecise uses of "agnosticism" for example.

For the record, "agnostic" (literally "lacking knowledge") in the traditional sense doesn't mean "I don't know" nor "I don't care," but rather is a positive philosophical belief that it is impossible to know for certain whether god(s) exist, e.g., because of the impossibility of collecting appropriate evidence or the nature of knowledge/deities/the universe/whatever.

Or, in terms of familiar statements:

"I believe" = theism
"I don't believe" = (strong) atheism
"I don't care" = apatheism
"I don't know" = weak atheism (aka "negative" or "soft" atheism)
"I can't know" or "No one knows" = agnosticism
"I don't know, and I don't care" = apatheistic atheism
"I don't give a crap, and nobody could ever know anyway" = strong agnostic apatheism

etc.

Huh? What does that even mean?

If you said that collisions have to do more with "how other people drive than how **I** drive," maybe your statement would be logically comprehensible.

Or, to put it another way, for some values of "you", "others" = "you." (I.e. some people you (the parent) are including as "you" are part of the bad "others" who apparently are poor drivers.)

I've never used sling. Does it have a DVR function?

I thought that I'd heard some pretty compelling OS sales pitches in my time; but "Perhaps the #1 choice of impoverished peasants buying their first finite state machine!, if we can get the OEM deals through" simply redefines my expectations of what is possible in the genre. What could possibly be more thrilling than that?

I have to pay for a monthly subscription to DirecTV because my wife wants HGTV. I would gladly pay for the "Binge Watch House Hunters and Fixer Upper Online On Demand" subscription if it existed.

Very true; though (on the whole) the end user has made the same choice when they'd either have to buy more hardware or spend more for software and/or make do with fewer features.

Even situations that are highly cost sensitive and have customers who bear the entire cost of the extra hardware or the extra software engineering (like embedded systems) have seen a fair amount of hardware growth. Cortex-M0 or a bunch of extra squeezing to get it into an 8 or 16 bit micro?

I'm no expert; but my off-the-cuff assumption would be that it could be made quite fast:

At least with Debian and derivatives, you have a locally stored cache of package data(not the packages themselves, but their metadata). Searching that is pretty fast unless you have a lot of repositories or a brutally slow storage system.

The obvious(and probably flawed in some less obvious way that I'm not thinking through) extension would be to add the VID/PID combinations (or device classes, for class drivers) to which a driver package applies to the existing metadata about the package. You might also have a 'driver package vs. 'non-driver package' distinction to reduce the search space). During the hotplug process, if nothing suitable is already available, apt-cache search for the VID/PID pair would be run, and a match downloaded, if available(the amount of security prompting would obviously be a matter of configuration: sometimes it would be desireable that admin authorization always be required, sometimes it would be better if downloads from already-blessed repositories are acceptable, depends on the use case).

The local search would be reasonably fast, barring very slow storage, the download and install obviously depending on the size of the driver and the speed of the connection. In the not-terribly-valuable opinion of a layman, it seems like it could be reasonably quick.

And it turns out that people were still launching boards with AGP in 2010. You can probably still buy one...

True, but SMP systems are older. I used a dual P3-700 for years, which I picked up cheaply on eBay because not many people searched for 'duel processor' (I think eBay now does some phonetic matching in their search). Before that, the ABit BP6 (1999) was quite popular. It ran two Celerons, so you could get a dual-processor machine for cheaper than a single-processor one (though you needed to run Windows NT or *NIX to be able to use the second one, as XP was the first SMP-capable consumer OS from MS). The 300MHz Celerons overclocked to 450MHz by bumping the FSB from 66MHz to 100MHz, making it quite competitive with the P2 (the L2 cache in the Celeron was half the size, but twice the speed, and the core was the same).

This wouldn't be the kernel's problem; but it might be kind of neat to make the package manager aware of the hotplug process; in order to allow largely automated hunting of the repositories for the appropriate modules for a newly inserted device; but the amount of space saved may just not be enough to be worth the trouble. It'd arguably be more elegant than preloading more or less everything, or having the user grovel around with VID/PID combinations looking for helpful advice on Google; but storage tends to be cheaper than any human labor you'd want touching important software...

Really? Wikipedia tells me that kindergarten in the USA means up to age 6. By that time, I had been taught to read, write and do arithmetic (though I sucked at long division and found long multiplication hard until I was taught a third method a few years later). My handwriting is not much better now than it was then, though it did improve a bit in the middle as a teenager when I was writing on a regular basis.

I don't, but if you want to get the same fun without all of the old annoyances there are two things I'd recommend:

The first is to get an FPGA dev board. BlueSpec is a nice proprietary high-level HDL that is free for academic use, but if you don't qualify for that then CHISEL from Berkeley is also not bad - they're both a nice step above Verilog / VHDL.

The second is the mbed boards from various ARM partners. Some ARM folks handed me one of these to play with a few months back. These are aimed at getting embedded development to people who don't normally do it. They've got all of the fun I/O stuff from the BBC micro (plus some new stuff like USB and Ethernet) and a nicely put together development environment.

They're increasingly hard to justify though. Cortex-M cores are really, really cheap (M0 and M0+ especially) and a modern 32-bit instruction set can be a significant win. You can't justify a 16-bit microcontroller on cost grounds anymore, let alone an 8-bit one. The main places Z80s are used is in systems designed in the early '80s that would cost too much to change, but which need periodic repairs.

I've seen a few things recently that have taken an amusing middle ground and bought ARM cores and used them to run a Z80 emulator, because it was cheaper to get the associated peripherals to attach to the ARM core.