yeah, and it's probably carcinogenic.

I've got a nasty Diet Cola habit, but switched from Pepsi to Sam's after Pepsi started adding ace-K. It's not hard to calculate a dose of aspartame that your liver enyzmes can handle but there's no safe-ish dose of ace-K.

Oh, and the whole "aspartame makes you fat" meme is bullshit - I've dropped 45 lbs in the past year by getting rid of nearly all the carbs in my diet, all while drinking the stuff. An over-abundance of carbs is what horks your insulin system.

A sweetener that is proven to be incredibly dangerous, though: sugar, especially HFCS. It causes the largest health crisis the country has ever seen and innumerable downstream morbidities. Most articles about artificial sweeteners tend to "gloss over" that part.

A huge number of Americans self-medicate on caffeine (the drug they should be on is probably illegal or guarded behind the nearly impenetrable veil of the AMA's psychiatric guild). But encouraging them to drink their caffeine with sugar is the worst possible idea. Ace-K is probably carcinogenic, but once you've got some cancer cells, to really make them happy, fill them with fructose - Pepsi's got what cancer craves!

At what point did Pandora explicitly ask the artists if they wanted their work advertising? At which point did the artists explicitly agree to Pandora advertising their works?

Pandora is just radio "on the Internet", with the logical efficiencies that unicast delivery can provide. Demanding a different licensing scheme is as much bullshit as every one of the patents that demanded rent for some existing thing and then added "on the Internet" on the end.

It's only lawyers who benefit from re-litigating established societal norms. Of course, they promise some middlemen riches to get them to file actions, but there's only one party that's guaranteed any riches.

This. I don't give a damn about animations or not animations, but what I do give a damn about is when I load G+ and I can't even start typing what I want to type for 15 seconds while the UI gets its shit together and loads all its assets from all kinds of Google domains and re-arranges its layout on-the-fly.

Same reason I don't 'like' YouTube comments anymore - it's at least a 10 second pain while it opens new browser windows, redirects to G+, bounces back, and occasionally works round-trip.

I really don't think that Google is this stupid - engineering principles can fix all of these problems. These must be features that somebody wanted to rot on the vine and incentivized their developers and users accordingly.

I use a few non-search Google products, but the way they seem to trip over 98% of them makes me never want to rely on any of them.

If Google can't even make Lollipop work on its own hardware, how much of an endorsement is that for other manufacturers to put their efforts into Android? Clearly it's not because Google is underfunded.

I'm not jumping to conclusions, but the people who have been making the case for historical alien visitors claim that the written record specifies liquid mercury rotating at high speeds as part of their antigrav drives. The Mayan writings are the most-often cited.

I'm poised to install a $4K backup generator in the next few months. I don't live in a region where I can force my neighbors to pay for my tech goodies, and the $9K difference doesn't get paid for on any kind of time horizon that outpaces even a basic interest rate.

The generator also has a near-infinite runtime, in the case of a bad storm. However, it needs more maintenance, so if there were price-parity I might opt for the battery.

Give it another five years and that just might be feasible - good for Musk for getting this ball rolling, and kudos to the early adopters who take it in the pocket to promote the technology.

If slashcode had ever evolved beyond 2001, we'd be selecting comments like this to replace the summary.

And even with the 'cannon' in China, do we know who lit the fuse?

Almost certainly the same people who arranged for NXDOMAIN on github.com a few weeks back. They really hate that there are open source anti-censorship tools on there.

They had to stop breaking DNS for github since most of China's Internet developers couldn't get any work done anymore.

That Chinese developers are freely using a California hosting service which has benefits to everybody in the world, and everybody recognizes that the "damage" here is government, it actually gives me a bit of hope. People do prefer to cooperate on all things, until a few sociopaths get a set of keys.

Is this a Bayer or Shell astroturfer here to spread disinfo?

It seems unlikely that development support of XP is more costly than the revenue generated by XP users. And Apple has plenty of cash. But this may still be shrewd - let's see if there's a bump in Mac sales this quarter. These users represent existing Apple customers running an OS that Microsoft abandoned. They don't need to know about how fast Apple abandons hardware, but to be fair Apple does upgrades pretty nicely. They can blame MS and gain the customer, all by hosing said customer. Devious and clever.

That's not how cancer works. Cancerous cells are constantly arising and being killed by the immune system. Let's assume that eating healthy food reduces the incidence of metastatic cancer. Then it is preventing cancer in many instances. To claim that it prevents all run-away cancer processes would be a stronger claim with a much higher bar to meet.

Who was actually harmed by this crash? A bunch of wall street speculators running computer programs to trade faster than regular people. Who gives a shit. If anything, it exposes the vulnerability so it can be fixed.

Wall Street (and The City) give a shit, and they own the governments. This is exactly how the system is set up to work for them.

Guess who gave more money to candidate Obama than every other candidate combined ever, at the time? Your clue letters are 'G' and 'S'.

And, of course they all bet big on both horses, so they're covered no matter how a given race turns out.

Just being a standard doesn't stop obsoletion. Wireless shows you that. Within days of actually being ratified as a standard, the next wireless standard is in the works and people start pushing our pre-N or pre-AC products.

Yet you can still configure an -AC AP to allow -b devices to connect to it. B-only devices were last made in, what, 2001? It's limiting, and sometimes not the default, but real standards usually try to incorporate backwards-compatibility if they can.

Can you imagine the uproar if older HDTV tuners suddenly stopped working with new broadcasts?

Odds are some "smart" TV's are losing YouTube, or will with the next change. By the end of their 20-year life-expectancy, most of those things will only be able to play HDTV and HDMI. The ones that aren't bricked by malicious malware by then, anyway.

There might even be some that lose functions before the warranty runs out - is the manufacturer liable for firmware updates to maintain functionality?

Google's clearly going to externalize all the costs of reacquisition and recycling - it's not established what obligations, if any, they have when they offer a product and refuse to support it for a "reasonable" time. I'm just surprised with that with a Google of money, it's not worth it to them to hire a guy to keep the old API working, so that those eyeballs don't migrate to other services. If Youtube fails and Hulu keeps working, it would be an error to assume that people will just go buy a new TV to keep up with YouTube - they will substitute other services in most cases.

There aren't even any 3G towers that I know of.

Seriously? A good chunk of the existing phone base can't even do 4G - prepaid is still largely 3G-only phones, which are still sold new today. It would be very rare to have 4G-only coverage areas in a town.

However, if you never go anywhere and have really good 4G coverage, setting your phone to 4G-only may well be a good workaround to reduce your chance of an intercept.