Aspartame has problems for some people (like my wife and brother-in-law) and not for others (like me).

Sucralose has problems for some people (like me) and not for others (like my wife).

Seems to me the thing for Pepsi to do is to bring out another formula - with a different name - using Sucralose, put them in the stores side-by-side (they get a LOT of shelf space to play with), and let the customers decide.

Changing the formula of an existing brand strikes me as a stupid move. I suspect Pepsi is about to have it's "New Coke!" moment...

Oh well, Diet Coke is still better anyways.

The radio story where I first heard about this claimed that Coke was considering doing the same to Diet Coke.

The bit you're apparently not grasping is something called a spatial light modulator. ... Couple it with a microwave radar or ultrasound sonar, and you can track individual raindrops and then cast shadows on them.

Then construct an object that appears to the system to be raindrops and you can put an invisible obstacle in the road. B-b

A site may wish to continue using JQuery because some of its clients are using older browsers that don't support the new features that allegedly obsolete JQuery code.

Drop the JQuery code and you drop those customers. Develop future code without it and the pages with the new features won't perform with people using legacy browsers. And so on.

I've seen similar things happen over several generations of web technology. Use care, grasshopper!

Ah, I see they do offer comparable pricing to Boost. 1GB with service is $30. 2GB is $40, but if I use 1.5GB they credit the difference. Sounds like it's worth trying.

You can change his plan too. Boost offers 2GB/mo 4G LTE for $30/mo, which simply degrades to 3G when he hits 2GB.

I don't bother with the higher plans. I play Ingress a lot, use it constantly for mail, and I do a lot of web stuff when not home. Like searching for reviews and price comparisons when I'm out shopping. I also occasionally tether my laptop if I need to do something and don't have wifi available. At home and when I'm in an office, I get on wifi. It's not a bandwidth saving measure though, it's just faster to be on a fat pipe than anything wireless trying to penetrate buildings. When I check my usage, I'm usually only at 1.2 to 1.5 GB per month.

I ran into my first problem with Boost a month ago. They messed up provisioning Visual Voicemail when I switched phones, so it isn't sending transcribed messages to me.

It would seem that they're targeting a small market with this new plan.

Ah, they got their site up. It was throwing an error last night.

If that's the story I'm thinking of, we're not resurrecting the mammoth, we're cloning it. Those are usually introducing the DNA into somewhat comparable modern animals. It's not like the mammoth would wake up and say "Hey, what happened? Last thing I remember was eating frozen grass in the tundra." That's assuming mammoths could talk. :)

1. Why have vaccines and autism rates both grown exponentially in the last 25 years? (no, detection does not come close to answering)

Changes to the definition and protocols for diagnosing it account for the rate changes just fine.

The obvious problem is that we pay them so much more for drug busts than for traffic citations./i?

The problem is that we pay them EXTRA for drug busts: They're allowed to seize property that is "associated" with it (like the car it was in, or the money in the driver's and passengers' pockets, ...), convert the non-cash to cash at an auction, and split the swag among the officers, department, and other branches of government.

That's the same incentive structure that powered the Spanish Inquisition, and look how THAT turned out.

This has been snowballing since the passage of the RICO laws.

I am almost certain I saw this kind of thing in a Radio Shack catalog in the 80's ...

It's as old as infrared LEDs and networking.

Datapoint did it with Arcnet in the late '70s: Both infrared office networking patches (though I don't know if those were productized or just experimental) and the "Arclight" building-to-building cross-town infrared link (which had a pair of lenses each about the diameter of a coffee can.).

Arcnet was still a going technology when the first portable ("luggable") computer - the Osborne-1 - came out in '81. (But I don't know if any of them were ever hooked to Arcnet, let alone the office-infrared flavor.) With the machines being desktop devices requiring power, running coax to the desk wasn't a big deal. So I don't think the office I.R. link got much deployment (even if it WAS productized.)

The Arcnet's token-passing logical ring was self-healing, which was a decent match for intermittent connections. When a rainstorm blocked the building-to-building link the net would automatically partition itself into two working nets and when it cleared they'd heal back into one. Similarly, walking between an infrared-linked machine and its hub would cut the machine off only until you walked away and leave the net running (with a quick hiccup) meanwhile.

So you're saying that a dead 2 year old, who had already had half her brain removed and the other half was seriously damaged, and dunking that in liquid nitrogen with the hope that someday a new body could be built for her and she'd be perfectly normal again ... is a con?

Oh ... ya ... it is ...

I don't know how the fuck anyone falls for it. Really... Why would they think that even if their bodies were preserved that long, and the technology was invented to create what's missing, and repair all the damage done by the freezing process, that anyone would spend the 14 bazillion New Earth credits (or whatever currency there is in futureland) to bring some old fucker back?

In her case, the could have just saved a DNA sample. The story is clear about the condition her brain was in. Half was gone. The other half critically damaged.

I'd have to think that it would be questionable in futureland to resurrect a 20th century person, even if they were in pristine condition. Say 21 years old with much above average intelligence, who was taught everything that there is to know, with no medical issues, no trauma. Just frozen as-is without cellular damage. Why would anyone opt to wake them up? Just to ask "Hey, so what was life like in the 20th century?"

The whole cryogenics "industry" is a huge con.

If these people are religious in the least, they'd have to believe that the soul was trapped in that frozen body until it was awakened. If it wasn't, there would be no reason to reincarnate them. What if they picked the wrong part to freeze? Like, if the soul was really in the liver, or maybe in the spinal cord between C1 and C3. Oops, sorry, we cut that part off.

And if they aren't religious in the least, why bother? So they can wake up as a curiosity in the future? "Hi Cro-Magnon. Fire hot. We have spoken languages you don't understand. And try to wrap your mind around these three seashells. No more poison ivy toilet paper for you. No, don't hit females with a club to make them your mate/slave."

So you're saying it wasn't hyper quantum sticktation of the flux attitude gimble during the multiphasic delay sequence?

Damn, I should write science fiction. Or maybe I could work for the media. Both string scientific sounding words that mean absolutely nothing. :)

I'm thinking they need to figure out a better way rather than landing it vertical. Maybe when they get it that close, they could do some sort of net capture, rather than hoping it will stay upright. It would solve some of the more delicate problems. That could create all kinds of new problems though.

Asphalt gets worn down by [all sorts of stuff] ...

Like fossil fuels in general, Asphalt is used for road surfaces currently solely because it's overall cheaper (better price-performance) than many alternatives that we know damn well how to use. Restart a crashed civilization without cheap oil and one or more of these other alternatives will be used.

Asphalt is cheap because it's one of the side-effects of oil refining - a product that is valuable enough as a paving material that it's more profitable to sell it as-is than to "crack" it into lighter stuff and boost the fuel output (or other products) by a couple percent.

Mr. Kennedy is not a credible source. You know that, right?

I'm not concerned with whether he's credible. I just responded to the question about where the 3 months bit was coming from. It's poor form to imply people are pulling it out of a dark orifice when it's right there in TFA.

Another thing though that no one else is bringing up; how much tax revenue have they given up for 10 years?

The "lost tax revenue" I could care even less about. Governments habitually operate at a higher tax rate than the peak of the Laffer Curve. (Raising taxes further brings in more in the short term, though it ends up costing more than it brought in later. That's why they go far past the peak rather than zeroing in on it and maximizing the amount they suck out of the people's pockets.) So, on the average, every million dollars they DON'T tax now is MORE than a million dollars they'll eventually get in taxes later, once the transient has worked itself out. It's also SEVERAL million dollars more that people will earn in "generating" that added tax.

What concerns me more is including the wages and jobs LOST thanks to taxing the people to get those millions to spend "promoting" the plan, when comparing it to the pay for the jobs "generated" by the plan.