For those who are wondering how scientists can tell the different, the Wikipedia article has a section on various Reservoir Effects, including how volcanoes can skew the dates if their effect isn't properly adjusted for.

(think what happens with a Skype call in your house behind a NAT)

I don't use Skype, but I do use other things, such as SSH to my desktop from my laptop when I'm on the road, that need to connect to a specific machine. I do that by giving my desktop a fixed IP on the LAN and forwarding the appropriate ports to it, while allowing other machines, such as my laptop when I need it at home, to use DHCP. As long as Skype uses a consistent set of ports, there's no reason I can see that this wouldn't work, and it's not that hard to set up, either.

You can test ipv6 functionality by going to test-ipv6.org.

Alas, the site is down and whois shows that the registration has expired. However, test-ipv6.com is up and running if you need it.

Google may not (yet) be doing evil, but more and more I find them Doing The Wrong Thing. As an example, I'm writing this on my desktop at home. If I go to Google Maps, my home address is my default location, which is what I want. It's also the default location on my laptop. However, if I'm traveling and change my laptop's default location, it's been changed on my desktop when I get home which is exactly what I don't want it to do. The right thing, of course, would be to store the default location on the computer, so that you can have several computers with different default locations, but I guess that's too obvious for Google.

TFS says, 'We found fish that had almost 70% of their biomass made from carbon that came from trees and leaves instead of aquatic food chain sources.' I haven't read the article itself, and probably wouldn't get too much out of it because I never studied the right parts of chemistry, etc. to understand all of the details, but if somebody knows how they were able to determine this and can put it in layman's terms, I'd appreciate it. I'm not disputing their results, but I would like to learn how they got there.

Years ago I used to run a precinct during elections. That precinct had about eight people who'd registered as being in the Peace and Freedom Party. You'd think that anybody who cared enough to do that would care enough to come out and vote, but for most primaries (the only time that your party affiliation mattered at the poll) not one of them came in, and none of the ever requested an absentee ballot. There were representatives of several other minor parties but again, almost none of them showed up on election day. If that's true in a closed primary, how likely is it that any of them will vote in an open one?

Actually, no. Back before California instituted an open primary, there was a candidate in the General Election from every party that was represented in the primary. That means that for each congressional district, there was a Green Candidate, a Peace and Freedom candidate, a Libertarian candidate and so on. Now, with the open primary there are exactly two candidates on the final ballot, meaning that the minor parties have no real chance of getting anybody elected. This is just one of many reasons I voted against it, and I'd happily vote to get rid of it again because I consider it unfair.

Maybe I should have used sarcasm tags. I don't deny that the climate is changing, because I'm enough of a realist to understand that the climate is always changing. I am, however, skeptical about the cause. My personal opinion is that geothermal energy may be a factor (even, possibly a major factor) in the melting of the Thwaites Glacier, but AFAIK there's no evidence, as yet, that this is true for any other glacier.

The Thwaites Glacier is melting because of Geothermal heat rather than AGW? I must admit that I'm astonished. Not by the cause of the melting, but by the fact that the discovery is being announced without any attempt to spin this as proof of AGW.

That's nothing! I have ocular implants and my adjustable augmented hearing just got upgraded. I'm far more bionic than you are!

To quote from your post: "But if you want to talk about the guy who invented Robots you should check out RUR by Karel ÃOEapek ..." You may have meant to refer to the term Robotics, but what I responded to was what you actually wrote.

Don't think that the idea of a robot only goes back to RUR! How about The Golem of Prague, from the late 16th Century? How about Talos, the bronze man that Hercules fought during the Quest for the Golden Fleece? And, of course, there are the metal servants that Hephaestus built, and that helped him forge the new armor for Achilles in the Iliad. The idea of artificial workers goes far, far, back in history, much farther than most people realize, because the older stories don't use the term "robot."

the attorney general even went so far as to say "think of how this will look on your permanent record after you are reversed."

I do hope that that attorney general got to spend some time in jail for that because threatening the judge like that is clearly contempt of court, and a simple slap on the wrist, or a small fine just isn't enough to make the point clear.

Just because it was posted on 06/05/2014 doesn't mean that that was when it was submitted. It may well have taken two days to get to the front page.

There's another excellent reason for a Moon colony: we can learn how to build, maintain and live in an environment where there's little or no atmosphere and is close enough to Earth that extra supplies can be shipped there on fairly short notice. Once we know how to build a self-sufficient lunar colony, we can use what we've learned there on Mars, the largest asteroids and possibly some of the Jovian or Saturnian moons.