For Mt. St. Helens, it wasn't so much predicted as the first signs of an impending eruption were noticed and acted on. There's a similar volcano close to where I am (Mt Baker) and all science says is it is currently quiet and very unlikely to erupt real soon. It can't say 10 or a 100 years or even if it will erupt again though it is likely to.
Earthquakes are similar, there seems to be early signs that some animals pick up on and may be measurable but for the fault I live by, all science can say is statistically we're due for an earthquake. Could be next week or next century.
And yes, the question is whether the methane release is normal or not along with other methane releases. This one could be normal and others could be recent. Climate change is complicated and we don't really know how things will evolve but there is a good chance that the world will warm up and it safer to act on that just like it was safer to evacuate Mt St Helens even though it may have been more of a fizzle then a major eruption.

Petroleum and coal have only been forming for some 100's of millions of years, basically since plants colonized the land and pseudo-forests started to grow. (Some petroleum may have been formed earlier by algae). For the first period of perhaps 60 million odd years there were no fungi to break down the plant matter and much of current fossil fuels were created, sequestering lots of carbon which we're now releasing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

He'd probably say, "you're right, lets have a Continental Congress and unite the colonies, at least diplomatically and militarily"

I'm not even American and even I know that only Texas and Hawaii were ever separate countries that gave up their sovereignty to join the USA. It can be said that the original 13 colonies had a choice between signing the articles of confederation or being sovereign countries after the war of separation but as far as I know all 13 signed the articles of confederation and later the constitution.
Seems most of the rest were conquered or purchased territory rather then sovereign independent states that decided to join the USA. At that even some of the original 13 had to be reconquered and forced back into the union, which shows how much sovereignty they actually had.
As for expansion of federal power, its been ongoing ever since 1776 with notable events being the US Constitution, written up by a bunch of guys at the pub who didn't have a mandate to write a constitution (at least the 13 voluntarily signed it), Andrew Jackson who ignored the judiciary branch as he practiced genocide to add States to the USA, and the big one, Lincoln and the new Republican party who actually went to war to push the Federal agenda and after the war, occupied State Legislatures and forced them to pass amendments at gunpoint.

That's true, the government has been implicit in enclosing the commons since 1235 and without common land to drag cable/fiber across you can't just start an ISP.

Perhaps we need to stop the government from giving the aristocracy (the rich) the right to own the land and infrastructure built on our land. Traditionally there was private land, eg your house and immediate property and their was common land for the use of all. Government has removed the common part and given it to the lords and now naturally those who own the commons want to profit off it.

Thing is the other providers are the same companies as own the ISPs.

Here in BC the government cut income taxes by 25% and have been making up the shortfalls from hydro so prices are really going up. They also want to build a new large damn on the Peace river for liquifying natural gas for export (they think they're going to make a fortune exporting gas) which will jack up our prices and flood a lot of nice farmland.
We have some ideal country for solar which combined with hydro would help the load as it produces best in the summer when the reservoirs are low but the first test just started and wind hasn't even been looked at.

Easier is more the word then stronger, someone posted the supplemental treaty that Sweden has with the USA up the page.
http://yro.slashdot.org/commen...

Canada illegally* extradited Marc Emery to America for the minor crime of selling seeds. I'm sure Sweden would illegally extradite Assange.
*Canadian law only allows extraditing when the illegal act is roughly equivalently illegal in Canada including sentencing. 5 years in prison is not equal to the $100 fine he would have got here. Of course we have a law and order government so breaking the law to enforce it is fine.
Funny enough during the time he was in jail, his crime was legalized in Seattle where he was tried.

Actually they've generally been right. The Luddite period was the beginning of 80 years of chronic underemployment, generations of people with horrible lives of poverty. The saving grace was expansion, stealing other peoples land and resources and giving it away to the poor and the capitalists, think of the States, expanding west throughout the 19th Century, giving the poor land to be not so poor with millions of people coming from Europe, tons of resources that were easily harvested and used to create jobs. I recently read that 6 million Italians came to America at the end of the 19th century, they came because their were no jobs where they lived.
Once that came to an end at the beginning of the 20th century, workers started to be removed from the workforce, kids first, put into school. This is still happening with more and more education being required for most any jobs, people are expected to spend close to 1/3rd of their life in school now. Many women also were taken out of the workforce about the same time with the idea that they would stay home and be homemakers.
When that didn't work, well there were windows to break, we call them world wars. The first WW consumed a lot of labour, and after we fixed the windows there was a major depression so we had another war which also employed a lot of people replacing windows. Afterwards we've had to fall back on cold wars and various other wars including the current war on terror, all basically breaking and fixing windows (or stockpiling them) to avoid the unemployment that comes with automation.
How many people are employed in the various security fields needed by the war on terror? And is this really a positive way to employ people? Soon we can all be employed at jobs like airport security or plain old informants.
Then there is removing people by jailing them (1% of adult Americans currently in jail) and declaring them unemployable afterwards. Also creates security type jobs

The problem is when person B has something that person A wants or needs (food) but person A has nothing that person B wants. With an army of robots, person B won't need anything from person A.
This has happened before, think of the Luddites, 80 years or so of chronic unemployment, no social net so legally all you could do was starve or work at a poor house for a bowl of porridge a day and the sentences were harsh if you stole something like a loaf of bread.
It also happened around the turn of the last century, money was spread around a bit more, children taken out of the work force and put in school (this is still happening with increasing education needed for any job) and women taken out of the work force and made into homemakers.
Now we're back to putting people back in jail, 2 million just in the States and also have segregation (whole class of people with limited rights called felons) so they can't ever work again, nor vote for change.
Even the old standby of war is becoming robotized and otherwise automated so can't even employ people as cannon fodder or cannon builders anymore.

Depends on who you are and who the people using the reservoir are.
If you're a regular or poor person, especially brown with an Arab sounding name, well the book will be thrown at you so hard it'll knock your head off.
If you're running a successful mining company and it's just a bunch of brown (or red) skinned poor people using the reservoir for water and the government was saving money by not inspecting that big tank, well even when it breaks the worst that will happen is you have to re-incorporate as a different company after much finger pointing.

To quote an AC up the page. http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...

Which is why they're talking about switching software provider etc.

From what I hear, many cable packages include paying ESPN and therefore the NFL. Same with many ISPs, they pay for ESPN and get the money from subscribers and now cell phone providers are offering streaming football.

On the other hand, perhaps it's like the neutrino. fusion (or fission, I forget) equations didn't work out so as a fudge the neutrino was invented, a super small particle that didn't interact with normal matter.
I'm sure it was met with derision by a certain group, an imaginary particle that could travel through the Earth, how ridiculous and obviously the idea of fusion was wrong in some fundamental way.
Well eventually the neutrino was observed, mostly matching up with theory (it was actually more complex, coming in a few flavours) and now we have neutrino observatories buried deep under the Earth.