They're not 'ideas', there is now actual DNA evidence for the presence of a Native Americans in Europe before Columbus. The same goes for Polynesians visiting America there is enough evidence to warrant further investigation. Polynesians found tiny little islands but missed two ginormous continents? Really? I'm no scientist but I do know enough about navigation to know that this suggestion is just plain stupid. It's a bit of a catch 22, if you are unwilling to investigate anything without evidence than you never find any evidence because you never investigate anything. People like you is the reason we need nutty scientists who go out on a limb. Sometimes they actually discover something that runs contrary to everything their more conservative colleagues held to be unchallengeable truths and often these colleagues are people who dominate a field, i.e. the 'great egos'. My favorite example of this is probably the supposed impossibility of there being Neanderthal DNA in modern humans. There were a number of great scientific egos who dominated the field of paleontology who ended up with egg all over their faces over that one, especially Ian Tattersall. Tattersall never went looking because there was no evidence, Svante Pääbo went and did something that was supposed to be impossible and then he actually went looking for something despite having no evidence and lo and behold he found found it.

You just described the rise of Christianity in the Roman empire.

Religious outrage, racist outrage, nationalist outrage. They are all equally stupid. I have had a long series of strange discussions with people of all these denominations about the building of a Mosque in my town. The argumentation goes that: "Do you know how many Churches there are in Saudi Arabia? Have you seen what they are doing to Christians in Iraq!?! We must ban mosques immediately to prevent this from happening here before the Moslems rise up and impose Sharia law on all of us!!!". Really? Says I, for one thing our moslems are a small and moderate minority; how are they supposed to impose Sharia law on us (Answer: Uhhhhhhhhmmmmm.... Uhhhh.... I just fear that they just will!). Secondly I find it interesting that you are implying that one can use the stupidity and cruelty of people in other countries to justify doing stupid and cruel things to innocent people in your own country? In that case did you notice what the Serbs did to Moslems in Bosnia? Did you notice what the white patriotic christian knights of the Ku Klux Klan did to African Americans, Latinos and other minorities in the USA? We must ban Christianity immediately!!! Remarkably enough they considered equating all moslems with ISIS and banning Islam to be a reasonable and natural thing to do (even though the local moslem community is just about the most peaceful and law abiding group of people in our country) but they went absolutely apeshit when I applied their own logic to Christianity. It got even funnier when I pointed out that both the Serbs and the Ku Klux Klan are white and perhaps we should ban white people since most of the people involved in this discussion including my self were white. I just find it endlessly fascinating how the minds of these people work. They keep citing the Constitution when it supports their point of view but then they want to ban Moslems from practicing their religion, ban immigration of non-whites or put gay people in jail for offending christian fanatics everywhere by existing the Constitution can apparently be ignored.

There is now also a YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

The icelandic met office has a site that tracks seismic activity (read: earthquakes), they have an english website: http://en.vedur.is/#tab=skjalf...

The University of Iceland's institute of earth sciences has a news page in english: http://earthice.hi.is/bardarbu...

They have also set up a number of webcams:
http://www.livefromiceland.is/... (Vaðalda, north of Vatnajökull, towards Bárðabunga)
http://vedur2.mogt.is/grimsfja... (Grímsfjall)
http://vedur2.mogt.is/kverkfjo... (Kverkfjöll)

Not very spectacular sites but the content is a bit better than most of the bullshit you are likely to get from the corporate media.

It is a composite word: Bárður - A man's name. Bunga - In this context it means mountain or peak. So in English: "Bárður's Peak"

In Icelandic 'o' and 'ö' are fairly subtle variations on the same sound, the difference betwee 'o' and 'ö' is only a matter of moving your tongue about 4-5mm forward. Icelandic is near near-isomorphic with with Ancient Norse to the point where some Icelanders can actually stumble their way through inscriptions transcribed into modern alphabet from rune stones over a thousand years old and many can read 12-13th century manuscripts similarly transcribed to modern alphabet pretty clearly, in fact teenagers in Iceland are sometimes required to read portions of sagas in the original medieval Icelandic in secondary school. You can consider Icelandic as something akin to a modern dialect of Ancient Norse whereas the modern Scandinavian languages on the other hand have evolved very far from the original Ancient Norse. The difference is about the same as between modern English and the language spoken in the UK in the 10-13 century. Come to think of it an Icelander would probably have much better luck reading early medieval English than a modern English person. Try getting a Norwegian, Swede or Dane to read a 13th century Icelandic saga manuscript and you'd not have much luck either.

Eyjafjallajökull let's not forget the umlaut...

My employer has been using AIX for stability reasons for a long time (since the very early 90s). At the moment neither MySQL nor Postgres guarantee AIX ODBC driver support. Only DB2 (obviously), Oracle and Sybase (IIRC) do that so there you are, another reason on to keep dealing with these companies. Whether you use MS-SQL, Sybase, or even DB2 is really irrelevant, they all force a degree of vendor locking, they are expensive and come to think of it, if you want support, MySQL is merely somewhat less expensive than the rest. I will agree that Oracle's pricing is armed robbery but they are not alone. I had a one third party driver vendor ask more money for a MySQL ODBC driver license for AIX (that allowed us to connect to one MySQL instance) than it cost to get a MySQL enterprise license. It was cheaper to migrate to DB2.

AFAIK Iceland has not offered him asylum. The Icelanders just changed to a fiercely right wing government which has already refused to consider asylum unless Snowden actually lands in Reykjavik and hands in an asylum request in person. That does not exactly indicate much enthusiasm for pissing off Obama and the US Republicans. I'd say Snowden is unlikely to receive much sympathy with the current Icelandic Govt. unless the Icelandic population gets together and to forces them to reconsider by protesting or gathering enough names on a petition. Given the size of the country and the close knit nature of Icelandic society it is actually surprisingly easy to get up to 25-30% of the electorate to sign such a petition if you can stir up enough support.

Ditto, a lot of the complaints I get about OS X boil down to it not working like Windows, Gnome, KDE, (name your poison).... The same goes for Gnome 3 haters, Gnome 3 is different, if you want Gnome 2 back get one of the numerous forks and move on. Just stop bothering the rest of us with long rants about how Gnome 3 isn't like Gnome 2.

It's OS X not OSX, if you are going to troll this place with juvenile flaimbait, at least try to get your ancronyms right.

I mostly use my iPad for note taking at work, e-mail, games, movies and several hundred e-books and a pile of photos. A tablet won't replace my laptop any time soon. The virtual keyboards are no good for typing, there are no really good office suites, no proper image processing apps, and try coding on a tablet... yeah right...