As long as we are pretending fan fiction is close to workable reality, we might as well also inject the claim that it could have been avoided long before G.W. Bush was president if President Clinton would have supported the Kurds when they attempted to overthrow Saddam back in the mid 90's.

Of course a lot can be said about other actions if they had been taken. For instance, President Clinton also had the opportunity to take out Bin Laden before 9/11 but chose not to for probably good reasons (too many civilian casualties would have incurred)

Hind sight is always better then the fog of reality in real time I guess. It's fun to look back and think what if something was done differently but if seems to be a mighty powerful word. If the dog didn't stop to shit, he would have caught the rabbit. If the rabbit didn't stop to shit, the dog would have never caught him. How true either of those statements could be is just a guess, but if we knew, it still wouldn't be as real as what really happened.

You know, that really is the sort of thing people would do here ;) When Dethklok - sorry, Skálmöld ;) - took the stage at Menningarnótt this evening (with about a quarter of the country in attendance - who doesn't like metal? there's even been multiple Skálmöld Day“s at elementary schools where little kids come in their best metal gear and listen/ sing along to their music, and no, I'm not kidding ;) )... anyway, when they took the stage, the concert started off with a news update about the volcano. ;)

There is one music fest that I'm aware of that's held next to a volcano ("Extreme Chill - Undir Jökli), but that volcano is extinct (Snæfell).

Bárðarbunga is unfortunately rather remote. Oh, and there's the fact that the 10% of Iceland around it is now a prohibited zone...

Java is not H1-B garbage code. H1-B does what H1-B is ordered to do, as a slave, to put bread on the table. The root cause trickles down from higher up above, who are dazzled by concepts such as object polymorphism and inheritance, and such sexy names, by abstractualizing the conceptualizations of how the different frameworks interact from an objective perspective, that are a massive waste of time, effort, complexity, etc., along the lines of why C++ was not chosen for Win32 back in the day. Of course we can all embark in this mission of bending over backwards and forcing C++ complexity into some better performing thing, but under grave cost. Same goes for Java, that oracle bought. Complexity of constructor destructor polymorphism inheritance crashes that boggle the minds of the H1-B. Every feature carries a complexity and performance cost, and when you have to use a Boeing 777 or 797 to run errands at the nearby grocery store, like Java has to be used for something as dumb and simple as a health care website, it's an overkill, like shooting a fly with a nuclear bomb instead of a fly swat, and wondering why it's taking so long, it should have been done in 0.4 second, but the warhead launch sequence takes at least 5 minutes to prepare.

You can't say with any confidence at all right now what kind of eruption it's going to be in the long term nor what its effects will be. It's pretty much standard for Icelandic volcanoes (excepting Hekla and a few others) to start off with small lava eruptions, and it's pretty much a requirement of a subglacial eruption to begin suchly. These are chains of interconnected volcanoes, to the point where it's even hard to define what's one volcano and what's the next (it's rifts of permanent weakness from the parting of the plates). They expand as they see fit. Eyjafjallajökull began with the Móði and Magni eruptions on Fimmvörðuháls, for example.

The size of the eruption doesn't necessarily correlate with the magnitude of the jökulhlaup. They're glacial outburst floods, they occur when the water - however much is there - finds a way out of the glacier. A fast melt certainly increases the odds of a strong outburst, but it's not a requirement.

At this point we don't even know for sure that the lava has even met the ice, some of the scientists here are disputing the met office's claim.

It means Bárður's Bulge“.

Eyjafjallajökull means "Glacier of the Mountains of the Islands" (Eyja = Of islands; fjalla = of mountains; jökull = glacier). ("The Islands" = Vestmannaeyjar, a small island chain close off Iceland's southern shore; Eyjafjall and his big sister Katla form a mountain range near Vestmannaeyjar.)

You probably only think you're pronouncing "Bardarbunga" (you mean Bárðarbunga") right. It's "BOWR-thar-BOON-ka". The R is an alveolar tap (unless you say it slowly), the th is voiced and further foward on the teeth, the N is devoiced, and the "g" (which I rendered as "k") is unvoiced but also unaspirated.

I think it might have something to do with calling things Ariane, as it sounds too much like Aryan, and that strikes a sensitive chord in the souls of many people. If you called it Uber-Aryan and painted it white, except near the tip where it would look like a KKK hood with black eyeballs painted on it, its chances of success would be lowered even further. Hey, talk is cheap, what's in a name, change the friggin name to something better, like the Soviets had Mir for Peace, or names like that. That's my 2 cents. In fact I think the Boston Marathon bombing was over it being a marathon, a symbol or anti-Hannukah Hellenism, and there was a need to rekindle this anti-terrorist oppression of people, which was getting weak, so what better spot to pick for that, than a marathon, simply for being a marathon. You can't really tell people to accept inspection cameras being stuck up their anus to inspect and verify they are not hiding anything criminal in there, if there haven't been any recent terrorist events, so every time this attitude of it's been so long since terrorist was really relevant so let's stop this 1984 of big brother is snooping on everyone and raiding and inspecting everyone's anus, you can expect a new terrorist event to hit very close to home, just to maintain status quo, by people not really fundamentalist in views or really polarized internally, just willing to stick up for the cause. But when George Carlin made that speech about the Bigger Dick foreign policy, how we only bomb brown people - semites - because they are brown and have bigger dicks, the US showed that we can brown Aryan Serbs too(almost Macedonians or Greeks, all of who have small dicks, just look at ancient statues), who have little dicks, all we have to do is yank their chain with some ex-Ottoman-oppression muslims coming back and taking over their villages one at a time. So maybe the next terrorist event will be on the big dick side theme of the spectrum, just to show we don't only bomb little dick celebration events, marathons being such an event. If you think such racism things are a thing of the past, look at this image, http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-4n3S... What happened to her? It's a sad situation.

Nice reply. I don't claim to understand the Scottish-UK relationship, but your post help me gain insight into the mindset of some Scots. In fact I had not clue even that the UK is about to abandon EU membership, I live a sheltered life. I do know Switzerland and Norway are not in the EU for instance, they have long traditions of independence and things like right to bear arms, but France, and especially Germany want everyone united working together cooperating for a better future. And of course there are two sides to every story, all I know is that ultra-polarized extremes of any kind, including Soviet communism or mercenary merchant capitalism with slavery and pirates, neither of them is an idyllic world. Even the Chinese are relaxing on uber-communism and are allowing greater degrees of private ownership experiments with a strong central communist gov't still maintaining control and arbitrary decision of changing their minds back. Private property and individual rights vs. the tragedy of the commons and cooperation, both have their faults. So the people in England might have different views, especially when they have to drag the dead weight of Greece economically in the EU, which, it sucks for the Greeks, and I wish them happiness and good life and the best, but I think they must have some corrupt forces pushing them to such economic brinks, but facts are facts, and there is something to say about a friend in need is a friend indeed, except when its abused to where if I'm sinking and going under I'm pulling you down with me. It's hard to tell the future, or know whether united or divided is better, but Scotland united with England, is not the same thing as UK united with and dragging all the economic corruption weight of Greece and Ukraine and being bogged down by them to paralysis. It's like Greece and Ukraine will be dragged down as much as available from the EU to be dragged down by, so if they are somehow set independent, then there is nobody to drag down, you can't really go much below zero when there is nothing. I mean you can get debt but that's fluff, as debts get defaulted on and canceled and all that, so you have this hard wall of worst case scenario is there is nothing, zero, not negative, as opposed to being tagged on to the EU and Germany's and UK's economy and having something to feed off of as a parasite. I think the EU understands that the EU is not possible without equal economic well being throughout all member states, and that is extremely difficult, and the EU is shaking at its core, when you read things like Switzerland, Austria, Czech Republic and Hungary discussing austerity measures so severe, that, to save fuel, when there is a stray airplane through their airspace, they sign treaties that once one of them launches escort fighter jets, they escort the stray plane through the whole airspace, without individual countries having to launch their own fighter jets individually, to save fuel, when it would be a perfect opportunity for practice drills in real case scenarios. So austerity measures everywhere, then you can't help thy brother. Am I my brother's keeper? Well, they might pose that question to you as in am I my brother's keeper when we're both starving and the brink of death economically, about to collapse, and there is stuff, wealth, food available, to where one might survive but not both, are you supposed to be altruistic and let your brother live and you die, or selfish, and compete for that food. Unemployment and oil revenues and what not, a UK with US supply ships could fend off Hitler, which, when divided into smaller pieces, might be more difficult. How long til the EU breaks down under the pressure of forces wanting it to break down, and not be strong, and then you have another Axis vs. Allies war. It has not even been a century since the last one. I think being allowed to maintain identity, such as mother tongue and even racial identity or being allowed to freely marry with your own kind if you want to, is more important than the economic drag the ruling group poses, as in compensation for that "fee" you do get a pretty good military defense. The British Navy defended Scotland for a long time too, and if Scotland had been alone, it might have been an easy prey to the Germans in WW2 without the UK military.

I somewhat agree, but it could help tell us where to focus other search efforts.

I guess all theories are subject to experiment, and in absence of experiment, you have to go by anecdotes. Similar things apply to ball lightning, which has many anecdotes, but we have no way to recreated in the lab, so we don't understand it. All theories are subject to experimental verification, repeated and duplicated, before they can be accepted as some kind of a scientific truth.
There is a repeatable experiment with chickens though, where farmers cut the head off, and send the headless chicken running around the yard for the entertainment of the children. I don't know how to chicken head feels, but a simple sudden drop in blood pressure such as a missing head from the body is not an instantaneous death, as it takes time for the blood to flow out,even if squirting fast. So you do get at least a few seconds of medium blood pressure, and just because the blood pressure dropped, it does not mean the oxygen and energy storing and converting facilities of the braincells run empty right away, in fact they probably have minutes of reserve power left even in the complete absence of blood supplying the oxygen, and nutrients, and death most likely has something to do with pain overload and apoptosis like self suicide of let's all shut down, than running out of juice to keep working. A lot of the time the brain goes into coma under intense pain, even if the body stays alive and comatose for 40 years on life support. So there are these automatic shutdowns, though the brain is so oxygen and energy hungry, than when drowning, or a heart attack, you have 4 minutes to resuscitate somebody before there is permanent brain damage, though in ice cold waters and cooled head it's been much longer than 4 minutes with complete recovery and no brain damage. But 4 minutes is the reserve oxygen the brain carries, so a 35 second awareness before the comatose pain overdose shutdown happens is not that unimaginable. So it might be a myth, in absence of experiment, or properly conducted documentation of accidents where there is luck to have just such a recording. For instance, there in an anecdote of a car accident where somebody's buddy's head flew off the body, and landed on the car hood, and he lay there, blinking in horror, for about the same 30-40 seconds, before he stopped. Had this been a cops car with a front view camera recording the events on the hood, we'd have proper documentation and scientific evidence of some sort, as opposed to this whole thing being a mere anecdote, and having to take the other guy in the accident at his word.

To play devil's advocate in "I'm New Around Here"'s defefence, it was the user "Third Position" who posted the racist link in his sig, and the comment from "I'm New" himself wasn't (necessarily) condoning the views expressed.

What he *was* clearly doing was defending Third Position's "right" to express his opinion without being attacked for it. Which is, of course, stupid and ignorant, because no-one has such a "right" under the freedom of speech in the US constitution (which I assume is what "I'm New" has misunderstood when he referred to what was "allowed" in "this country"), despite many thinking it does. Freedom of speech obviously cuts both ways, otherwise it's not true freedom of speech. (Anyone making such a deal about it should have realised this already.)

But that misunderstanding doesn't *necessarily* mean he's a racist... just stupid and ignorant.

The implication in your reply being that he mocked and attacked you because he disagreed with you?

Either that's a strawman or you really weren't paying attention.

The paragraph you replied to was mocking you not because he disagreed with you on a matter of opinion, but because your belief that "people were allowed to have their own beliefs in this country without others attacking them for it" was *factually wrong* (and by implication showed that you really don't understand what "freedom of speech" does and doesn't get you.). End of story.

Look ass-hat AC, I'm a Rep and I find the teacher's, school's and police response intolerable. Most Rep's do, by the way. We're not the ones freaking out over any mention or play acting concerning a gun.

That the "pet" is an imaginary creature suggests he might have serious guilt problems associated with having killed a real pet, or even a human; or witnessed such a crime.

Oh bullshit. Stop playing psychologist, this wasn't some six year old. Every time I was asked to write about myself I fabricated stuff and made it plain that I did. It's not a teacher's job to investigate a kid's psyche.

Reading at -1 is like having your soul sucked out and replaced by liquid nitrogen.