What the heck??? If the government really wanted to be useful, they should do this for airline tickets!!! It is nearly impossible to compare airline tickets nowadays because every company nickels and dimes for every cent they can get. It would be incredibly helpful if "economy" class meant the same for every company, like it generally meant in the past, with an allowance for one checked bag and one carry-on. Now "carry-on" does not even mean a full-sized carry-on, and in some cases, it is limited to one, small personal item.

If this isn't second guessing nature, I don't know what is... This is clearly a survival/resilience mechanism for these seeds. What do we get for defeating? A benefit in the short run, but what about the long run?

C-14 has a half-life of about 5,730 years, and like most radioactive decay and half-life based dating methods, it's only good back about seven half-lives. So radiocarbon dating can only generally be used for organic-based things back to about 35,000 - 40,000 years old, i.e. about seven half-lives. It can be extended back a little further to maybe 50K-60K years, too, but with less accuracy. Regarding the accuracy of radiocarbon dating, depending on the quality of sample, you might have +/- accuracy of just a decade or two for a really good sample. But it also depends on the radiocarbon calibration curve; i.e. for a sample of a given quality, it may have different +/- accuracy results because of wiggles in the radiocarbon calibration curve. With poor samples and contamination, you could be looking at +/- accuracy of hundreds or even thousands of years. With multiple good samples, wiggle matching of the radiocarbon calibration curve, Bayesian techniques, etc., one could get down to +/- accuracy of just a few calendar years. Back to the press release at hand--the plant/organic material they attempted to age date with radiocarbon was radiocarbon dead, i.e. no more measurable radiocarbon remained. They used other dating methods, too, including cosmogenic Be-10 dating (a speciality of Bierman, one of the authors) and luminescence dating as well, but they just very lightly mentioned these in the press release (not using the specific terms I have used above).

To satisfy your fiscally conservative side, why not backup your current Win7/8 system, do the free upgrade so you get your free Win10 license, and then restore back to Win7/8? That way, if you decide you really want Win10 in the future, you'll at least have acquired the license while it was free.

Very true, kind of like animated GIFs, which are the new rage for youngins, have actually been around forever...

There is seemingly more innovation in the Chinese smartphone market right now though certainly there is a lot of copying and catch-up, too. But some of these Chinese manufacturers release new models many times per year instead of just on an annual refresh cycle. They have been trying things like multiple displays, cameras with changing orientations, dedicated hardware buttons for instant photo snapping, huge batteries, etc. Overall quality is picking up, too, but for sure, there is still a way to go. But nonetheless, these companies are probably more agile and willing to take some risks vs. Apple, Samsung, etc. LG at least seems willing to try something new once in a while.

This is so true--I really want to use open source software, but it simply doesn't cut it for some things. This is painfully obvious with some packages more than others, for example, LO Calc is just ridiculously clunky and slow compared to MS Excel. I use Excel almost every day of my working life to look at data sets, usually as scatter plots. Even with several thousand data points to plot up, when you click Ok, Excel basically displays your plot immediately. In turn, LO Calc can take many seconds up to minutes to display a plot, and this is with even small sets of just a couple hundred data points. Every time there was a new major or even minor release, I'd go back to OO or LO hoping that they would have this under control, but no dice. I had to stop holding my breath for this a while ago.

I've been doing quite a bit of traveling lately, and every time when confronted with one of these machines, I've chosen the alternative pat-down (it's your right, you can request this). Why? I simply don't trust them for the radiation exposure despite the claims that they are safe. I have NEVER seen them allow an infant through these systems--they just wave the mother/father around the device with the infant in their arms (and with no alternative pat-down for the parent...). If the TSA will not allow infants through the system, obviously they don't think the exposure levels are completely safe. So anyway, sure, the alternative pat-down is super-invasive, but at least you avoid accumulated exposure. I only travel 5-6 time/year max., but for folks that might travel several times per month, I can imagine the accumulated exposure over many years will not be completely benign. A side effect of requesting an alternative pat-down is that it seems to throw the system into convulsions. They start radio'ing around about needing somebody to deal with the "refuser", and waiting for someone to arrive can be either fast/immediate or slow (like 5+ minutes). For being a "refuser", besides the pat-down, you seem to obligatorily get swabbed/analyzed for explosive residue. All in all, if just one person every few minutes were to request such an alternative pat-down, it would overwhelm the system. The problem with this is that they then just start waving people through to avoid clogging the pipes. So these people get a metal detector only--not a pat-down nor the full-body scan. If they just let people through like this, well, what is the whole purpose of this anyways???

Apple could certainly take the high road, and actually allow Flash, but not in the default configuration. Thus, end users would have to get it from the App Store knowingly. If it turned out to really be as bad as Apple claims, end users would be quickly saying, "hey, why the heck has my machine slowed to a crawl, and the battery life dropped to two hours?" Apple could put a prominent FAQ on it's website or make it the first scripted answer from support--"If you are experiencing sluggishness and reduced battery life, and have installed Flash via the App Store, please remove it, and check if your problem is solved before complaining more." Word on the street would be "Hey, don't install Flash because it cripples your iDevice." This would clearly shift the burden to Adobe--or they pick up the ball and run with it (i.e. engineer Flash from being a cpu/battery hog and security risk), or they loose brainshare/marketshare because they cannot do so (as Apple claims). Apple's actions are far from the high road even though they present them as that...

The fact of Global Warming isn't really in question.

Let me applaud you on getting this correct because some still deny it is even occurring.

There is extremely good evidence that the process is substantially if not entirely natural.

But I won't let you get away with this because it is simply incorrect. The vast majority of the scientific community that has studied this has reached the conclusion that it is related to human activity. Even George W. Bush finally admitted before the start of the G8 summit last year that global warming was linked to human activity.

Science, not just climate science, is overall a very conservative discipline. For the majority of the scientific community to have arrived at the conclusion that our planet is warming related to anthropogenic activity is not simply because a couple of scientists or even hundreds or thousands of scientists have said so. It is because an overwhelming amount of evidence from every corner of the globe has led them to this conclusion.

Yes, there are still some climate scientists, by far a small minority, that still claim that either global warming is not occurring, or if so, it is not related to human activity. That's ok, that's part of the scientific process, and everybody has a different understanding of reasonable doubt. But as evidence continues to pour in day after day from around the globe, I think eventually even that small majority will have a change of opinion.