The NPG made high res images viewable online as a series of tiles, i.e. you might deliver the full image as twenty smaller images each showing a portion of the total.
His "hack" was to download each of these tiles individually and reassemble them into a coherent whole.
Nothing was done to gain unauthorize access or compromise their systems in any way.
If one really buys into that argument then it evicerates the CC licenses. If CC licenses really "make no representations" about how it is okay to use the image then you could never use any CC images without running the risk that someone other than the person offering the license had a copyright or other claim against it. It would be like offering a gift of "free" imagery only to later find out that it had been stolen. It defeats the whole spirit of calling it "free".
Well hypothetically, lets consider what claim might be made against the Commons?
Not to say that any of these are plausible, but if you had to argue something, perhaps:
A) Commons contributed to the abuse by misleading the photographer regarding the rights involved by assigning the license. B) Commons contributed to the abuse by encouraging the photographer to enter into a legal agreement that Commons should of known he did not have the authority to enter. C) Commons contributed to the abuse by encouraging the photographer to use a contract that is intrinsically unenforcable. D) Commons constructed CC-BY in a way that recklessly encourages or was designed to promote libel.
None of these seem likely to me, but in the world of sue 'em all and let the judge decide, I can believe that a lawyer would be willing to try and generate billable hours by arguing that Commons' promotion of the CC-BY license contributed to the libel/infringment claims via one or more of the arguments suggested above.
Frankly, I doubt the Commons organization has direct liability here, but they could see the judge rule on the legitimacy of all or part of the CC-BY license in a way that material affects the work that Commons has been doing.
Yes. Most likely, the photographer lacked sufficient rights to make the image available for commercial use in this way, and so the photographer would seem to bear the largest share of the blame and legal responsibility.
However, the libel claim adds interesting wrinkles. If a court really buys into the idea that the girl was unfairly placed in a position to be ridiculed (which is not obvious given the description of the ads), then a whole additional sets of rights come into play distinct from copyright. You may freely own an image, but you can still commit libel with that image, by portraying the people in the image in an unfair light.
So there is an argument to be made that even if Virgin were legally authorized to use the photo with respect to copyright, they still hadn't neccesarily recieved sufficient permission to use it in a way that would bring negative attention to the person pictured. That one could turn on the details of what the court considers CC-BY to mean and cover. Ordinarily one would expect a signed contract specifically addressing this before using a person's image in a way that could be characterized as negative. So it's possible (though not neccesarily likely) that Virgin could be found to have acted reasonably with regards to copyright and still have committed libel.
It's accelerator physics. The beam, which is incredibly expensive to start up and maintain, runs 24-7. For many projects, beam time is scheduled months in advance, so if you get a slot at 3 AM Sunday morning you are certainly expected to be there.
Most likely, he just happened to be the one on the beam at the time. "Ripped apart" in this case probably doesn't really mean disassembled. Probably they simply removed his equipment from the line so they could do their own experiment, but his equipment probably wasn't really taken apart. However, by making him miss his scheduled beam time, it could have delayed his research by months while he waited for another slot to be available. Still plenty rude.
Sandia National Labs is a government owned research facility, operated by independent contractors. The government decides how much money to provide the facility. The contracted management corporation decides how to spend it, though if they fail to meet government expectations then the government can decide to rebid the contract.
So a judgment against the facility would come out of government funds originally intended to support research. The government can then either increase funding to cover the judgment, accept a reduction in research, and/or fire the management.
As to why use such contracts? Part of the idea is to create a profit motive by allowing the managing corporation to keep a profit if they can fulfill the government's expecations for less than the originally bid price. So a judgment like this would potentially eat into their ability to profit in that way. The other argument for such contracts is to reduce bureaucracy and political pressure at research institutions.
Well, who knows. People today seem to be almost solely fixated on "global warming" and carbon dioxide emissions. There are many, many other pollution problems--sulfur dioxide / acid rain being one of them. China for instance today has huge sulfur dioxide emissions, roughly comparable to the US 25 years ago before we got good about it.
Yes, SO2 matters, but because it only persists in the atmosphere for a few years it is our problem to solve (or not). For example, China could substantially address their sulfur problems in a few decades if they decided they wanted to do so. By contrast, CO2 has a very long residence time and about 20% of what we emit today will still be in the atmosphere 300 years from now. Consequently, how we address CO2 has profound long-term consequences that are unlike almost any other form of air pollution.
The previous sea level predictions for 2100 were still less than a meter. Given that most of the land on earth is more than 3 feet above sea level, sea level rise was never a major part of the near-term concern posed by global warming (except for specific coastal cities and vulnerable islands).
Most of the scientific concerns over climate change are, to be blunt, associated with the changing climate (e.g. temperatures, precipiation, storminess) and not associated with the incremental change in sea level, even if sea level is an easier threat to convey to the public.
Monckton mentions that there is a direct correlation between number of sunspots and grain prices falling, attributing it to the fact that more sunspots mean that the sun is hotter. Actually, that's wrong. Sunspots are cooler regions on the surface of the sun (3800 K vs 5400K on the rest of the surface), which means that the sun is actually radiating *less* energy in the visible and infrared spectrum. So his entire point completely falls apart with this basic item of astrophysics.
This is incorrect. Sunspots are cooler, but during active periods on the sun they are surrounded by large regions called faculae that are slightly brighter than normal. The net effect is that in spite of the darkening by sunspots the sun as a whole is actually slightly brighter (~0.1%) during the phase of the solar cycle with many active sunspots.
One of the important underlying points is that other reconstructions have been done, using a variety of techniques by a variety of groups, and all of the groups feel that the modern period is unusual. The uncertainties involved are such that we can't rule out the idea that the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than today, but the available evidence suggests it was not.
It can be said with a high level of confidence that global mean surface temperature was higher during the last decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period during the preceeding four centuries.... Presently available proxy evidence indicates that temperatures at many, but not all, individual locations were higher during the past 25 years than during any period of comparable length since A.D. 900."
At reasonable efficiency, 1.6 MW suggests a panel area in the vicinity of ~100,000 sq. ft., which seems reasonable if there complex has a million sq. ft. of office space (presumably distributed over multiple floors).
It would only take about 15,000 km^2 of solar panels in a sunny area to supply enough energy to satisfy all of the US energy needs. For comparison, that's about 4% of the area in California. A single data center could of course make do with far less, though at current land and equipment costs, solar is often several times the cost per kWh as traditional electricity sources.
Oceanic shipping is already incredibly efficient and only accounts for a few percent of the cost of most goods shipped that way. For example, a supertanker only adds 2 cents to the cost of a gallon of gas. It would take a very radical change in the cost of oil to have any significant impact on the economic viability of overseas manufacturing.
One could just as easily argue the converse. Dump the country codes and have everyone use location neutral identifiers; after all com, net, edu, and org already account for more than 60% of all hosts.
But the truth is that neither proposal will fly. There are too many existing websites to demand that billions (trillions?) of href's be changed to accomodate major architectural deletions to the existing DNS system. And that is to say nothing of the staunchly entrenched national interests in support of the existing TLDs.
As an American, I don't think that is an easy question to answer. At face value, a system that Americans control (or at least substantially influence) is more likely to protect American interests than any other system. There are any number of countries (e.g. China, Iran, Saudia Arabia, North Korea) that could desire to place controls on the internet that would be opposed to freedom and/or American interests. I can't help but recall the farce by which Libya got to run the UN Human Rights Commission.
At the same time, if ICANN were replaced by an international body strongly influenced by, for example, Europeans then we might well have more freedom and be less likely to see puritanical elements in the US getting a say over network decisions.
However, for the moment I think that the devil that we have is doing an okay job, and would hesitate to replace that with a devil that we don't know. Basically, I worry that an international body could end up being influenced by countries without a tradition of free speech in ways that could have a far more chilling effect on the internet than anything ICANN has ever done.
Some years back the USPS was actually considering linking every snail mail address to an email address, so we could really have had email postal addresses. They seem to have let the idea die a quiet death however.
Well, in that case they have their timing wrong. They are sending the shuttle up in the afternoon and most fireworks displays aren't until the evening. Let's hope the God of Explosions doesn't get impatient and decide to set off a big one early.
You think Canada increased their per capita emissions > 20% in less than 4 years? That strikes me as just silly. Feel free to prove me wrong, but I believe that Canada uses about the same amount of energy per capita (to within a few %) and does so with a significantly lower carbon burden because roughly half their electrical generating capacity is hydroelectric.
You are simply mistaken with respect to carbon. In 2002, Canada emitted 4.5 metric tons carbon per capita. In the same year, the US emitted 5.5. Still very large compared to the global average of about 1.1 though.
Actually, I disagree. As someone who can draw 300 spams a day (managing multiple domains), I'd say Gmail is subpar. In my experience Yahoo is better, and the Bayesian filtering on my desktop is a lot better. Also, when I was using Gmail it had false spam identifications for me often enough (1 or 2 per week) to be really annoying.
Maybe it is something about the composition of emails that I get, but Gmail is not a system I'd recommend as a spam trap. To be fair, it does seem to handle most of them correctly, but if spam filtering is large concern then better alternatives exist.
Of course, just a couple weeks ago there was a story about people at RHIC thinking they saw evidence for micro black holes. And presumably if RHIC can do it, IceCube might be able to as well.
Construction on AMANDA began in 1994, and South Pole was chosen because you need high transparency ice. That means you need an ice sheet substantially thicker than 1400 meters (the bubble conversion zone) in a region with few dust or volcanic impurities. South Pole satisfies both these properties very well.
Slashdot Mirror
As they say [citation needed].
According to their 07-08 annual report the NPG had an annual revenue of 16.6M pounds, liquid assets of 7.5M pounds, and total assets of 69M pounds.
Relevant bits start around page 40.
"Hacked" is rather misleading.
The NPG made high res images viewable online as a series of tiles, i.e. you might deliver the full image as twenty smaller images each showing a portion of the total.
His "hack" was to download each of these tiles individually and reassemble them into a coherent whole.
Nothing was done to gain unauthorize access or compromise their systems in any way.
No, no, no.
Berne requires that the US protect foreign copyright holders if and only if equivalent works published in the US by US citizens would be protected.
If a work is intrinsically ineligible for copyright in the US then the US does not and will not honor any foreign laws that say otherwise.
If one really buys into that argument then it evicerates the CC licenses. If CC licenses really "make no representations" about how it is okay to use the image then you could never use any CC images without running the risk that someone other than the person offering the license had a copyright or other claim against it. It would be like offering a gift of "free" imagery only to later find out that it had been stolen. It defeats the whole spirit of calling it "free".
Well hypothetically, lets consider what claim might be made against the Commons?
Not to say that any of these are plausible, but if you had to argue something, perhaps:
A) Commons contributed to the abuse by misleading the photographer regarding the rights involved by assigning the license.
B) Commons contributed to the abuse by encouraging the photographer to enter into a legal agreement that Commons should of known he did not have the authority to enter.
C) Commons contributed to the abuse by encouraging the photographer to use a contract that is intrinsically unenforcable.
D) Commons constructed CC-BY in a way that recklessly encourages or was designed to promote libel.
None of these seem likely to me, but in the world of sue 'em all and let the judge decide, I can believe that a lawyer would be willing to try and generate billable hours by arguing that Commons' promotion of the CC-BY license contributed to the libel/infringment claims via one or more of the arguments suggested above.
Frankly, I doubt the Commons organization has direct liability here, but they could see the judge rule on the legitimacy of all or part of the CC-BY license in a way that material affects the work that Commons has been doing.
Yes. Most likely, the photographer lacked sufficient rights to make the image available for commercial use in this way, and so the photographer would seem to bear the largest share of the blame and legal responsibility.
However, the libel claim adds interesting wrinkles. If a court really buys into the idea that the girl was unfairly placed in a position to be ridiculed (which is not obvious given the description of the ads), then a whole additional sets of rights come into play distinct from copyright. You may freely own an image, but you can still commit libel with that image, by portraying the people in the image in an unfair light.
So there is an argument to be made that even if Virgin were legally authorized to use the photo with respect to copyright, they still hadn't neccesarily recieved sufficient permission to use it in a way that would bring negative attention to the person pictured. That one could turn on the details of what the court considers CC-BY to mean and cover. Ordinarily one would expect a signed contract specifically addressing this before using a person's image in a way that could be characterized as negative. So it's possible (though not neccesarily likely) that Virgin could be found to have acted reasonably with regards to copyright and still have committed libel.
It's accelerator physics. The beam, which is incredibly expensive to start up and maintain, runs 24-7. For many projects, beam time is scheduled months in advance, so if you get a slot at 3 AM Sunday morning you are certainly expected to be there.
Most likely, he just happened to be the one on the beam at the time. "Ripped apart" in this case probably doesn't really mean disassembled. Probably they simply removed his equipment from the line so they could do their own experiment, but his equipment probably wasn't really taken apart. However, by making him miss his scheduled beam time, it could have delayed his research by months while he waited for another slot to be available. Still plenty rude.
Sandia National Labs is a government owned research facility, operated by independent contractors. The government decides how much money to provide the facility. The contracted management corporation decides how to spend it, though if they fail to meet government expectations then the government can decide to rebid the contract.
So a judgment against the facility would come out of government funds originally intended to support research. The government can then either increase funding to cover the judgment, accept a reduction in research, and/or fire the management.
As to why use such contracts? Part of the idea is to create a profit motive by allowing the managing corporation to keep a profit if they can fulfill the government's expecations for less than the originally bid price. So a judgment like this would potentially eat into their ability to profit in that way. The other argument for such contracts is to reduce bureaucracy and political pressure at research institutions.
Well, who knows. People today seem to be almost solely fixated on "global warming" and carbon dioxide emissions. There are many, many other pollution problems--sulfur dioxide / acid rain being one of them. China for instance today has huge sulfur dioxide emissions, roughly comparable to the US 25 years ago before we got good about it.
Yes, SO2 matters, but because it only persists in the atmosphere for a few years it is our problem to solve (or not). For example, China could substantially address their sulfur problems in a few decades if they decided they wanted to do so. By contrast, CO2 has a very long residence time and about 20% of what we emit today will still be in the atmosphere 300 years from now. Consequently, how we address CO2 has profound long-term consequences that are unlike almost any other form of air pollution.
The previous sea level predictions for 2100 were still less than a meter. Given that most of the land on earth is more than 3 feet above sea level, sea level rise was never a major part of the near-term concern posed by global warming (except for specific coastal cities and vulnerable islands).
Most of the scientific concerns over climate change are, to be blunt, associated with the changing climate (e.g. temperatures, precipiation, storminess) and not associated with the incremental change in sea level, even if sea level is an easier threat to convey to the public.
Monckton mentions that there is a direct correlation between number of sunspots and grain prices falling, attributing it to the fact that more sunspots mean that the sun is hotter. Actually, that's wrong. Sunspots are cooler regions on the surface of the sun (3800 K vs 5400K on the rest of the surface), which means that the sun is actually radiating *less* energy in the visible and infrared spectrum. So his entire point completely falls apart with this basic item of astrophysics.
This is incorrect. Sunspots are cooler, but during active periods on the sun they are surrounded by large regions called faculae that are slightly brighter than normal. The net effect is that in spite of the darkening by sunspots the sun as a whole is actually slightly brighter (~0.1%) during the phase of the solar cycle with many active sunspots.
One of the important underlying points is that other reconstructions have been done, using a variety of techniques by a variety of groups, and all of the groups feel that the modern period is unusual. The uncertainties involved are such that we can't rule out the idea that the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than today, but the available evidence suggests it was not.
... Presently available proxy evidence indicates that temperatures at many, but not all, individual locations were higher during the past 25 years than during any period of comparable length since A.D. 900."
To quote the NRC Report:
It can be said with a high level of confidence that global mean surface temperature was higher during the last decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period during the preceeding four centuries.
At reasonable efficiency, 1.6 MW suggests a panel area in the vicinity of ~100,000 sq. ft., which seems reasonable if there complex has a million sq. ft. of office space (presumably distributed over multiple floors).
It would only take about 15,000 km^2 of solar panels in a sunny area to supply enough energy to satisfy all of the US energy needs. For comparison, that's about 4% of the area in California. A single data center could of course make do with far less, though at current land and equipment costs, solar is often several times the cost per kWh as traditional electricity sources.
See this figure for a breakdown of the sources of greenhouse gases in the year 2000.
Oceanic shipping is already incredibly efficient and only accounts for a few percent of the cost of most goods shipped that way. For example, a supertanker only adds 2 cents to the cost of a gallon of gas. It would take a very radical change in the cost of oil to have any significant impact on the economic viability of overseas manufacturing.
One could just as easily argue the converse. Dump the country codes and have everyone use location neutral identifiers; after all com, net, edu, and org already account for more than 60% of all hosts.
But the truth is that neither proposal will fly. There are too many existing websites to demand that billions (trillions?) of href's be changed to accomodate major architectural deletions to the existing DNS system. And that is to say nothing of the staunchly entrenched national interests in support of the existing TLDs.
As an American, I don't think that is an easy question to answer. At face value, a system that Americans control (or at least substantially influence) is more likely to protect American interests than any other system. There are any number of countries (e.g. China, Iran, Saudia Arabia, North Korea) that could desire to place controls on the internet that would be opposed to freedom and/or American interests. I can't help but recall the farce by which Libya got to run the UN Human Rights Commission.
At the same time, if ICANN were replaced by an international body strongly influenced by, for example, Europeans then we might well have more freedom and be less likely to see puritanical elements in the US getting a say over network decisions.
However, for the moment I think that the devil that we have is doing an okay job, and would hesitate to replace that with a devil that we don't know. Basically, I worry that an international body could end up being influenced by countries without a tradition of free speech in ways that could have a far more chilling effect on the internet than anything ICANN has ever done.
Some years back the USPS was actually considering linking every snail mail address to an email address, so we could really have had email postal addresses. They seem to have let the idea die a quiet death however.
Well, in that case they have their timing wrong. They are sending the shuttle up in the afternoon and most fireworks displays aren't until the evening. Let's hope the God of Explosions doesn't get impatient and decide to set off a big one early.
You think Canada increased their per capita emissions > 20% in less than 4 years? That strikes me as just silly. Feel free to prove me wrong, but I believe that Canada uses about the same amount of energy per capita (to within a few %) and does so with a significantly lower carbon burden because roughly half their electrical generating capacity is hydroelectric.
You are simply mistaken with respect to carbon. In 2002, Canada emitted 4.5 metric tons carbon per capita. In the same year, the US emitted 5.5. Still very large compared to the global average of about 1.1 though.
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/top2002.cap
Actually, I disagree. As someone who can draw 300 spams a day (managing multiple domains), I'd say Gmail is subpar. In my experience Yahoo is better, and the Bayesian filtering on my desktop is a lot better. Also, when I was using Gmail it had false spam identifications for me often enough (1 or 2 per week) to be really annoying.
Maybe it is something about the composition of emails that I get, but Gmail is not a system I'd recommend as a spam trap. To be fair, it does seem to handle most of them correctly, but if spam filtering is large concern then better alternatives exist.
Of course, just a couple weeks ago there was a story about people at RHIC thinking they saw evidence for micro black holes. And presumably if RHIC can do it, IceCube might be able to as well.
Construction on AMANDA began in 1994, and South Pole was chosen because you need high transparency ice. That means you need an ice sheet substantially thicker than 1400 meters (the bubble conversion zone) in a region with few dust or volcanic impurities. South Pole satisfies both these properties very well.