While I am not sure if this should be considered libel, I don't think the defense 'well it was true!' always triumphs as a legal defense. What about rights to privacy?
Right to privacy is a different issue.
"It was true" is (or should be) a defense against libel-- not a defense against violation of privacy. Different things.
The key point is that the trial court here has not considered any evidence yet. It made a purely legal ruling under Massachusetts law, and it was wrong because it failed to take into account the actual malice law.
No, the key point is that the legal principle that truth is an absolute defense against a charge of libel is under attack in Massachusetts.
This principle is one of the bedrocks upon which our freedom of speech is built.
You're right that it's not a bad ruling. It's a terrible ruling.
Amusingly, the New York Times had censored the word in the original article-- they called it only "a vile obscenity". Discussion of the meaning is here
It is as if the frequencies in its spectrum just miss the the ones my photoreceptors are tuned into...
Well, that's because the LEDs actually are missing (large) components of the spectrum!:-)
Even when your eyes are tricked into believing the light is white (by equally stimuling the three kinds of color-sensitive cells), the light reflected off of objects isn't "correct".
Imagine two green objects. One has true green pigment, the other has a mixture of yellow and blue pigment. Both look the same under incandescent light, because the light from a glowing filament emits a full spectrum.
No!
Incandescent light is extremely blue deficient. It's not at all "full spectrum".
Colors look approximately right under incandescent illumination because your eyes are extremely good at color-adjusting the signal to the brain to compensate for the ambient light, and "most" things you tend to look at don't have sharp spectral bands. But in the case you describe, where a green color is synthesized from a blue and a yellow reflectance band, it will look very different under sunlight and incandescent light. (Look up "alexandrite", for example)
The EU has done no such thing. Yes, it banned the sale of classic lightbulbs (effective September 2012). But what you replace them with is your own choice, you are not forced into buying fluorescent tubes.
Haven't they reported this a dozen times over the last decade?...
For some reason, every time there's an incremental advance in understanding the environment of Mars, in the process of turning the results from science into news reports, the actual science gets simplified and simplified until the net result seems to be a headline of "Water found on Mars."
There's a lot more to the real science, of course.
The article sounds pretty damning-- if they move bad reviews down based on whether you advertise on the site (or even, apparently, actually write bad reviews if you don't advertise), that's extortion.
I'm wondering if they can be sued for that. If they really write bad reviews for restaurants that don't advertise, I would think that this would count as libel, even if you can't sue for extortion.
Yes. Any employer worth your time is either a) not going to be doing something as petty as e-stalking you,
Uh, you don't know what "e-stalking' means. Doing a google search is not stalking.
or b) doing it properly, and making sure that the person is really you.
They're going to have way too many applicants for a fresh-out-of-school position. There's no cost to them to move on to the next name in the applicant pool, because there are another few hundred applicants out there who are (at first glance) just as good, and they have to eliminate 99% of them any way that they can. They don't have time to waste trying to find out whether he is or aren't a criminal; they have a hundred other applications they need to get to.
On the other hand, if he pushes the bad-name guy down the stack a few entries, they don't have time to search that deep-- and anybody who does search that deep will have the time to check if it's him, or somebody else. So he just needs to make sure the top entry or two isn't scurrilous.
"They could be in our equivalent of 1750 and we'd never hear a peep."
In fact, they could be our equivalent of 2009 and we'd never hear a peep.
Except for one or two exceptions, no radio signals from Earth are strong enough to be detectable at interstellar distances using the receiving technologies that we use for SETI.
The "exception" is ballistic-missile warning radar, which might be detectable, if it were at the wavelength being searched, and they happened to be looking in the right direction when the Earth happened to be rotated so that the radar pointed the right way. But there's no signal in radar, and even the carrier would be gone when they looked again to follow up, so to a SETI search, it would be tagged "noise"-- most likely a side-lobe of a transient terrestial source, possibly a satellite. (Unless they knew the Earth's rotational period, so they could look again when the signal was aligned their direction.)
This is hilarious. I work in a school district with Cisco VOIP phones and we had this happen in one of our buildings recently... the only thing was, two geniuses managed to pull it off at once, so after one phone was found the network was still fscked. Fun times...
More likely, when the network went down the first time, somebody said "hey, wait, I see the problem-- this one here isn't plugged in."
Of course, ten seconds after that they said "hmm, guess that wasn't it..." but didn't unplug it
Indium is used in IZO (Indium ZInc Oxide), which the article is undoubtably referring to.
Indium Tin Oxide (ITO) is little more commonly used in solar cells. Zinc Oxide's a little more transparent a short wavelengths, though.
And you don't need very much indium in ITO (it's really indium-doped tin oxide).
...Complicated III-V solar cell stacks don't necessarily need In. And there are a variety of conventional cells that don't need any rare materials.
True enough (although many III-V compounds do use Indium; it is a group III element, after all).
Water vapor produces a positive feedback element-- the hotter it gets, the more water vapor in the atmosphere, and the higher the water-induced greenhouse effect.
But, seriously, does that necessarily follow? One could also argue that the more water vapour in the air, the more clouds there are, which could conceivably increase the albedo.
Of course. The original comment was about the greenhouse effect-- that is, infrared absorption-- of water vapor, so that was what I was talking about. As for other feedback effects, the post you quote continued: "But it's just one of many feedback effects, positive and negative."
Since the top of clouds over 18,000 feet are almost all ice, and not water vapour, and ice has a very high reflectivity, it's at the very least arguable to say that the two effects might offset.
Yep, that's the "negative feedback effect" mentioned.
Note, however, that the negative feedback effece reduces temperature increase from the greenhouse effect, it doesn't eliminate it. (because if it eliminated it, of course, the feedback itself would be zero.)
Of course, maybe they don't; I don't profess to have any data one way or the other. I'm just saying this is the type of reasoning that drives me nuts; it could be true, it could be false,
but the AGW crowd takes one side, doesn't always provide data, or ignores data that refutes their position, and calls anyone who disagrees with them a nutter.
Well, let's see, what would be the correct approach? Maybe, do a detailed physics-based computer model, and validate it with detailed measurements? That is what climate scientists do. That's pretty much their job description.
And is what the deniers don't do. And don't even try to do.
...I'm skeptical of AGW because I've read so many forecasts ("Tuvalu will be completely underwater in three years! Antarctica is melting!", etc.) when...
Again, as I said previously, the characteristic failing on that side is not bad physics, but is a tendency toward hyping worst-case scenarios. Which I find almost equally annoying. There's a cherry-picking process here, though-- the press picks up and hypes the most extreme predictions, so if there's, say, ten thousand predictions, the single one that's wacky gets amplified, and the more moderate voices get ignored. Have you actually read the IPCC report? Not the popular media reports and the biased analyses from people with opinions, but the actual documents from the IPCC? If you're talking about predictions, this is the place to start, not whatever hype-of-the-week you got from scrolling around on the internet.
It's amazing to me how many people want to throw rocks at the IPCC report and how few want to bother to actually read it. It's not the place to go for all the details (although it does have extensive bibliographies), but it's a good place to start, and written at a tutorial level.
"The supposed "global cooling" consensus among scientists in the 1970s -- frequently offered by global-warming skeptics as proof that climatologists can't make up their minds -- is a myth, according to a survey of the scientific literature of the era....
But Thomas Peterson of the National Climatic Data Center surveyed dozens of peer-reviewed scientific articles from 1965 to 1979 and found that only seven supported global cooling, while 44 predicted warming. Peterson says 20 others were neutral in their assessments of climate trends.
The study reports, "There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age.
"A review of the literature suggests that, to the contrary, greenhouse warming even then dominated scientists' thinking about the most important forces shaping Earth's climate on human time scales."
calling skeptics "deniers" is like something out of the salem witch trials.
People who deny are deniers, just like people who swim are swimmers, and people who count are counters. This is the way the English language forms nouns.
uh, global warming proponents i've run into don't understand that water vapour produces the vast majority of our warming effect.
OK. Pretty much everybody I talk to is aware of this (*). It's quite well known among anybody who knows anything about atmospheric thermal balance.
Since water vapor in the atmosphere is a dependent variable, not an independent variable (it is produced by evaporation of water, which depends on temperature), it's mostly a "so what" thing.
Water vapor produces a positive feedback element-- the hotter it gets, the more water vapor in the atmosphere, and the higher the water-induced greenhouse effect. But it's just one of many feedback effects, positive and negative.
*except for the fraction of the global-warming deniers who argue that the greenhouse effect doesn't exist at all.
And the terrible lack of understanding of physics by many of the loudest proponents of 'Global Warming' doesn't likewise cause you to throw the whole postion??
I haven't heard a lot of bad physics from the people who believe in anthropogenic global warming-- to the contrary, I've seen a lot of very patient tutoring on basic thermal physics in an apparently futile attempt to educate people who not only don't care, they actually don't want to learn.
The main failing on that side is not bad physics, but is a tendency toward hyping worst-case scenarios.
Supratik Guha of IBM told the conference that sales of silicon solar cells are booming, with 2008 being the first year that the silicon wafers for solar cells outstripped those used for microelectronic devices.
This is particularly worrysome from my perspective. This implies solar cell demand has a HUGE impact on the price of silicon. If demand for silicon solar cells has increased this much, then all these assumptions about silicon solar cells reaching parity with grid electricity within a few years in terms of dollars/watt may NEVER happen.
Very recently the solar cell market has made an impact on silicon price.
Not a problem in the long run-- the increased demand for silicon means that new silicon production capability has to come on line. This, however, means cheaper silicon in the long term, since newer plants can use more efficient technology, and also larger plants gather some economy of scale.
It would be a problem in the short run, but (unfortunately) the economy has put a big drag on sales, and so there's probably much more capacity right now than demand.
...The efficiency of solar cells is measured as a percentage of light energy they convert to electricity. Silicon solar cells finally reached 25% in late December. But multi-junction solar cells can achieve efficiencies greater than 40%.
I wish there was more information in TFA on what "greater than 40%" is.
III-V material tandem multijunctions. At the moment, these would be a germanium bottom cell, a gallium arsenide middle cell, and a gallium-indium phosphide top cell, but to get over 40% they're going to tweak the materials materials, probably going to some sort of indium-gallium arsenide on the bottom, and very likely adding some more junctions. Nitride materials (e.g., gallium-indium arsenide nitride) are possibilities, too. You can substitute in small amounts of other group-III and group-V elements to tweak the materials properties somewhat.
Yup, the planet's been cooling for 10 years. Ask your newspaper why it's not news.
If you actually look at the data, you'll see that's not true. The climate -hange deniers who have a clue-- and most of them don't-- sometimes argue that the planet hasn't heated up on the last few years (and if you look carefully at the graph, you can in fact argue that). But it most certainly hasn't, on the average, "been cooling."
But the average climate-change deniers aren't interested in the data that hasn't passed through Rush Limbaugh first.
Slashdot Mirror
While I am not sure if this should be considered libel, I don't think the defense 'well it was true!' always triumphs as a legal defense. What about rights to privacy?
Right to privacy is a different issue.
"It was true" is (or should be) a defense against libel-- not a defense against violation of privacy. Different things.
The key point is that the trial court here has not considered any evidence yet. It made a purely legal ruling under Massachusetts law, and it was wrong because it failed to take into account the actual malice law.
No, the key point is that the legal principle that truth is an absolute defense against a charge of libel is under attack in Massachusetts.
This principle is one of the bedrocks upon which our freedom of speech is built.
You're right that it's not a bad ruling. It's a terrible ruling.
Amusingly, the New York Times had censored the word in the original article-- they called it only "a vile obscenity". Discussion of the meaning is here
Enthusiasm is as yet little premature. Basically, this only says that the judge will let them make their argument.
p>Are you even old enough to remember the USENET flame culture?
I'm old enough to miss it!
Hey, if security was easy, everybody would do it.
It is as if the frequencies in its spectrum just miss the the ones my photoreceptors are tuned into...
Well, that's because the LEDs actually are missing (large) components of the spectrum! :-)
Even when your eyes are tricked into believing the light is white (by equally stimuling the three kinds of color-sensitive cells), the light reflected off of objects isn't "correct". Imagine two green objects. One has true green pigment, the other has a mixture of yellow and blue pigment. Both look the same under incandescent light, because the light from a glowing filament emits a full spectrum .
No!
Incandescent light is extremely blue deficient. It's not at all "full spectrum".
Colors look approximately right under incandescent illumination because your eyes are extremely good at color-adjusting the signal to the brain to compensate for the ambient light, and "most" things you tend to look at don't have sharp spectral bands. But in the case you describe, where a green color is synthesized from a blue and a yellow reflectance band, it will look very different under sunlight and incandescent light. (Look up "alexandrite", for example)
The EU has done no such thing. Yes, it banned the sale of classic lightbulbs (effective September 2012). But what you replace them with is your own choice, you are not forced into buying fluorescent tubes.
Quite true. You can sit in the dark.
I am waiting for the discovery of intelligent life on Earth.
Ah, but the search for intelligent life relies on searching radio and television signals!
Haven't they reported this a dozen times over the last decade? ...
For some reason, every time there's an incremental advance in understanding the environment of Mars, in the process of turning the results from science into news reports, the actual science gets simplified and simplified until the net result seems to be a headline of "Water found on Mars."
There's a lot more to the real science, of course.
I'm wondering if they can be sued for that. If they really write bad reviews for restaurants that don't advertise, I would think that this would count as libel, even if you can't sue for extortion.
Am I overreacting?
Yes. Any employer worth your time is either a) not going to be doing something as petty as e-stalking you,
Uh, you don't know what "e-stalking' means. Doing a google search is not stalking.
or b) doing it properly, and making sure that the person is really you.
They're going to have way too many applicants for a fresh-out-of-school position. There's no cost to them to move on to the next name in the applicant pool, because there are another few hundred applicants out there who are (at first glance) just as good, and they have to eliminate 99% of them any way that they can. They don't have time to waste trying to find out whether he is or aren't a criminal; they have a hundred other applications they need to get to.
On the other hand, if he pushes the bad-name guy down the stack a few entries, they don't have time to search that deep-- and anybody who does search that deep will have the time to check if it's him, or somebody else. So he just needs to make sure the top entry or two isn't scurrilous.
Should I attempt to set up my own site that would steal the top Google search from this blog posting?
Of course.
You want the top search on your name to be you, not some low-life with your name. Carpe webium.
"They could be in our equivalent of 1750 and we'd never hear a peep."
In fact, they could be our equivalent of 2009 and we'd never hear a peep.
Except for one or two exceptions, no radio signals from Earth are strong enough to be detectable at interstellar distances using the receiving technologies that we use for SETI.
The "exception" is ballistic-missile warning radar, which might be detectable, if it were at the wavelength being searched, and they happened to be looking in the right direction when the Earth happened to be rotated so that the radar pointed the right way. But there's no signal in radar, and even the carrier would be gone when they looked again to follow up, so to a SETI search, it would be tagged "noise"-- most likely a side-lobe of a transient terrestial source, possibly a satellite. (Unless they knew the Earth's rotational period, so they could look again when the signal was aligned their direction.)
This is hilarious. I work in a school district with Cisco VOIP phones and we had this happen in one of our buildings recently... the only thing was, two geniuses managed to pull it off at once, so after one phone was found the network was still fscked. Fun times...
More likely, when the network went down the first time, somebody said "hey, wait, I see the problem-- this one here isn't plugged in."
Of course, ten seconds after that they said "hmm, guess that wasn't it..." but didn't unplug it
Indium is used in IZO (Indium ZInc Oxide), which the article is undoubtably referring to.
Indium Tin Oxide (ITO) is little more commonly used in solar cells. Zinc Oxide's a little more transparent a short wavelengths, though. And you don't need very much indium in ITO (it's really indium-doped tin oxide).
...Complicated III-V solar cell stacks don't necessarily need In. And there are a variety of conventional cells that don't need any rare materials.
True enough (although many III-V compounds do use Indium; it is a group III element, after all).
Why use one term over the other?
Because if you don't use one term or another, it's impossible to say anything.
Water vapor produces a positive feedback element-- the hotter it gets, the more water vapor in the atmosphere, and the higher the water-induced greenhouse effect.
But, seriously, does that necessarily follow? One could also argue that the more water vapour in the air, the more clouds there are, which could conceivably increase the albedo.
Of course. The original comment was about the greenhouse effect-- that is, infrared absorption-- of water vapor, so that was what I was talking about. As for other feedback effects, the post you quote continued: "But it's just one of many feedback effects, positive and negative."
Since the top of clouds over 18,000 feet are almost all ice, and not water vapour, and ice has a very high reflectivity, it's at the very least arguable to say that the two effects might offset.
Yep, that's the "negative feedback effect" mentioned.
Note, however, that the negative feedback effece reduces temperature increase from the greenhouse effect, it doesn't eliminate it. (because if it eliminated it, of course, the feedback itself would be zero.)
Of course, maybe they don't; I don't profess to have any data one way or the other. I'm just saying this is the type of reasoning that drives me nuts; it could be true, it could be false, but the AGW crowd takes one side, doesn't always provide data, or ignores data that refutes their position, and calls anyone who disagrees with them a nutter.
Well, let's see, what would be the correct approach? Maybe, do a detailed physics-based computer model, and validate it with detailed measurements? That is what climate scientists do. That's pretty much their job description.
And is what the deniers don't do. And don't even try to do.
...I'm skeptical of AGW because I've read so many forecasts ("Tuvalu will be completely underwater in three years! Antarctica is melting!", etc.) when...
Again, as I said previously, the characteristic failing on that side is not bad physics, but is a tendency toward hyping worst-case scenarios. Which I find almost equally annoying. There's a cherry-picking process here, though-- the press picks up and hypes the most extreme predictions, so if there's, say, ten thousand predictions, the single one that's wacky gets amplified, and the more moderate voices get ignored. Have you actually read the IPCC report? Not the popular media reports and the biased analyses from people with opinions, but the actual documents from the IPCC? If you're talking about predictions, this is the place to start, not whatever hype-of-the-week you got from scrolling around on the internet.
It's amazing to me how many people want to throw rocks at the IPCC report and how few want to bother to actually read it. It's not the place to go for all the details (although it does have extensive bibliographies), but it's a good place to start, and written at a tutorial level.
... these same climate experts were also spouting off that there would be an ice age not so long ago.
Citation needed.
Try this one: Study Debunks Global Cooling myth of the 90s (or here)
"The supposed "global cooling" consensus among scientists in the 1970s -- frequently offered by global-warming skeptics as proof that climatologists can't make up their minds -- is a myth, according to a survey of the scientific literature of the era....
But Thomas Peterson of the National Climatic Data Center surveyed dozens of peer-reviewed scientific articles from 1965 to 1979 and found that only seven supported global cooling, while 44 predicted warming. Peterson says 20 others were neutral in their assessments of climate trends. The study reports, "There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age.
"A review of the literature suggests that, to the contrary, greenhouse warming even then dominated scientists' thinking about the most important forces shaping Earth's climate on human time scales."
calling skeptics "deniers" is like something out of the salem witch trials.
People who deny are deniers, just like people who swim are swimmers, and people who count are counters. This is the way the English language forms nouns.
Is English not your native language?
uh, global warming proponents i've run into don't understand that water vapour produces the vast majority of our warming effect.
OK. Pretty much everybody I talk to is aware of this (*). It's quite well known among anybody who knows anything about atmospheric thermal balance.
Since water vapor in the atmosphere is a dependent variable, not an independent variable (it is produced by evaporation of water, which depends on temperature), it's mostly a "so what" thing.
Water vapor produces a positive feedback element-- the hotter it gets, the more water vapor in the atmosphere, and the higher the water-induced greenhouse effect. But it's just one of many feedback effects, positive and negative.
*except for the fraction of the global-warming deniers who argue that the greenhouse effect doesn't exist at all.
And the terrible lack of understanding of physics by many of the loudest proponents of 'Global Warming' doesn't likewise cause you to throw the whole postion??
I haven't heard a lot of bad physics from the people who believe in anthropogenic global warming-- to the contrary, I've seen a lot of very patient tutoring on basic thermal physics in an apparently futile attempt to educate people who not only don't care, they actually don't want to learn.
The main failing on that side is not bad physics, but is a tendency toward hyping worst-case scenarios.
Supratik Guha of IBM told the conference that sales of silicon solar cells are booming, with 2008 being the first year that the silicon wafers for solar cells outstripped those used for microelectronic devices.
This is particularly worrysome from my perspective. This implies solar cell demand has a HUGE impact on the price of silicon. If demand for silicon solar cells has increased this much, then all these assumptions about silicon solar cells reaching parity with grid electricity within a few years in terms of dollars/watt may NEVER happen.
Very recently the solar cell market has made an impact on silicon price.
Not a problem in the long run-- the increased demand for silicon means that new silicon production capability has to come on line. This, however, means cheaper silicon in the long term, since newer plants can use more efficient technology, and also larger plants gather some economy of scale.
It would be a problem in the short run, but (unfortunately) the economy has put a big drag on sales, and so there's probably much more capacity right now than demand.
I wish there was more information in TFA on what "greater than 40%" is.
III-V material tandem multijunctions. At the moment, these would be a germanium bottom cell, a gallium arsenide middle cell, and a gallium-indium phosphide top cell, but to get over 40% they're going to tweak the materials materials, probably going to some sort of indium-gallium arsenide on the bottom, and very likely adding some more junctions. Nitride materials (e.g., gallium-indium arsenide nitride) are possibilities, too. You can substitute in small amounts of other group-III and group-V elements to tweak the materials properties somewhat.
Yup, the planet's been cooling for 10 years. Ask your newspaper why it's not news.
If you actually look at the data, you'll see that's not true. The climate -hange deniers who have a clue-- and most of them don't-- sometimes argue that the planet hasn't heated up on the last few years (and if you look carefully at the graph, you can in fact argue that). But it most certainly hasn't, on the average, "been cooling."
But the average climate-change deniers aren't interested in the data that hasn't passed through Rush Limbaugh first.