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China has suspended imports of shellfish from the west coast of the United States -- an unprecedented move that cuts off a $270 million Northwest industry from its biggest export market.
China said it decided to impose the ban after recent shipments of geoduck clams from Northwest waters were found by its own government inspectors to have high levels of arsenic and a toxin that causes paralytic shellfish poisoning.
The restriction took effect last week and China's government says it will continue indefinitely. It applies to clams, oysters and all other two-shelled bivalves harvested from the waters of Washington, Oregon, Alaska and Northern California. U.S. officials think the contaminated clams were harvested in Washington or Alaska. Right now they’re waiting to hear back from Chinese officials for more details that will help them identify the exact source.
State and federal agencies oversee inspection and certification to prevent the shipment of tainted shellfish. Jerry Borchert of the Washington Department of Health said he's never encountered such a ban based on the Chinese government's assertion that these U.S. safeguards failed to screen out contaminated seafood.
“They’ve never done anything like that, where they would not allow shellfish from this entire area based on potentially two areas or maybe just one area. We don’t really know yet,” Borchert said.
The biggest blow could fall to those who farm or harvest the supersized geoduck clams. In the Northwest, they're concentrated in Washington's Puget Sound, where about 5 million pounds of wild geoduck are harvested each year. Aquaculture accounts for an additional 2 million pounds, according to estimates from the Washington Department of Natural Resources.
A barricade around the Chinese consumer market means trouble for those in the Northwest who rely on Asian trade.
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Add whales, sea turtles and sturgeon to the fight over the future of the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station, but leave room for alewives as well.
Following a meeting between plant critics and Nuclear Regulatory Chairman Allison Macfarlane, several groups led by the Earthrise Law Center and including locally based Cape Cod Bay Watch, called on the NRC to add a new condition to the plant’s license, requiring Pilgrim’s owners to report occurrences, sightings or interactions with certain officially listed endangered and threatened marine species near Pilgrim. That was not in the relicensing documents but that may have been a mistake.
At one point, the NRC apparently thought there was such a condition in the new license. It said so in communications with the National Marine Fisheries Service, when discussing the pending relicensing of the plant in 2012.
When critics heard that discussion referenced, they went looking for it in the license. It wasn’t there. Click headline to read more--
It’s here! On Wednesday, Connecticut became the first state in America to pass a law that requires food manufacturers to indicate the presence of genetically-engineered ingredients on the label.
If you’re surprised, you’re not the only one. After bitter defeats at the hands of big food lobbyists in California and Washington, I would have thought that we’d have to wait a long time to see another labeling measure with even a slim chance of passing. Yet here is Gov. Dannel Malloy, commemorating a bill that finally honors Americans’ right to know what’s in their food.
Well, once I took a closer look at the bill itself, it became clear why we didn’t see a knock-down, drag-out fight between food labeling advocates and Big Food like in California and Washington.
According to a statement from Gov. Malloy’s office: “Connecticut’s GMO labeling law goes into effect only after four other states enact similar legislation. Additionally, any combination of northeastern states with a combined population of at least 20 million – including Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey – must adopt similar laws.
“The bill also includes language that protects Connecticut farmers by ensuring regional adoption of the new labeling system before requiring local farms to analyze and label genetically engineered products.”
So, while the law sounds great, and Connecticut legislators are patting themselves on the back for the accomplishment, it means absolutely nothing. Although the bill is now law, it doesn’t change a thing for Connecticut families, and doesn’t require food companies to do anything differently. Perhaps the only comforting thing is that we can tack a “yet” onto the end of that sentence.
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A notification from the India’s Department of Telecommunications on 18th July 2013 reclassified the term ‘Broadband’ as referring to connections that have the capability of a minimum download speed of 512kbps, the telecom regulator TRAI’s monthly telecom subscribers report mentions, stating that as per the notification:
“Broadband is a data connection that is able to support interactive services including Internet access and has the capability of the minimum download speed of 512 Kbps to an individual subscriber from the point of presence (PoP) of the service provider intending to provide broadband service”.
Accordingly, the TRAI has said that as per its classification, the minimum download speed has been increased from 256 Kbps to 512 Kbps, and from this October 2013 onwards, service providers have to report only those wireline Internet subscribers with at least 512kbps as ‘broadband’.
Consequently, the number of broadband connections in India has come down to 14.91 million connections (the rest are classified as “Internet” connections). In May 2013, India had 15.3 million broadband connections, but that was as per the old definition, and would have included connections between 256kbps and 512kbps. Note that the 14.91 million connections number is on the basis of data from 105 of 153 ISPs, with old data being used for 48 ISPs.
We’d like to remind the Department of Telecommunications, and recent ministers A. Raja, Kapil Sibal and Milind Deora, what utter failures they have been when it comes to enabling the growth of wireline broadband in this country.
It makes me feel old say this, but does anyone remember Dayanidhi Maran, and his tenure as Telecom Minister?
Back in 2007, Maran had wanted to reclassify broadband as 2 mbps*, and talked about using BSNL to change the benchmarks, in order to force private players to follow suit. Maran left the government after that, and was replaced by A. Raja. The rest is history: in terms of the 2G scam, the Aakash Tablet. We’re still waiting for the completion of the rollout of broadband to villages, which Maran, in 2007 had said, had the following targets:
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There are a lot of amazing places on our beautiful blue planet. So many, in fact, that I have a hard time imagining anyone being able to visit all of them during their entire lifetime. Some places are of course more epic than others, but they all have one thing in common, they are all worth visiting. One such place is an abandoned salt mine from 1932, which has now been converted into one of the world’s most epic amusement park complexes.
We see it more and more, mines being converted into everything from hotels to amusement parks. If anything, that is what we should be doing as we’re constantly creating dangerously large holes in our beautiful planet. This salt mine is 120 meters deep and is a royal sight for anyone that has the opportunity to take a look at it from above as well as from within. The things they have managed to do in this mine are nothing less than on the edge of brilliant.
Looking down into the deep hole, you will be met by a sight that rivals that of a science fiction movie. As a matter of fact, it looks like a space base at the bottom with all the lights that have been used to illuminate the abandoned mine. It is epic in every way and that is just the view from the top. Drop down to the bottom in the elevator and you will enter into an amusement park (which is really a recreational park) that can only be described as a Wally World within our own world.
There is literally everything in this deep mine from a Ferris wheel to a football playground, sports halls and an amphitheater. There is even room for a boat ride if you so crave one on the underground lake. I do not know how deep the water is in this lake and I would not want to find out either, but the whole place looks nothing but enchanting and magical when you look at it from all angles. So where is this place located? This abandoned salt mine is named Salina Turda and it is located in Romania - Salina Turda website.
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Arctic fjords are poor places, low in marine life and muddied by glacial meltwater. In the southern ocean, where everything is upside down, it’s a different story. Scientists from the University of Hawaii report that they found unexpected riches deep in the fjords of the Antarctic Peninsula.
The Peninsula is one of the fastest-warming places on the planet. On land, researchers have used 150 years of moss growth as a kind of archive of change, and recorded a warming of 0.56°C per decade since the 1960s.
But researchers who photographed the sea floor found an abundance of bristle worms, sea spiders, sea cucumbers, crustaceans, jellyfish and of krill, they report in the journal PLOS One.
This is precisely what they had not expected: on the evidence of the rapidly-warming Arctic waters, these Peninsula fjords should have been much less lively.
“There appears to be something special about these fjords that stimulates sea floor productivity”, says Laura Grange, of the UK National Oceanography Centre at the University of Southampton, who collaborated in the study.
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The whole world can dig into the region’s history after a North-East university unveiled one of the most definitive mining archives online.
The North East England Mining Archive and Research Centre (NEEMARC) is founded by Sunderland University academic Dr Stuart Howard in association with a number of the region’s mining institutions.
Dr Howard’s team have digitalised volumes of the National Union of Miners (NUM) Durham Association minutes books.
The books, hosted on Sunderland University’s website, chronicle the records of the most powerful union in the country in what was arguably the most important region for coal mining, the North-East.
They are now online and cover the period 1876 to 1942 and are the first NUM materials anywhere to be digitised.
The archive paints a clear picture of the political, economic, social and cultural life in an industry that was so important to the region.
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A new study funded by Greenpeace shows that a quarter of a million Chinese people died of air pollution from coal fired power plants in 2011. And the smog is worse this year.
"The analysis traced the chemicals which are made airborne from burning coal and found a number of health damages were caused as a result. It estimates that coal burning in China was responsible for reducing the lives of 260,000 people in 2011. It also found that in the same year it led to 320,000 children and 61,000 adults suffering from asthma, 36,000 babies being born with low weight and was responsible for 340,000 hospital visits and 141 million days of sick leave."
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After almost two years of negotiations with the European Council and the European Parliament, the European Commission is ready to launch Erasmus+ on 1 January 2014. With an agreed budget of 14.7 billion (an increase of 40% on current levels), the programme is set to run for the next seven years. What does the new programme really mean for higher education? Here’s a guide to the final agreements and implications of this highly anticipated programme. Together with Erasmus Ambassadors, Erasmus Mundus and Oceans Alumni, the EAIE was invited as one of the Erasmus multipliers to learn more about Erasmus+ at a special training session organised by the European Commission in November. In addition to discovering what Erasmus+ means for higher education, all participants discussed how to promote the new features of the three Key Actions.
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In March 2011, an unknown amount of radiation was released into the atmosphere after a powerful tsunami slammed into the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear reactors on the Pacific coast in Japan. Because people had little access to detailed information about radiation levels, they bought up every Geiger counter they could find in stores and online. Soon the counters were all but sold out worldwide, and in Japan a grey market of shoddy Geiger counters sprouted up, some with faulty or fake parts.
Now, as workers at the plant attempt to move 1,500 highly radioactive spent fuel rods from Unit 4, the most heavily damaged reactor, the risk of radioactive contamination is escalated. The rods, housed in a damaged and leaking concrete pool 100 feet above the plant’s floor, are being moved to a second enclosed pool where it’s hoped they’ll be secure if another earthquake hits Japan’s coast.
The situation at Fukushima has received limited coverage in the Western media, but many scientists have grave concerns about the health and safety ramifications of the procedure — which has never been tried before — should something go wrong.
In a phone interview, Harvey Wasserman of Nukefree.org emphasized the gravity of the situation.
“God forbid they drop a rod, or another earthquake occurs,” he said. A mistake in the procedure could be catastrophic. The tightly packed rods together contain 14,000 times the radiation released by the Hiroshima bomb, according to Reuters.
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Serious games: What an oxymoron! In the classic definition, a game is defined as a voluntary action that is intended to be fun and enjoyable for the player. On the contrary, serious - video or board - games’ first intentions are utilitarian. Because of this they are often used within business or education. Indeed, their key aim is to engage individuals in complex or boring tasks.
These more serious games provide a safe environment to let participants (often employees) experiment in solving business issues or problems without worrying about the consequences. The process of developing and using such games enhances skills and abilities, which is a necessary first step before actually taking action to improve real-life business problems. They focus on emotions rather than on a cognitive approach to enhance participants’ motivation in seven key areas: Competition, personal challenge, chance, loss of control, role playing social recognition and collaboration.
Today, serious games are used for both employee and customer engagement. Disney’s “Disneystars” game, for example, is designed to build employees’ understanding of Disney’s leisure businesses, to facilitate cross and up-selling. Alternatively, they can also be implemented by Human Resources departments for training, assessment or recruitment. L’Oréal’s serious game “Reveal” is a good example of serious games in this context.
But, in each of these situations, the transfer of knowledge is in one direction; top-down. While they may be learning experiences for participants the business doesn’t actually gain any insights in return.
The really exciting trends in serious games reverse this process. The best serious games don’t just facilitate knowledge transfer, they facilitate innovation too. The 57,000 players of the virtual puzzle “Foldit” are contributing to scientific research on different diseases through protein folding, as well as learning about molecular biology.
Business leaders often talk about their desire to tap into their employees’ knowledge; serious games provide a great means to achieve this. The challenge now for organisations is to make the most of this best practice, flip the knowledge transfer process, and innovate through gaming. In this way they can reset the processes of learning and innovation.
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The Asset Owners Disclosure Project (AODP) asked the world’s thousand largest asset owners what they were doing to guard against the possibility that their investments in fossil fuels could, in future, become worthless.
Together, the owners manage more than US$70 trillion of funds. The Project found that only 27 of the 460 investment funds replying to its request are currently addressing climate risk at what it considers a responsible level.
Only five of the 460 achieved the AODP’s top AAA, with an additional 29 rated A or above. Only these groups, says the Project, “will survive a carbon crash in any kind of good shape”. . Of the 1,000 asset owners approached, 80% are either D rated (abysmal) or X rated (doing nothing). A further 540 funds did not disclose sufficient information to allow a rating.
“A majority of the world’s investment industry are clearly acting contrary to the interests of those whose money they represent – this is an outrageous situation” says Sharan Burrow, an AODP board member and general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation.
“It must be remembered that much of the money being held by these organisations is the product of workers’ lifelong savings.”
The survey looked at several categories of investment behaviour, including transparency, risk management and low carbon investment. Asset owners examined came from 63 countries, in all regions of the world.
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While the use of geothermal energy and recycled materials would normally be starting points for Gizmag's look at a new holiday destination like the ION Adventure Hotel, there's one element here that stands well above the pack – location. The hotel is nestled amidst the diverse Icelandic landscapes in the heart of the Mt. Hengill region, offering guests the opportunity to catch a glimpse of the spectacular aurora borealis or midnight sun, depending on which time of the year it is.
The ION Adventure Hotel opened its doors earlier this year and was built with the environment in mind.
"The fact that we are in a water protected area and the nature around the hotel is so rich we wanted to connect the hotel with the nature rather than have it stand out from the nature," ION's Assistant Hotel Manager, Katrín Ósk Sigurgeirsdóttir tells Gizmag.
Local hot springs provide the hotel with geothermal energy and hot water, local wood such as driftwood was used to furnish most of the building's interior and all of the beds, lounges and chairs were built from recycled materials. Corrugated cardboard was used to make many of the hotel's lamp shades and recycled rubber was used for the restroom basins.
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Imagine powering your home with waste bi-products. You could essentially power you home with pee. Adult human being produces 1-2 liters of urine per day. 1 liter is enough to power a small generator for 6 hours. How do we know this? A 14 year old girl and her friends from Nigeria, Africa created a system that separates the hydrogen and oxygen in urine, purifies the hydrogen and uses it to power a generator.
The amount of electricity produced is not shown, but judging from the size of the generator it’s probably at least a few hundred Watts. That’s more than enough to power small electronics and LED lighting in your home.
Click headline to read more, view pix and watch video clip--
Independent coastal experts say the federal government used outdated wave methodology better fit for the Pacific coast when they drafted Marshfield’s new flood maps. As a result, they say, the government over-predicted flooding that would occur during a 100-year storm for much of the state.
At the request of U.S. Rep. William Keating, D-Bourne, two coastal scientists analyzed data and methods used by the Federal Emergency Management Agency in developing Marshfield’s new flood maps, which the town is currently challenging.
The new maps expand flood zones and drastically increase the water elevation in many communities, meaning higher insurance premiums for thousands of property owners. Others would be required to pay flood insurance for the first time.
John Ramsey, a coastal engineer from Applied Coastal Research Inc. in Mashpee, and Brian Howes, director of the Coastal Systems Program at UMass-Dartmouth’s School for Marine Science and Technology, found that FEMA used a mapping method fit for the Pacific coast, where the wave periods are much longer and the beaches are straighter, instead of developing a correct approach for New England.
Keating plans to present the findings, detailed in a technical memorandum, to FEMA in a letter requesting a delay of the implementation of the maps. He will be circulating the letter to other members of the state’s congressional delegation for support.
The weakness of the Pacific model, which was used for all of Massachusetts, is that it’s based only on empirical data, rather than site-specific physics, Ramsey said Monday.
“We don’t have a straight coastline, and the simplified method doesn’t take offshore islands and shoals into account,” he said. “It’s unreliable in areas where the shoreline changes quite a bit, and most areas in the state are that way.”
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Convergence Partners Investments Ltd., a South African private-equity company focused on technology, plans to invest part of its $250 million fund for telecommunications infrastructure in Nigeria and West Africa.
“The rapid deployment of infrastructure is required and the operator community is not going to be able to absorb that growth themselves,” Chief Executive Officer Brandon Doyle said in a Nov. 28 phone interview from Johannesburg. “Our preference is to build infrastructure that will serve operators on a wholesale basis, rather than compete with them.”
The fund expects to reach $250 million by the end of next year after raising $145 million at its start on Nov. 27, with investments from the International Finance Corporate, the European Investment Bank, the Dutch Development Bank, the Development Bank of Southern Africa and U.K.-owned CDC Group.
It plans to spend at least a third of the fund in West Africa, Doyle said, with the bigger slice of the regional investment going to Nigeria.
Convergence Partners holds a 12.5 percent stake in Seacom Ltd.’s project to develop an undersea telecommunications cable to link South Africa and East Africa with Europe and India, and has invested in Dimension Data, South Africa’s largest technology services provider.
Bandwidth capacity in the region has grown in the last four years with the addition of three international submarine fiber connections to the only one that existed before 2010. Nigeria, Africa’s biggest oil producer, saw its bandwidth increase about 26-fold to more than 9,000 gigabytes per second, according to data provided by the Communications Ministry. A lot of that remains stranded in the cities where the nodes landed due to a lack of infrastructure to distribute it.
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In a ground-breaking move, voters in Boulder, Colorado, approved an initiative to end their relationship with Xcel Energy, a utility with $10.7 billion in revenues, thus clearing the way for the city to form its own municipal utility that would lower rates and make greater use of renewable energy.
Opponents of the effort had themselves put the question on the ballot in order to block measures by the city council. They also tried through a second initiative to hamstring the city from issuing enough bonds to be able to afford the purchase of Xcel’s facilities.
During the fierce battle that attracted national attention, corporate executives and their allies argued that the city had neither the money nor the expertise to manage such a complex enterprise. Advocates for the municipal utility, including New Era Colorado Foundation, fought back with a crowd-funding campaign that raised more than three times their financial goal. In a landslide, two-thirds of voters supported the idea of bringing the utility under public control and then rejected the borrowing limits designed to kill the deal by a similar margin.
Though the utility industry has gone through a wave of consolidation over the last two decades, they are starting to show the strains of technological, economic, and political change. Municipal utilities are far more common than most people are aware, with more than 1000 already functioning in the United States, serving 50 million customers, a population greater than the size of Spain. Most of these entities are owned by cities, and controlled by panels of local citizens. Some are even cooperatives owned by their members.
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This newly-released report from National Geographic is nothing short of devastating, demonstrating how the ongoing Fukushima catastrophe is affecting that the food chain of the entire Pacific Basin, including the waters off the coast of California. This information is taken from both National Geographic and the National Academy of Sciences and it shares that, as of July 1st of 2012, 98% of the studied sea floor 145 miles off the coast of California was covered with dead and decomposing sea creatures. For those who think that 98% may be a normal study number, only a few months earlier, in March the same study found less than 1% of the sea floor covered with ‘detritus’. Several up-to-date video reports depict that squid are now washing ashore on Santa Cruz beaches and that a mysterious illness is causing starfish of the Pacific Northwest to simply fall apart. Here are extracts from the reports published recently in two academic journals: Click headline to read more and watch video clip--
A recently released paper by former chief NASA climatologist James Hansen and 17 other international climate scientists is getting some pickup in youth movement circles. The paper, published by peer reviewed journal PLoS ONE, goes well beyond what one would traditionally expect from a scientific paper, mainly because of its intergenerational framing of climate change:
“The possibility of such intergenerational injustice is not remote – it is at our doorstep now. We have a planetary climate crisis that requires urgent change to our energy and carbon pathway to avoid dangerous consequences for young people and other life on earth.”
Hansen et al. go on to state that despite the increasing body of evidence stating that anthropogenic climate change is occurring, governments around the world continue to burn fossil fuels. Further fossil fuel extraction has and will impact us all, but it will inflict the greatest damage on my generation and those that follow. Hansen’s paper is compelling because it discusses an intergenerational justice angle, and the dire need for action, as being directly linked to climate science. While perhaps obvious, rarely is this connection made so explicitly in academic writing.
Among Hansen et al.’s main findings is that a previously understood limit of 2°C rise in global average temperature is a “dangerous target” that would not avoid the worst impacts of climate change. According to the paper, negative feedback loops connected to sea level rise and arctic ice melt would in fact become apparent with a 1°C degree rise in current temperatures. These environmental shifts are real, observable and actionable. And they must be addressed as such.
Our friends at iMatter recently wrote of their thoughts on the paper:
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On 19 November 2013, I attended the launch of the “2013 Country Visit Report of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Nigeria” that took place in London. [1] The report described the observations of two British Parliamentarians who visited Nigeria in July 2013 and covered interesting topics including the Human Rights of Nigerian women and children. However, in a footnote on page nine of the report there was reference to the recent United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) report which stated that Nigeria has the highest number of out-of-school children in the world at 10.5 million. [2]
I was sad when I read this. But why should I be sad? Should it matter to me? After all, I am not affected. I and all members in my family are educated. Also there are more Nigerian children attending school than those not attending. And the majority of Nigerian children out-of-school appear to come from the northern part of Nigeria, which is far away from where I come from in the deep south of the country. So it has nothing to do with me or my family. End of story, full stop. But this is a selfish and naive view that misses the bigger picture. Just because I was lucky to have educated parents who could afford to pay for the education of me and my three sisters, does not mean I should ignore less fortunate Nigerian children. It is no Nigerian child’s fault if they are born into poor families who cannot afford to send them to school. After all, no one chooses where they are born. If the 10.5 million figure is true, then Nigeria must act urgently. There are economic, political and social negative consequences for Nigeria if nothing is done. In this essay I will first give four reasons why I think it concerns all Nigerians and then offer four suggestions that I think can mitigate this sad situation.
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The Panel on Global Internet Cooperation and Governance Mechanisms—a diverse group of global stakeholders from government, civil society, the private sector, the technical community and international organizations—held their first meeting in London on December 13th to discuss global Internet cooperation and governance mechanisms.
The Panel expressed strong support for a multistakeholder approach to the future of Internet governance. The conversations held at the London meeting were facilitated by a team of Internet governance experts. The discussion will be taken online in the coming days at 1Net.org.
"The world relies on the Internet for economic, social, and political progress. It is imperative to ensure emerging issues are properly addressed in a global context, without individual governments or intergovernmental organizations developing their own solutions," said Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves and chair of the Panel.
"The success of the Internet is rooted in a distributed and bottom-up model, with openness and collaboration at its core," said Vint Cerf, vice-chair of the Panel. "The inaugural meeting of the Panel brought together a diverse set of perspectives on the future of the Internet, and through this diversity I'm confident we can chart a course to protect the core of the current ecosystem, while evolving its methods, accessibility, and universality to meet the opportunities and challenges of the future."
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BT has announced that new customers will from today have porn filters automatically switched on when they subscribe to its broadband service.
The company is also introducing new BT Parental Controls that go beyond the remit of its current free privacy controls, which only focuses on desktops and laptops. The new controls will cover all internet-connected devices in the home, including tablets, games consoles and smartphones.
New customers, says BT in a press release, "[will] have to make a choice on whether or not to activate the parental controls when setting up their internet connection for the first time", but adds that "the option of having the controls implemented is pre-selected". You'll either have to confirm that you're happy with the pre-selected protection level, or actively choose to change the settings, which BT is keen to remind you might expose you to "content potentially unsuitable for children".
"BT takes the issue of online child protection extremely seriously and we are very pleased to be able to launch the whole-home filter to help parents keep their families safe online. It adds to the many tools we already make available for free to our customers. We've been focused on the issue of online safety since we developed the world's first Cleanfeed filter to block child abuse images and made the technology available free to other ISPs across the world a decade ago," says Pete Oliver, MD of consumer commercial marketing and digital at BT.
If you're already a BT customer, the company will be contacting you some time over the next year in order to make you aware of the new controls and give you the option to implement them or not.
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German copyright troll U+C (Urmann and Colleagues) recently upped its trolling game by sending out settlement letters to German Redtube viewers who had the misfortune of watching some rather generically-titled porn under its nominal control. U+C's previous trolling efforts had concentrated on P2P file sharing, so this new move, targeted at viewers of supposedly infringing streams raised several questions.
First and foremost: how did U+C acquire the names and addresses of those who had viewed the streams? Streaming viewers don't leave IP addresses exposed like P2P sharers do. Redtube denied turning over any user data. The theory arose that U+C had misled the courts by presenting Youtube as a "swap meet," i.e., a file sharing site. Obviously, Redtube is not in the business of file sharing and under German law, those viewing streams -- even if the streams themselves are infringing -- cannot be held liable for infringement. The other theory mooted was that U+C was utilizing some sort of malware to trap IP addresses, but no evidence has surfaced that this is the case. (Although, it should be pointed out that Google indicates Redtube "might be hacked.")
A few German lawyers stepped into the fray, offering their assistance and telling those served with letters to ignore them until further notice. Now, Redtube itself has weighed in on the matter via a press release, and it sounds thoroughly irritated by U+C's shady activities.
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The controversial leasing of 2,800 acres near the Au Sable River to a Canadian gas and oil company has been approved, but with the caveat that no above-ground techniques be implemented to access the subterranean resources.
A Thursday, Dec. 12, meeting of the Natural Resources Commission in Lansing saw Michigan Department of Natural Resources Director Keith Creagh approve the results of an Oct. 28, oil and gas lease auction to Encana Corp., with the stipulation that the acres along the Au Sable River Holy Waters corridor are nondevelopmental.
A nondevelopment lease does not allow the use of the surface for oil and gas exploration or development, DNR officials explained.
The Holy Waters corridor is an 8.7-mile stretch of land that begins just east of the city of Grayling in Crawford County and meanders east from Burton's Landing to Wakeley Bridge. It's known for its wadable water, dependable insect hatches and quality trout fishing, according to the DNR.
“Michigan has special places that deserve careful attention and thoughtful protection,” Creagh said. “The Au Sable River is one of those places. A nondevelopment lease lets us protect an area’s valuable surface features. This, in turn, protects Michigan citizens against the loss of revenue if publicly owned minerals are removed without a lease in place.”
The DNR reports that funds generated from oil and gas leasing on state-managed lands pay for recreational improvements and land acquisition for Michigan residents. The agency continued that a significant portion of the Au Sable corridor — known as the Rayburn Tract — was acquired by the DNR with $1.2 million in funds from oil and gas lease development on public property.
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Shipping containers have been used to revolutionize housing, and have also given rise to wacky ideas like an extreme sports theme park. Thanks to a new concept dubbed SOAK, we can add sustainable bathhouse to the growing list of potential uses for the durable metal boxes.
The main premise behind SOAK is that it aims to remove some of the guilt which may result from being a regular visitor to resource-heavy spas or bathhouses, by using renewable energy sources and recycled shipping containers.
SOAK looks like it will be pretty well stocked in bathing facilities, with a couple of cold plunge buckets, a shower, and a solarium. It's not clear what the capacity would be (presumably not very high), but a small physical footprint would also make sustainable energy more practicable.
Click headline to read more, view pix gallery and watch video clip--
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