Are Thornhill and Talbott being (intellectually) dishonest? Is there something fraudulent about the "The Electric Comet" document?

There's a prima facie case to say they are, and that there is.

Start with the fact that there's a copyright notice on the bottom of page 2.

The apparent source for at least one of the images in the document explicitly claims copyright for that same image (the one of asteroid Itokawa, see my last post), yet Wallace Thornhill and David Talbott make no mention of this fact. Maybe someone who knows copyright law could pitch in here – is claiming copyright over something that you know is already copyrighted by someone else illegal? Whatever, it sure seems, to me, behaviour worthy of some kind of censure.

"The Electric Comet" document, by Wallace Thornhill and David Talbott, has the following at the bottom right of the first page:
And here is the complete list of posters at this conference: http://www.icops2006.org/technical_p...ter_order.html.

Notice something(s) odd?

The Thornhill & Talbott document is not listed as one of the 2006 ICOPS Poster Sessions.

Nor does it seem to conform to the standards for posters presented at scientific meetings (including ICOPS).

Click on the link to "ICOPS 2006 Poster", in the following link, for an example of a poster which does seem to have been presented at ICOPS 2006 (it's a > 1MB PDF): http://www.gangolee.com/research.html. Note that the Ombrello et al. poster looks like what you see at scientific meetings, in terms of its format, use of attribution and references, etc.

So, we have a document purporting to be a poster presented at an international plasma physics conference … but it seems it wasn't.

We have a document claiming copyright of all material contained in it … but it seems at least some such material is copyrighted by others.

We have a document sharing the thunderbolts.info website with pages containing the same images (at least one) and where correct attribution (and credit) is given to those images … so Thornhill and Talbott are unlikely to have been ignorant about the need for credits (they are listed as "Executive Editors" of the picture of the day section).

And this prima facie misrepresentation (if not actual fraud) was brought to the attention of persons claiming to be close confidants or colleagues of Thornhill and Talbott some time ago … yet the document is still up on their website.

Once you have had a chance to check what I have posted for yourself ATKINS (and Luxor), I'd like to know if you condone this apparent kind of behaviour.