I think we should laugh in Mexico's face and say, "forget about it." Archaeological images are always and have always been easily available to the public.
You could also argue that those pictures are Aztec writing, so the stuff on the cups are an original written work.
Wrong. We do know what happens when you smash particles at high energies. Particle accelerators across the globe, Fermilab the most prominent until now, have been doing it for years. The energy the LHC is going to smash at, while much greater than any before, still isn't that much. Divide the energy, 14TeV, by c^2 to get the mass. 14TeV/c^2 is about 15,000amu, the mass of 15,000 hydrogen atoms or 2.5x10^-20 grams. Even if the LHC did manage to create a black hole out of all that mass, it would be too little to draw anything in and would evaporate in less than a second.
And in the event the LHC does cause great damage (more likely to be to the power grid than anything), CERN will be responsible for paying up. The physicists will not go on trial, CERN will, because CERN is responsible for the LHC in the same way Fermilab is responsible for the Tevatron. That's why people start corporations—so they don't become responsible when something goes wrong.
Yeah, I think that someone needs to set up a pi computation BOINC project and just keep calculating. The real question is "would it be feasible?" I guess they'd have to go about it a different way than {SETI,Folding}@Home. Instead of giving the client a "chunk" of instructions, you could just give it one digit. The algorithm for finding a particular digit (the BBP or Bellard's formula) could be stored on the client's computer indefinitely, and the computer could simply be instructed to extract a single digit or a block of digits and send them back to the host.
PiHex already did this, sorta, but in binary and only was after specific ranges of digits. I think the main deciding factor would be speed. How many digits can the average computer (or slightly above average, since that's the kind of people who would sign up) compute in about a second? A minute? An hour? Is it linear? We ought to run benchmarks before doing anything like this.
"Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines." -- Bertrand Russell