I've been buying ebooks for over a decade: Before Amazon, many ebooks were cheap, the main exceptions being the ebooks of the big-name authors or stuff on best seller lists. Amazon brought those down, but didn't touch the prices for most of the books. After the agency model, the prices of the big-name authors & best sellers went up, but not quite as high as it had been. Oh, and it became easier to find books, and e-readers finally found a common, open, non-proprietary, format that is widely used and supported. (DRM is still a problem, and after getting burnt a few times early on I refuse to buy anything with DRM, but that's starting to be easier...)

This though is my experiences. The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'. I'm sure someone has hard data gathered in a rigorous manner on the subject.

If they know it, it's not something 'only you would know' (or it's a password, effectively). Family or coworker snapshots can be defeated with a bit of time on Facebook. Etc. The article above seems to think switching to a physical token is a solution - effectively switching from a combination lock to a keyed one. Which works in a controlled, corporate environment.

But the problem is fairly complex: You need to come up with a simple, secure, easily implemented, quick way to distinguish a human from a machine, and one human from another. Oh, and it needs to be accessible: your visual idea only works if the person you are trying to verify isn't blind. (Even temporarily.) Security in general has been a problem for as far back as at least the Romans, if not further; there's a lot of value in breaking the other side's security, and a lot of value in not having them break yours. (Heck, I've seen tribal huts using the traditional design that had locks on their doors, though they don't look like what you'd think of as locks.)

Right now China, India, and Europe are trying to get the USA to play along on this issue. Or at least come to the table.

The competitive bidding process was followed exactly: Someone in government drew up the specs, and then had several companies bid on it, and they picked the cheapest bid.

Of course, the specs themselves were horrible, but that's not a problem with the bidding process... (At least, not in theory.)

And you are sure of this based on your vast knowledge and experience of the law, without hearing any arguments from either side.

He's not, based on his vast experience. And the right thing to do is to hear out both side's legal arguments, and to look up precedent on his own. Meanwhile, he leaves the jury to judge the facts (instead of the law) of the case.

Which is precisely how our system is designed: The judge rules on the law of the case, and the jury rules on the facts of the case. Together, they come to a ruling. If we didn't want someone experienced in the law to be a part of that ruling, we wouldn't have judges.

Oh, for mod points.

This. The judge basically said 'The question of whether copyright law can apply at all in this situation is a legal one, and needs to be handled by someone who has studied the law. That's me. Your job is to decide if the law was violated. So, assume the law exists, while I go research.' The judge can still come back and say the law doesn't apply at all, so it doesn't matter what the jury says, but in the meantime the jury doesn't have to be confused by arguments over whether the law applies.

Because the light will be of lower energy (and therefore of a different wavelength) than that which the solar cells absorbed.

Basically, instead of heating up, these cells emit the energy in a controlled manner, in semi-directed infrared (probably) radiation. No laws of thermodynamics are being bent: The waste product is just closer to the type of the input than in other solar cells.

You could similarly say that a water turbine is more efficient if it lets water flow out: It is. The water will just have less flow strength than it did when it went in. The difference is what the turbine is collecting as energy. In this case, instead of letting the light 'back up' in the solar cells (as heat), it's released.

This is probably what Sophos (an anti-virus provider) is hoping.

The day when Hitchhiker's Guide is 'to nerdy' for /. will be a sign of the end times.

(At least the end times of this site.)

I was thinking it probably had a passive or low-power cooling system - if any - for normal use. This is basically an add-on for certain applications, and most of the mechanics of it would be located at the station. (Just have heat-exchanger tubes in the car.)