Not necessarily. You could actually be in the group that sometimes lies but sometimes tells the truth, and this time you are lying, and so not being truthful at all.

If I read the article correctly, the thumbprint isn't being used as a password of sorts, but rather the only method of identification at all. Therefore even a single false positive within the school is a major problem as the system would have no way of telling between the two students whose hashes are identical. Thus the hash must be specific enough for false positives to be highly unlikely within any given school's population across all schools using the system.

Not that I'm against this use of thumbprinting, but I wonder how effective the mathematical template is at maintaining privacy. Theoretically even if they don't have the actual thumbprint on file, could they not still check a thumbprint they find somewhere against their student database by running it through the same template and seeing if it matches the result of any of the students' prints? They may not have the students' thumbprints themselves to compare against, but they still effectively have a hash from it. This would prevent them from producing the student's thumbprint from their hash and using it elsewhere, but not from finding a thumbprint somewhere in the school and comparing it to their database if they desired.

I wonder about that last bit. The main reason the last election gained the conservatives seats seemed to be the fact that Canadians were pissed off that their opposition called an expensive and pointless re-election. If the Conservatives force a re-election in the process of trying to pass a bill that Canadians can't stand, the resulting election immediately thereafter might cost them seats.

This is what I worry about; it feels like only a matter of time. The only seeming way out of this is to have a law enacted that ensures consumers' rights are truly fully protected; but then, that seems like a nearly impossible goal to achieve.

A general lack of understanding about copyright law among people in general really doesn't help the issue. Here's hoping we can both stave it off a bit longer and find a real solution.

Well, that's true of most DRM, eBook and otherwise. Still, I'd personally rather not buy DRM'd books and strip them, because that still appears to support DRM'd books from a sales perspective.

RTF is a better choice than either, if you really want to keep things simple. But neither really adds up to ePub at this time for anything that includes images at all. Then there's metadata, text reflowing/resizing and so forth.

Actually, ePub files use XHTML and CSS. They already have the ability to plug in a DRM layer (with no specific standard demanding a certain sort at this time) and include text reflowing and resizing (while keeping images at the same size up to as large as the screen in question allows). They also track page numbers based on the original book's page size. So effectively, it's probably the implementation you're asking for.

PDFs are great on computers and some devices, but don't always work as well on eBook readers. Other formats such as ePub have better capacity to reflow and resize text while keeping images at a single size; reflowing text on an eBook reader often causes errors in PDF files. It depends on the reader in question of course, but if we're looking for an industry standard, it should be as widely compatible as possible, and ePub would fit the bill better than PDF for that.

ePub is a really good choice. Aside from the fact that it's an open standard, it has the option to plug in any DRM the publisher wants to use/write for it. Hopefully they eventually learn better, but since for now they won't settle for anything that doesn't include a DRM option, that's an advantage for it. It's specifically designed for reading books on an eBook reader, including keeping track of where the pages actually change (when reading at different zoom levels). I'm honestly a bit surprised the industry isn't already switching to it.

That said, I'm not fond of the Adobe Digital Editions DRM that it tends to come packed with at the moment on DRM'd books. The required software is not very good quality. The eReader style DRM is at least a lot easier to work with. (Of course, DRM-free remains the ultimate goal; at this point I pretty much only buy DRM-free eBooks anyway.)