Americans think themselves a bit safer because the NSA is not supposed to spy on them. But what tells me that the NSA is not letting a foreign partner agency collect and evaluate the data of the Americans for them and just gets back the hits? For these hits they would have no problems getting a warrant, even from a non-secret court.
No, he just compared it to an inefficient distribution (a roof with panels on the south and the north side).
As was pointed out in other comments there are 20 cells on the tree and, most probably, 10 cells on each side of the roof. Had he really compared to 20 cells in a flat panel array, he would have found that the tree distribution is less efficient than the flat panel.
By the way, there is an optimum inclination (vertical angle) of a photovoltaic module, which in Europe is between 30 and 50 (depending on the latitude and the height), see this map (pdf, 11 Mb).
I nevertheless admire the idea and the work of the young boy. As an adult I'm sure he would have spotted the error in the result, unlike the jury and the submitter of the story.
Visible light would not be safer here, since the pulse is just 100 ns long and thus much faster than any reflex of the eye.
If I read the original Science paper correctly this is nothing more than an etalon in front of an absorbing material (i.e. a plate of silicon, as they used in their experiment, in front of a black sheet of paper). Of couse it works as a selective absorber or "anti-laser", this is well known.
I wonder if they wrote the Science paper just to show what you can publish using a lot of buzzwords...
The original image can be resized without showing the watermark, see their demo page (and press Ctrl +/- if you browse with Firefox). But so can the re-encoded picture, it shows the watermark only at the zoom level of 100%.
From this I suppose that there is also one zoom level at which the original picture shows the VOID watermark (you better choose it to be an odd value)!
The linked article at Connectify says they measured a resistance of 2 Ohm, but on the picture I read 2 MOhm!
Check yourself with the large version of the picture.
I'd say it's nearly a Gi$ = 1,073,741,824 $.
No, it's not legal to copy the articles to Wikipedia, since they grant no other right than free view. See their copyright: basically the author retains the copyright, and grants Stanford the right to publish the article electronically.
I've actually not found a better enterprise solution to team development than the newest version of TFS. Especially in corporate environments.
Perforce still beats it as a pure source control manager, but that's FAR from free software, and the whole package isn't as nicely integrated as TFS.
Politics: A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage. -- Ambrose Bierce
