Whoop-de-doo. There are several outfits that have done something similar over the years, including companies that have tens of thousands of fingerprint devices out on the street already. I would be somewhat surprised if the tech covered in this article is not already patented by Lumidigm or somebody like them.

"Liveness checks" have been a part of fingerprint tech for many years now, ever since the famous "ghosting" attack on the early L-1 and Cross Match sensors. Whoever wrote the article didn't do their homework if they think this is actually "news."

Um, no.

Summary: the 27th amendment prevents Congress from altering its own salary during the same session, and the sequestration deal was originally struck to apply to the same session.

So, our crongresscritters will continue to get paid as they avoid doing the job they were hired to do.

Illegal? How do you figure?

The only law restricting cash that I know of concerns crossing a US border with more than $10k in cash, and even then you just have to declare the fact that you are carrying more than $10k. The act itself is not illegal.

Inside the borders of the USA, your comment about merchants being prohibited from accepting cash for a purchase is completely nonsensical. "Legal tender for all debts, public and private." That's what it says right on the note.

I'm not sure that carrying $100k in cash would stand up as "probable cause" for a search in most courts unless there were other factors involved...

My wife has a Kindle and uses it almost exclusively to check out e-books from the Austin Public Library. They have to be reserved through the library and transferred by Amazon, but she says the process is easy enough to manage. I know she has read upwards of 100 books in the past ~18 months this way.

So if libraries already have a working process for lending e-books for Kindle (and presumably other readers), I have to ask why someone thinks they need this "digital media library" approach. I assume that this is all political and/or publicity oriented, but I have to ask whether the money wouldn't be better spent elsewhere. If nothing else, loaning delicate electronic equipment to the public seems like a frightful risk.

It would also be interesting to see if there are structural anisotropies in the dwarf galaxies, and if so, are those anisotropies oriented any particular way with respect to the planes of Andromeda or the Milky Way, or the orbital plane of the dwarves in general. If my guess about tidal effects is correct, I would expect the answers to both of the above questions also to be "yes."

This sounds like a tidal effect from the Milky Way. I will be interested to hear how the analysis & modeling progresses in the future.

The kid probably did most of the coding, but used data gathered by other observations at the observatory (or even other observatories). The idea probably came from his father. This is exactly the sort of straightforward project you would assign a bright undergrad (or high school student) to do. It's relevant, mostly easy, and might possibly generate a new result. You can't ask for much more.