OK, did I miss the bit where this was 'new' news? We've been using Junior Librarian software for over 10 years and it has always supported fingerprint book loans and returns! It does exactly the same thing, putting the fingerprint into a file format on the computer which cannot be re-hashed back to the original fingerprint.

Until something along the lines of GPO's are available, Linux can never compete with MS as a desktop OS. However, plenty of OS software that runs on MS Windows certainly is viable. OpenOffice being one of them - but even then, we (where I work) have a number of apps that depend on MS Office applications and will not run on OO - so there for one is why we can't simply ditch MS software across the board.

The potential cooling of the Nintendo Revolution which will be using an ATI video chip? Small and quiet......