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UCSD Biometric Vending Machine
dice writes to tell us that grad students at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) are creating the first biometric vending machine. The current machine comes equipped with a barcode scanner, a fingerprint reader, and a web cam for facial recognition. One student dubbed it the "most over-designed soda machine in the world." The project, code-named "SodaVision," is the brainchild of associate professor Stefan Savage, but it was the students who really made it come to life. And yes, it runs Linux.
That is a nice little bit of math on the web page you link to, but you overlook an important aspect. That paper defines "error rate = false positives + false negatives", and shows that layered testing increases the total error rate. But the paper itself points out that layering can decrease one of those terms, and, depending on your application, the bad-ness of each term can be very different. For example, in return for preventing the very bad situation of a thief getting to my money (false positive id), I am willing to accept a lot of inconvenient situations where I have to repeatedly attempt to authenticate myself (false negative id).