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According to Mashable, the Transportation Security Administration apparently spent $47,000 on an app that is essentially a random number generator—it was briefly used to assign travelers to left or right lanes at airports.

As the website reported: “The app was used by TSA agents to randomly assign passengers to different pre-check lines as part of a now-discontinued program called ‘managed inclusion.’”

Such an app is widely viewed to be an extremely simple program to write. Many are questioning why a government agency overpaid for the app.

Most of us would agree that human sacrifice is a bad idea. Yet many ancient civilizations (and some more modern ones) engaged in religious rituals that involved sacrificing people. Why do so many societies evolve a system of human sacrifice, despite the obvious moral drawbacks? A group of social scientists has just published a statistical analysis in Nature that reveals how this grisly practice has fairly predictable results, which benefit elites in socially stratified cultures.

The group examined 93 Austronesian cultures in the Pacific Islands, drawing information from the Pulotu Database of Pacific Religions to determine which groups had human sacrifice and when. Previous analysts have suggested that human sacrifice helps to maintain social stratification. In this new study, the researchers wanted to understand the relationship between human sacrifice and social stratification over time.

To do that, they created statistical models using Bayesian methods, testing to see how human sacrifice affected societies that fit into three buckets: egalitarian, moderately stratified, and highly stratified. They write:

A project to bring free wireless Internet to poor people in California is only providing a fraction of the promised Wi-Fi hotspots, according to multiple reports.

With a state grant issued in 2012, a nonprofit called Manchester Community Technologies was supposed to "install free wireless Internet along busy boulevards in low-income neighborhoods throughout Los Angeles County," said a report last week by the Los Angeles Daily News. The organization reported success to the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) in March 2015, saying it had connected more than 100,000 people to the Internet.

But today, few of the sites actually have Internet access. The Los Angeles Times visited the hotspot locations and reported that hardly any had Wi-Fi signals. CPUC staff visited the Wi-Fi hotspot sites in January in response to the Times' investigation, finding Internet connectivity at just two of 25 locations. CPUC says it is now planning an audit.

In a US presidential campaign season full of unexpected moments and petty squabbles between candidates and public figures of all stripes, today's interaction between Donald Trump and Electronic Arts still ranks as one of the oddest. This afternoon, the publisher issued a YouTube takedown notice for a video supporting Donald Trump that uses voices and music from 2010's Mass Effect 2, after the candidate himself tweeted the video approvingly to nearly 7.5 million followers earlier in the morning.

The ad, which appears to have been created by an individual fan with no official connection to the Trump campaign, draws directly from Mass Effect 2's launch trailer, overlaying a speech from Martin Sheen's Illusive Man character with videos and photos from modern America. "We're at war," Sheen intones over scenes of generalized and specifically Trump-related chaos. "No one wants to admit it, but humanity is under attack. One very specific man might be the only thing that stands between humanity and the greatest threat of our brief existence."

The Mass Effect content is roughly intercut with images and messages from Trump supporters, as well as lines from Trump's stump speech about making America great again. It ends with the message that "the American people are DONE with career politicians" and an entreaty to "GO OUT & Vote for Trump." Yet there are some signs the video could be an elaborate, trollish joke against Trump, including an image with the non sequitur purported Trump quote, "No more oreos!"

Amazon has been focusing its efforts on the tablet, TV, phone, and digital personal assistant markets for the last few years, but the company has never forgotten its quietly competent lineup of dedicated Kindle e-readers. Today, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos took some time off from running his newspaper and shooting things into space to announce that there will be an "all-new, top of the line" eighth-generation Kindle announced next week. Consider this an announcement of the announcement.

Amazon's current flagship Kindle is the Kindle Voyage, a very nice but very expensive $200 gadget with an auto-brightness sensor and a tablet-y design. The new model will presumably replace the Voyage instead of the more sensible $120 Kindle Paperwhite, but we'll have to wait until next week to hear more details and news about pricing and availability.

If you want a good dedicated e-reader and don't really care about having the latest and greatest features, Amazon is currently offering big discounts on current-generation Kindles for Amazon Prime members. The $200 Voyage is being offered for $150, the $120 Paperwhite is being sold for $90, and the $80 standard Kindle is being sold for $50.

Former Verizon customers who were switched over to Frontier Communications on Friday are still reporting outages and other problems today.

Verizon sold its FiOS and DSL networks in California, Florida, and Texas to Frontier, but the transition has not been smooth. On Friday, Frontier acknowledged a "technical issue" involving the integration of systems, but the company said it had been fixed by 9:30am ET that morning.

That assurance seems to have been premature, with customers still reporting problems on DownDetector and Twitter throughout the weekend and today. "Onto the 4th day without Internet or any working account...any timeframe guys? This is getting really crazy!" one California customer complained today.

When Elon Musk took the stage Thursday night at his Hawthorne design facility, the CEO of Tesla revealed a pre-production prototype of the Model 3, the company’s highly anticipated $35,000 car. The presentation was short and included a summary of Tesla’s history, a status update on the Gigafactory, and a look at how Tesla plans to expand its supercharger stations.

Actual details about the Model 3's specifications were slim. We learned that it will come with top-rated safety features and supercharging, even for the basic version of the car. We learned that all the Model 3s will come with the hardware necessary for autopilot features. (Although certain autonomous functions will require the customer to buy an upgrade.) And we learned the car will go 215 miles on a single charge at a minimum, and it will get from zero to 60 in “less than six seconds.”

Before the event, Musk called Thursday night’s event "Part 1" of the Model 3's debut, later adding that “Part 2 is super next level, but that’s for later…” The Model 3 isn’t due out of production until the end of 2017.