Yeah, we have to remember that these are the sort of people that molest children and rape young women. Or, you know, send sexting messages in middle school, sleep with their high school girlfriend, or get plastered and take a piss in an alley. "Sex Offender" has become so dilute as to be almost entirely useless.

This is what I don't get -- zombies are dead already, so what good are tiny pieces of metal at high velocity? They don't need to breath, they don't care about blood loss or "vital" organs... Unless your bullets can explode their heads, I think you need a new plan.

Outsmarting the zombies has never been the problem. How long can you run for? How many bullets do you have? How long can you keep swinging that crowbar? That they're individually stupid is irrelevant; it's their relentless march and unending numbers that are the problem. You need food. You need sleep. You will run out of ammo.

This is precisely why I'm not outraged. Verizon sent me a note about the change and made opting out almost trivial. And I could opt-out all the phones on my account at the same time.

I'm pretty sure I remember hearing that there's an 87% chance that your gender+birthdate+postalcode is unique... So, yeah, knowing your postalcode and birthdate gets you a lot without knowing your name.

That may well be true, but my point was that a one-time rapist is far more likely than a serial-rapist, or a one-time murderer is far more likely than a serial-murderer, rather than that different crimes have any relation to each other. Petty crimes might have a higher rate of repeat offense, but do we really need a DNA database for those?

I guess you have a different definition of "as needed" than I do. These sound the same to me, and any definition of "needed" that doesn't include "can show reasonable suspicion" is problematic, I think.

To be fair, though, even in the case you presented...

... do you mean to tell me you weren't already a suspect when they asked before you refused? Do you expect that the police will just swab the whole metropolitan area whenever any crime is committed? If they have no reason to believe you were involved why would they swab you, and if they think you might have been involved how is that different from being a suspect?

This.

Also, why do we need a record? That's only useful if you believe they'll be a repeat offender, and anecdotally it seems like most serious crimes are one-off incidents. I think DNA evidence can be useful in many situations, but why can't that be collected on an as-needed basis? That avoids this whole issue.

Yeah, I thought those were pretty interesting.

This is why the greeting card industry has been such a failure.

This.

My brother attributes a personality and identity to his iPod, I'm sure people will be able to empathize with a robot. The fact that the robot doesn't empathize back is irrelevant -- even in human-to-human interactions, my perception of your intent is far more important than your actual intent, which is recognized in the original comment:

Why not? Because that was the premise. If you want to introduce dice to "ensure" randomness that's fine, but it wasn't really the question at hand. And then people will start questioning whether you are playing the game/beating the computer.

So you have no reason to believe you were rejected based on anything you said or did, only that you didn't get the job. A job is a very nice thing to have -- one might argue necessary -- but I'm not going to self-censor before I see evidence that people are losing their livelihoods based on "remotely political" comments they've made, if then.