You're not ready for release. If I increase text size, words disappear. (Words on the left-hand side of the paragraph are pushed further to the left and become invisible. Words on the right-hand side of a paragraph increase in font size and remain visible.)

I read slashdot on a monitor across the room, so I *always* increase text size. You really have to fix this.

A smart evil genius wouldn't create a plague. He or she would be more interested in creating a strain of tomato (or some other benign plant) with THC or cocaine or opium in its leaves. This is the stuff of folklore, well-known as a can-do sort of idea. It isn't farfetched. I don't know why it hasn't happened already.

AIs in distant galaxies know about Earth already and are just waiting for our AIs to develop tachyon communications. I thought that this was a given.

That listening device hidden in the great seal was invented by Leon Theremin, the same guy who invented the theremin musical instrument.

Crooks can just salt the scene of the crime with DNA not their own.
 
DNA tests are not quick, either - forget what you have seen on TV. The FBI backlog is overwhelming, as it is for State labs in most cities. DNA evidence collected at a crime scene is likely not to be analyzed before the trial date.
 
New York City doesn't have the money to do this, anyhow. The cost would be exorbitant, even with a balanced budget.

The PLATO Notes application that allowed communication was written by David Woolley, who was 17 years old at the time.

I hope they consider the effects of beneficial bacterial flora in the body and create an array that can test for them too. It would be interesting to compare symbiotic cultures that reduce the effect of pathogens. (Now that antibiotics are so much less effective. Let the bacteria duke it out among themselves.)

Check out the free and open source software, Caucus and build your own social network. I belong to such a Caucus-based community, where invited members can speak openly, and I strongly agree that Facebook is seriously limited by privacy concerns.

You could also look up "The Well" and see what communities of a similar nature are out there. Seems you're looking for something like that.

this is your id and this is your id on drugs /b/
see? same thing
and that's even if you don't know anything about drugs

it's not as if /b/ tries to be the wild wild west
it just is
what else is left that's like the old usenet?
or like a place without rules?
it's there.. not that one can continue to feel well
if one looks into /b/ too deeply
so it's funny to think that net freedom is healthy coz /b/ is there
yet.. there you have it

The obvious inferences, which aren't being expressed here so far, are:

1. Journalists are still important, in that they dig up this kind of information.
2. We all knew this would happen, after the relaxation of civil liberties laws.
3. There are probably worse things going on that we will never know about.
4. It's patriotic to insist that law enforcement personnel do what is right, and obey the law, and not look for ways to subvert it or bend the rules, because otherwise they are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

It's human nature to take the easy way and do what is expedient, which is how it plays out in TV cop shows. But in the real world, these guys have to do what is right, for the sake of the light of liberty - which is incredibly fragile. They're supposed to be defenders of the Constitution, which is a very fragile idea about freedom. I hope the agencies involved see the big picture and understand what is really at stake, rather than get defensive and cynical about troublesome rules and regulations that "only make their work harder."

Here are a few semi-cheesey series that might fit the bill.

7 Days Not too bad as is.
Code Name Eternity Very low budget feel.
Earth 2 As mentioned by others.
First Wave Not a terrible premise.
Harsh Realm Came out the same year as The Matrix.
Level 9 Hackers working for the government?
Space Above And Beyond
Space Precinct 2040 Like Barney Miller in space.
Starhunter Interesting premise.
TekWar William Shatner's trashterpiece.
The Invaders The most retro of the lot.
The Secret Adventures Of Jules Verne Too British.
The Sentinel Featuring Fiona Apple's brother.
The Starlost With Keir Dullea - already mentioned.
Time Trax Tootsie as the computer interface?
Total Recall 2070 Could have been better.
Welcome To Paradox

I think Harsh Realm and Level 9 would be the most interesting.

Do yourself a favor and check out the Matrix Logic books by August Stern. I don't understand why the simple concept of logic as a vector process (a matrix process) isn't better known. I regret even mentioning the words vector and matrix, lest they put people off of understanding how simple the idea is. Conceptually deep, though.

Matrix Logic will completely reshape your head. I hope you truly want what you asked for.

I wanted a NeXT at that time. Man, $6500! But there was no Photoshop equivalent for NeXT, despite their photoshopped brochures, so I called their office in California (seriously) to see if they had any image manipulation software. The person on the phone, a very nice woman, only had scripts to read from. Later that week, though, I happened to see a piece of mail sent from the Free Software Foundation to a professor at my university. (Just the return address, not the contents of the letter.) That's when it first hit ME, that collaboration was an unstoppable idea, because code is modular and such. I had a terrible notion that it would all happen really quickly, that if I borrowed money to buy a NeXT, that free Photoshop-equivalent software would be available almost right away. I'm glad I waited for OS X.

So it's good that Linus came along with a much more realistic idea of time and what could be done with it, with perseverance. Kudos and happy birthday, Penguin person.

The phase space of this experiment is too large to explore with the simple rating system. No wonder the "survivors" all sound hyper-sequenced and repetitive, and nothing like Beethoven. What's happening is a bifurcation of the binary number space, because a music sequence is just a binary value occurring on a binary timeline, and each vote of plus or minus is a bifurcation of that space. An "i love it" vote is no less a simple plus, just a plus with extra survival chances.

The problem is that within the regions of binary space that are voted down, there could be much Beethoven, or even all of Beethoven - who could never be mistaken for OMD or The Magnetic Fields (sans lyrics).

The "evolutionary pressure" here is not astute, not deep. The "survivors" might have a glittering sonic quality, enough to get drive-by votes, but the set-up of the experiment could never teach us anything about music aesthetics. I suggest that this algorithm be re-purposed to selecting blinking patterns for Christmas light displays. Same thing, really - but it has nothing to teach us about music.