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Comment Program is not shut down (Score 3, Informative) 6

If one were to read the rest of the article, one would see that the program is still up:

"The agency now prohibits volunteers from having access to children’s family names and addresses, said spokeswoman Sue Brennan. The Postal Service instead redacts the last name and addresses on each letter and replaces the addresses with codes that match computerized addresses known only to the post office"

This system was put into place last year when the sex offender was discovered. It worked then and it is working now.

It is true that not all post office sites have the capacity to use this new system, however many of the major hubs are still open. Seems odd to me that with this service being such a central part of the North Pole, Alaska operation that they wouldn't find a way to meet the system requirements.

Comment Stupid. (Score 1) 234

This pisses me off. Account compromising is already a problem in WoW, having a single login tied to all your Blizzard games just increases the opportunities for your account information to be lifted.

I already hate that the Bliz forums require your account login info in order to post, they could have had a one-off login for the forums so if your computer is infected with a keylogger or packet sniffer your game account would not be compromised.

For Steam games it's not that big a deal - the games aren't MMOs so you don't have toons that you have worked on for months or years being destroyed if you get hacked.

Single-account login is a step backwards in security, not a step forward. The Bliz exe who thought up this brain-dead idea probably uses the same login and password for his bank, credit card, phone, energy company, and email. Stupid.

Comment Re:At the Risk of Sounding Like an Apologist (Score 1) 832

I believe his primary function is a flight droid so they were built to interface with ships. Not a lot else. John Scalzi seems to suffer from the "must have everything" school of thought and doesn't think the future will focus on minimalism and getting one thing right. Thank god he's not writing software and just another hot air blogger. I reject Episodes I, II & III so I don't know what he's talking about with the oil slick and jets.

I can understand R2 series not coming factory-installed with a voice mod. However, given the disproportionate ammount of time this particular astromech droid spends trying to communicate with non-binary-speakers, I have a hard time believing that all of his owners would have the patience to rely on crude beep-code translations, C3P0, or wait for him to jack into a terminal to figure out what he was trying to say.

The little guy tries to save the day as often as any other character in the series, how could the other characters not be annoyed at missing critical information when translation wasn't available?

Hell, I've upgraded all of my main boards to brands/models that have voice error messages instead of annoying beep codes that require a manual to decipher. You can be damn sure that a voice mod would be one of the first things I did to a sentient droid.

Comment Re:If you have enemies... (Score 1) 256

I (a geneticist) have to disagree. What you say is true for PCR as it is performed now, but a number of existing and rather routine quality control tests could be added to whatever law enforcement protocol is to circumvent this rather crude attempt to dupe the system. You may be able to make a library, but you would have to do so in a YAC, BAC or plasmid (Yeast Artificial Chromosome, Bacterial Artificial Chromosome, and, well, plasmid). Such structures are detectable and discoverable. Even if you performed mini-preps and purified out only the human segments your end sequences would be restriction enzyme cuts -- also discoverable via annealment and/or sequencing properties. That and your end solution would be purified DNA in the absence of other human (or any!) DNA. You'd have to replicate the rest of the human genome sans the SRS sites that would otherwise be amplified to perform identification. Possible but not exactly trivial, especially if needing to do everything in the right relative quantities. Your planted sample would also need to have other genetic markers of your target â" example should the individual have blue eyes and brown hair, and you planted genomic DNA that called for brown eyes & hair, your sample would be exposed. Or say something more esoteric, like your target having a gene that predisposes them to a certain type of heart disease when your sample did not. Next, you would need a human tissue sample -- blood, hair, semen, etc that has similarly been stripped of otherwise identifiable sequences. Absolutely non-trivial. Otherwise the lack of human cell-surface markers would be a pretty tell-tale sign that the sample was artificial, and if you used an unmodified source you would get a duplexed result. Finally, single-cell PCR is now possible. In the lab we can isolate a single cell in a media bath and perform PCR on it. So in order to fool this sort of analysis you are going to have to perform transgenic modification on a cell culture to get your SRS library transfected into a living cell in the right quantity. Not only that but if with FISH analysis you would also have to get each SRS inserted into the correct chromosome and in the correct orientation, without leaving otherwise tell-tail signs of manipulation. That would be a really tricky bit of work. No, I think it would be a heck of a lot easier to try and obtain a living sample of the targetâ(TM)s cells, preferably something like a hair follicle, maybe get some epithelial cells from a discarded cup or some such. Trick would be to get that sample into a cell growth media quickly enough to rescue any still-living cells and then culture them. Of course then you have to again deal with purity issues â" a lot of the chemicals used in cell culturing would also be detectable even in trace amounts. Cell morphology for cells grown in culture tends to differ than that of naturally grown cells, etc. Overall this would be akin to planting a fingerprint from a discarded bit of trash, only a heck of a lot more complicated. So yes, you could attempt to trick the system, and it may even work. But any number of assays that currently exist could be used to quickly identify any such attempt this sort of fraud. Besides which, DNA evidence is currently classed as circumstantial evidence not direct, and cannot typically be used to convict on itâ(TM)s own merit. You still need to pair with the Big Three (means, motive, opportunity) as well as a preponderance of other bits of circumstantial or direct evidence.

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