It ain't perfect, but it's without a doubt the most reliable criminal identification tool we've got. If we go back to rigged line-ups and botched fingerprint analysis, the world will be a less just place.

And a good defense counsel will make sure the jury knows about the potential problems of DNA matching. I served on a jury in which we rejected badly-collected DNA evidence and (for that reason and many others) acquitted the defendant.

The biggest difference between facial recognition and DNA fingerprinting is that DNA fingerprinting actually works.

I'm the original poster: glad you see what I did there. IANAL either, but I bet taking material from the outside of someone's house won't pass constitutional muster either, though it's much murkier than demanding a cheek swab.

I'll be honest here and say that I didn't intend for this to be a totally realistic scenario... just one with enough truth to scare y'all. Think of it as the Slashdot equivalent of a spooky campfire story.

Here's a scenario for ya. You're on the scene on day ten of the latest round of anti-capitalist protests in Zucotti Park, New York city. The crowd gets a little unruly and a full-scale riot breaks out. A cop gets his head caved in with a brick, a couple people get trampled, and the tear gas and truncheon work gets underway. The crowd scatters and disperses, and you go home and wash the tear gas out of your eyes.

Two days later, the cops show up at your apartment. It turns out they mixed a little DNA taggant into the tear gas grenades. They're going door to door throughout antiestablishment hot-spots in the city, asking for people to let them take a swab off their skin, so they can find the bastards who started the deadly riot. If you refuse, they apologize politely, and then swab your door handle on their way out.

Without taking a stand on either case, I have to say that digging back through 23 years of Ortiz's career to find some vague evidence of misconduct is pretty much the definition of muckraking. Honestly, if you have to look this hard to find some dirt on a U.S. attorney, she's remarkably clean for someone in her career.

The author is clearly going for a hatchet-job rather than honest investigative journalism, and as such, their motives are not to be trusted.

You should have Google Earth in front of you though. I measured it.

Shanghai to London via Northwest Passage: 16,000 km.
Shanghai to London via Panama Canal: 25,000 km.
Shanghai to London via Suez Canal: 19,500 km.

The Earth is not a rectangle.

(Amazingly, the Northwest Passage is not just the fastest way to go from Shanghai to London: it's also shorter than the Panama route if you're going to Cuba or Puerto Rico.)

Fortunately, 18th century lock engineers were smarter than you. Read and learn:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lock_(water_transport)#Water_saving_basins
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:LockWithPond_draw.gif

Yes, you lose a some water through the lock every time you use it, and that's an important concern. But through the clever use of water saving basins (aka "side ponds"), you can make the volume lost *much* less than the volume of the lock or the ship inside it. In the limit of an infinite number of side ponds (which is impractical), water use goes to zero!

That's not a particularly stable, rule of law part of the world.

Jesus, are you stuck in the '80s. Almost every nation in the Americas has been a more-or-less-stable, more-or-less democracy since the end of the Cold War. Nicaragua's government is a bit socialist for U.S. tastes, but it's perfectly legitimate.

Good on you for having the guts to admit it. You got that *so* wrong. :)

The water saving thing in modern locks works without pumps, it's all gravity feed. It's actually a pretty clever system, check it out sometime.

Yeah, so I'm looking at this map. Yeah, Nicaragua is wide, but there's this big old lake on the Pacific side of it. The lake must drain to the Pacific Ocean, right? Wait a second, it doesn't? You mean I could sail a boat from the Carribean up the San Juan river and get to within 10 miles of the Pacific? ... hmmm....

Do some reading before you spout your mouth off.

There is no doubt, however, that a cargo ship can move containers efficiently on water, but unless one lives on the coast in a port city, at some point, that container will need to be shipped by land.

The vast majority of people in the U.S. live within 100 miles of a major navigable body of water (Pacific, Atlantic, or Great Lakes). The land side of the transport equation is negligible in terms of distance, but is significant in terms of cost: you don't want to add to it.

Also, you're making a big deal about travel time, but in practice, people who ship stuff on cargo ships don't care how long it takes to get there. They deliberately design those suckers to go slow, because fuel efficiency is more important than speed. Transoceanic shippers work on the pipeline plan: if you want one shipment to arrive every week this month, you make sure you sent off a ship once a week three months ago.

I've done the math.

You've done it wrong. Here it is, to an order of magnitude, assuming the entire island of Greenland is a big block of ice:

Volume = area * height

Area of Greenland = 2 million km^2.
Elevation of Greenland = 2.5 km.
Volume of Greenland = 5 million km^3

Area of Earth's oceans = 340 million km^2
Height = volume / area = 5 million km^2 / 340 million km^3 = .014 km = 14 meters.

This is an overestimate because some of the volume of Greenland above sea level is rock rather than ice. If you figure it's 1/2 ice, 1/2 rock (which it is), you get 7 meters, the value reported by most reputable scientists. In any case, it is definitely meters, not inches.

I realize you're making a dig at the US, but I don't think the Chinese would be on board with your analogy. They'd see it this way:

"So the USA can meddle in Taiwan, but China cannot meddle in Florida? Seems fair..."

(Puerto Rico might be a better analogy, but you get the point.)

You probably shouldn't lump an entire continent together like this: "Africa" is not one place. By your standards, Europe has been in a state of constant war for more than a century now (WWI, spanish civil war, WWII, cold war, Cyprus, Bosnia, Chechnya).

Many nations within Africa, like South Africa, Zambia, and Tanzania, have been at peace since the end of colonial rule. Not all of these places are bastions of democracy, but if you're a business owner looking for a stable place to run a factory, that's maybe not a big deal.

No, the problem with Africa isn't violence, it's infrastructure. The China Miracle is based on superhighways, rail lines, and a stable power grid.