Unfortunately, prospective employers tend to judge you before they meet you. It's kind of their job.

Even though Microsoft used comic books as an example, finding another comic book geek isn't going to be the use of this method... it's going to be used to find someone with a compatible sexual fetish. That information definitely does not need to be available to employers, coworkers, family, etc unless you choose to make it so.

Right, and those areas with high levels of polymorphism tend to be non-coding DNA almost by definition.

That's right. We've got the best government that money can buy!

At that point you just pre-print the postage right on the envelope, and pay for it when buying envelopes.

You really think someone is going to spend the effort and legal liability of cracking a government code just to save $4 on 10 letters? Especially once people start getting denied because the same person sent out 10 letters over and over. Besides... easy fix. Put the address you are sending to in the message, keep that in a database and compare once the letter actually comes in.

And I would have got away with it if it wasn't for you meddling kids!

Which, in theory, should be somewhat alleviated by the patent office now holding on to the license fees rather than passing them on to patch the general budget. Well, unless corruption is actually one of the largest driving factors. Which, having worked in a beaurocracy, I highly doubt.

Depends on your definition of low cost. If you are comparing it to cotton, then it's moderately pricey. If you are comparing it to carbon nanotubes... then it's an outright bargain.

I'll put it this way... Wall Street does more gambling than Las Vegas Blvd: at least the casinos know the odds, and don't bet unless they are in their favor.

The real solution? Reimage the production server to just get it working, then you dig around on the dev server until you find out what's actually going on.