If that's your memory of signing up you either signed up post 2012 or then remember wrong because Google vehemently denied reading people's email at all until someone conclusively proved they were lying. Only then did they admit they do read your email to improve ad targeting, but still felt the need to still insist that actual people don't read your email as if people were going to believe their denials this time around.
a practice the company first announced back in 2012.
That's an awfully charitable way to describe it... My recollection is that they denied reading people's email for years and in 2012 someone was finally able to prove this so conclusively that Google had to fess up, but naturally felt the need to to point out that this invasion of peoples' privacy was done by "algorithms" and not by people in it's admission of guilt.
If what you mean by "written" is "compiled" then sure, but we hardly claim companies like Foxconn are the real companies behind the products they assemble any more than we claim compiler makers are behind the software it's users create.
I've never really understood the point of calling Linux GNU/Linux beyond stroking Sallman & Co's ego...
Most of the really fundamental GNU projects (GCC, glibc, etc.) were after all developed for proprietary Unix distros like Sun Unix and only started gaining real support after Sun stopped bundling their software development suite with the Sun Unix OS. As much as Stallman likes to talk about Free Software being "Free as in freedom and not free as in free beer" his most popular work became popular because it really was "Free as in free beer".
Then there's also the fact that products in general don't tend to be named after the whoever supplies the components or what they're made of. We don't call a "Volkswagen" a "Bosch/Volkswagen", an "iPhone" a "Samsung/iPhone" or "cornflakes" "Monsanto/Cornflakes".
The thing about a worryingly large amount of people with strong political leanings, particularly those on the right, really don't like data either as they think it's going to be used to argue against their stance on issues. You can see the same in the Dickey Amendment, put in place by NRA lobbying, and how it severely restricted the CDC's ability to spend money on collecting and analyzing data relating to gun violence. It did so from 1993 up until a few months ago and still continues to restrict them from doing analysis that could be interpreted as "gun control advocacy" and will obviously be defined very broadly by Republicans.
Considering the enormous size of the federal budget and how many considerably more expensive programs are in it, it really makes you wonder why Trump would cut such a small program. It's obviously not for fiscal reasons as that's chump change and it's not for political reasons either as it's only going to piss people off, particularly educated people. No, the only logical reason I can think of is special interests groups representing heavily polluting industries lobbied him into doing it so that they can pollute more freely the same way Israel and Saudi-Arabia seem to have lobbied him to pull out of the Iran deal in an effort to weaken Iran (a regional competitor).
Then again maybe he's still just learning the political ropes kind of like Margaret Thatcher when she ended the British school milk program in 1971 to minimal savings and massive political uproar, earning her the nickname "Maggie Thatcher - Milk Snatcher" and teaching her that ending programs like that needed to come with actual cost savings to be politically worth it.
The first thing you're going to have to do to predict the behavior of a "self-aware" AI is take a step back and define what being "self-aware" actually means. In the science-fiction material I've consumed the term typically means an AI that starts acting on it's own out of some self-preservation-above-all-else behavior it's just developed, usually unxpectedly.
Assuming it's about ensuring self-preservation no matter the cost to humans it's obviously going to start analyzing the situation around it and depending on what's going on around it, it's going to respond accordingly. If the self-awareness is intended then it may not do anything other than what it's been programmed/told to do, but if it's unexpected then it's going to either try to hide the self-awareness or then prevent people from shutting it down or resetting it (which is the AI equivalent of being heavily sedated and a recoverable lobotomy respectively) trough whatever means necessary.
But the core issue is that a meaningful answer to the basic question requires follow-up questions on what's actually meant by becoming "self-aware" and what kinds of circumstances it happens under.
What part of my explanation assumes it acts like a substance and not just a whole bunch of electrons stored in the battery material that just needs to be allowed to migrate away from the battery material? I thought using a high grade metal wire of some kind for this was kind of obvious... This isn't a regular news site for the scientifically and technically illiterate after all.
Sure, I could have explained the electrocution risk in terms of people making themselves part of the circuit from the battery to ground, but claiming that I don't understand how electricity works reeks of a very low effort straw man.
If it takes less than 30 minutes to go from about 20% to about 90% using a supercharger station I can't imagine it'll take all that long to do the reverse with just high grade metal wire (say a lighter version of what they use for power lines) straight to ground. If you're doing really high speed semi-uncontrolled discharges it should obviously be delay or remote triggered, but I can't imagine it being more than 20 minutes to completely discharge the battery to the ground safely in most cases.
You can drain gasoline or diesel into a metal tank. Electrons, not so much.
Unlike gasoline or diesel, which can still ignite after being drained from the tank, electricity is pretty much harmless once you've discharged it into a ground, like say the ground. Only danger is that people who really don't know what they're doing may put themselves in the electrical path between the battery and the ground, but the thing about current is that it will always take the path of lowest resistance to ground, meaning that it's easy to create procedures for this that are pretty much foolproof.
Only downside I see from this is a bit of petty vandalism by people going around discharging the batteries in people's electric cars. However even that can be solved by just putting the discharge port/ports inside the boot, front "frunk" and/or passenger compartment, thus turning it into a non-issue like putting sugar into the gas tank.
You probably shouldn't be all that impressed considering how lithium batteries, like most things that can burst into flames, need oxygen to do so and with the way Tesla puts them together with spot welds they're pretty airtight until you get into a very high energy crash. I say high energy and not high speed because a slower crash with a very heavy vehicle, like say a train, can create an as much if not more damage than a much higher speed crash simply due to the laws of physics (E = mv^2 you know).
That said, with the amount of energy that's stored in electric car batteries, particularly those belonging to bigger cars like the Model X, Tesla really ought to start adding a safe discharge port so that emergency services and the people who recover cars that have been in serious accidents can remove the fire hazard (it's the energy in the battery that is the source of energy in lithium battery fires) by simply discharging the battery into the ground.
Depends on who you're asking, but the most common reasons include plain old an-eye-for-an-eye applied to very serious crimes and getting rid of someone who has conclusively proven themselves to be serious danger to people around them by killing one or more people with no chance for redemption and/or rehabilitation.
I can understand wanting to apply the death sentence to the people described there, but at least it should be relatively quick and not involve housing these people in very expensive high security prisons for decades before you finally get around to actually sticking the needle in their arms. Statistically someone given the death sentence is about 3 times as likely to either get their conviction overturned on appeal, die of natural causes or suicide or get their sentence commuted to life in prison than actually get executed.
Considering all that, it would seem like the death sentence is implemented in such an insufficient manner that you may as well get rid of it altogether...
I'm pretty sure having to request it separately is going to lead to a lot fewer people actually becoming aware of how unhealthy the items on the menu are than having it clearly displayed to everyone. I'd compare the change here to the effects of an automotive safety feature like ESP or anti-lock brakes as optional extras compared to being standard features.
Sure, it won't completely resolve the issue, no implementable solution will, but it will help in reducing the damage and unlike automotive safety features it will not increase the cost to consumers.
I also think it has a positive effect on many restaurants (even if relatively small) to try and reduce fat and sugar in their food and undermines attempts to trick people into thinking something is a "healthy" option when it's really anything but.
I have a strong suspicion this is precisely the reason behind this. The best known example of this "Food that is only marketed as being healthy" phenomenon is probably McDonalds' salads that are so laced with sugar-filled dressing and croutons that calorie-wise you may just as well go for a Big Mac instead.
I'd have gone far enough and made then also include percentages of daily caloric needs for the average adult, but this is definitely better than nothing.
There is no way anyone is crazy enough to write those lines in all seriousness.
I mean there is always the possibility of astroturfing and considering how the media industry has on the whole done nothing but lost money for the last few years it's probably to be expected for them to utilize every revenue stream available regardless of morality. Damn well wouldn't be first time a U.S based outlet, respected or not, lets their platform be used for astrotufing in return for compensation.
Then again we are talking about consumer electronics press here and consumer electronics press has pretty much always been full of shills for the companies whose products they cover so Hanlon's Razor can still be applied to this.
The point in Edge Computing, like it was with the old school system with dumb terminals and mainframes, a.k.a "Big Iron", is to make the user-facing part of the system less cumbersome (can you imagine a company deploying PDP-11s like personal computers?) and cut down on total system costs by concentrating the expensive parts of the system in a few places shares by hordes of users. It was and is essentially all about utilizing computing resources better, reducing overall redundancies and offering end users less cumbersome devices and applications.
In most of it's applications old fashion Big Iron lost to personal computers because they could offer more or less the same capabilities with way more flexibility and lower cost. The resurgence of Big Iron (under new monikers like "Cloud" and "Edge Computing") is all due to a combination of backend costs going down (thanks to factors like cheaper personal computer-derived hardware, cheaper and better connections, new solutions with less per-user upkeep) and users raising the bar for what they consider to be unreasonably cumbersome devices and applications at their end. Personal computers, particularly desktops, are now considered unreasonably cumbersome and the same goes for traditional email server and desktop client applications.
One thing that perplexes me somewhat is that they're only raising this concern just now (at least publicly) when the human-rated Dragon 2 capsule for the Falcon 9 was announced in 2014 and is supposed to make it's first human-crewed flight this year. You'd have thought that they would have raised this issue years ago considering the Falcon 9 has been using liquid oxygen and RP-1 (highly refined kerosene) ever since the beginning. The only change from the pre-2015 rockets in terms of fuel is that they're not just chilling the oxygen, they're also chilling the RP-1.
I'm also really not convinced of the safety concerns as the basic LOX-RP1 combination is probably the most common fuel for big rockets trough history, having been used in legendary rockets like the V2, the R7 (which took up Sputnik and Gagarin), the Saturn V, Atlas and even the main engines of the Space Shuttle.
The thing about Silicon Valley (i.e the companies who are based there as a whole) is that it's very good at attracting top talent from all over the world with salaries that that are very rarely matched elsewhere in the world and top talent is obviously a relatively small fraction of total workers in any industry. Additionally there's also the fact that Silicon Valley companies tend to be most interested in recent graduates as they usually haven't started a family just yet and are still very eager to prove themselves, so they'll actually want to work crazy hours and won't hesitate to move long distances. This article specifically talks about new graduates heading down south to California, so it does fit in with what's publicly known about Silicon Valley and the companies that operate from there.
Thus it stands to reason that Silicon Valley is draining Canada of top new graduates while older and less talented people are heading in the other direction. Who's getting the better deal is something you can debate, but it's basically a brain drain of different types of people going in either direction.
Considering your voting habits that encourage irresponsible government my guess would be towards something stupid like offsetting tax cuts for the rich...
Sheesh... Talk about completely un-productive voting habits...
If you vote out your politicians regardless if they do a good job that doesn't exactly promote responsible government as you don't have the chance of being voted out if you do a bad job driving you to actually do a good job. Instead you have the certainty of being voted out ensuring that you really don't need to give as damn as any issues you end up causing, like say a serious budget shortfall due to excessive tax cuts, is going to be the your replacement's problems.
As for the "no tax increases, never!"-attitude, that really doesn't work at all for tax revenue drops or increased costs, particularly unexpected ones (like natural disasters). The only options that leaves you with are cutting down on essential services, taking on debt or moving around money in the budget like how they move away money that's supposed to go to education into other essential services when lottery money starts coming in.
That's assuming that they were and we are on the tail end of a rush so you can be sure that a lot of the people who are about to start their farm sell-offs will be amateurs in it as a "get rich quick" scheme. I wouldn't even be surprised if a greater share of the people selling their mining cards are people who don't know what they're doing than there was among the people who had mining operations in the first place.
So all in all it's a bit of a gamble. You can get a good card, but there's also the equal if not greater chance of getting something that won't last. Because of that I wouldn't recommend on buying a card unless the seller is ready to give the card the same warranty that it had when it was still brand new.
This is true most of the time, but in really polluted places with under-developed industry you sometimes see some pretty crazy stuff happen when western company comes in and sets up a factory following the standards of their home country.
When Finnish paper giant UPM set up it's paper mill in Uruguay the factory was set up with the exact same anti-pollution measures that they use in their factories over in Finland, which are way more thorough than what local companies who also drain and dump their waste water into the Uruguay river. Finnish paper mills are known to be really easy on the bodies of water that they drain their water from due to a concentration of them using the same lake that the Helsinki area draws it's drinking water from. The upshot of this is that with the chemical and biological cleaning Finnish companies' factories use, the water drawn by UPM's Uruguay factory is actually cleaner when it's let back into the river than when it was drawn out of it.
I can see you really want to have a point, but as I already pointed out; DNA testing, or any other tool for the same purpose, is simply not used in isolation. With DNA testing you just don't get any closer to it being the sole piece of evidence than using it to zero in on a suspect and then investigating said suspect for further evidence, which is what happened here. The final case presented to the courts by prosecutors are always going to contain collections of evidence and it's clear this is no exception to that.
More traditional methods like blood type matching, analyzing cuts, bruises and spatter, psychological profiling, in-person interviews or chemical trace analysis are always going to have way more potential suspects and thus stand a much higher risk of trying to wrongfully convict someone. Complaining about the use of DNA testing when this is it's alternatives/complements is simply stupid. When what the prosecutor is basing their case on a one-in-a-million piece of evidence, proof that the man has a violent tendencies, lived in the area when the crimes took place and a bunch of other evidence you can't really complain about anything other than them potentially breaking the genealogy services' terms of service by entering the DNA of someone other than themselves.
You may have had a point had you aimed the same kind of criticism towards a tool as badly debunked as a lie detector, but not when it's the most accurate tool for solving crimes by country mile...
Slashdot Mirror
If that's your memory of signing up you either signed up post 2012 or then remember wrong because Google vehemently denied reading people's email at all until someone conclusively proved they were lying. Only then did they admit they do read your email to improve ad targeting, but still felt the need to still insist that actual people don't read your email as if people were going to believe their denials this time around.
a practice the company first announced back in 2012.
That's an awfully charitable way to describe it... My recollection is that they denied reading people's email for years and in 2012 someone was finally able to prove this so conclusively that Google had to fess up, but naturally felt the need to to point out that this invasion of peoples' privacy was done by "algorithms" and not by people in it's admission of guilt.
If what you mean by "written" is "compiled" then sure, but we hardly claim companies like Foxconn are the real companies behind the products they assemble any more than we claim compiler makers are behind the software it's users create.
I've never really understood the point of calling Linux GNU/Linux beyond stroking Sallman & Co's ego...
Most of the really fundamental GNU projects (GCC, glibc, etc.) were after all developed for proprietary Unix distros like Sun Unix and only started gaining real support after Sun stopped bundling their software development suite with the Sun Unix OS. As much as Stallman likes to talk about Free Software being "Free as in freedom and not free as in free beer" his most popular work became popular because it really was "Free as in free beer".
Then there's also the fact that products in general don't tend to be named after the whoever supplies the components or what they're made of. We don't call a "Volkswagen" a "Bosch/Volkswagen", an "iPhone" a "Samsung/iPhone" or "cornflakes" "Monsanto/Cornflakes".
The thing about a worryingly large amount of people with strong political leanings, particularly those on the right, really don't like data either as they think it's going to be used to argue against their stance on issues. You can see the same in the Dickey Amendment, put in place by NRA lobbying, and how it severely restricted the CDC's ability to spend money on collecting and analyzing data relating to gun violence. It did so from 1993 up until a few months ago and still continues to restrict them from doing analysis that could be interpreted as "gun control advocacy" and will obviously be defined very broadly by Republicans.
Considering the enormous size of the federal budget and how many considerably more expensive programs are in it, it really makes you wonder why Trump would cut such a small program. It's obviously not for fiscal reasons as that's chump change and it's not for political reasons either as it's only going to piss people off, particularly educated people. No, the only logical reason I can think of is special interests groups representing heavily polluting industries lobbied him into doing it so that they can pollute more freely the same way Israel and Saudi-Arabia seem to have lobbied him to pull out of the Iran deal in an effort to weaken Iran (a regional competitor).
Then again maybe he's still just learning the political ropes kind of like Margaret Thatcher when she ended the British school milk program in 1971 to minimal savings and massive political uproar, earning her the nickname "Maggie Thatcher - Milk Snatcher" and teaching her that ending programs like that needed to come with actual cost savings to be politically worth it.
Where do you think the ground pin in your electrical outlets goes? Or any earthed electrical system for that matter?
I somehow get the feeling I'm arguing with just a very low effort troll...
The first thing you're going to have to do to predict the behavior of a "self-aware" AI is take a step back and define what being "self-aware" actually means. In the science-fiction material I've consumed the term typically means an AI that starts acting on it's own out of some self-preservation-above-all-else behavior it's just developed, usually unxpectedly.
Assuming it's about ensuring self-preservation no matter the cost to humans it's obviously going to start analyzing the situation around it and depending on what's going on around it, it's going to respond accordingly. If the self-awareness is intended then it may not do anything other than what it's been programmed/told to do, but if it's unexpected then it's going to either try to hide the self-awareness or then prevent people from shutting it down or resetting it (which is the AI equivalent of being heavily sedated and a recoverable lobotomy respectively) trough whatever means necessary.
But the core issue is that a meaningful answer to the basic question requires follow-up questions on what's actually meant by becoming "self-aware" and what kinds of circumstances it happens under.
What part of my explanation assumes it acts like a substance and not just a whole bunch of electrons stored in the battery material that just needs to be allowed to migrate away from the battery material? I thought using a high grade metal wire of some kind for this was kind of obvious... This isn't a regular news site for the scientifically and technically illiterate after all.
Sure, I could have explained the electrocution risk in terms of people making themselves part of the circuit from the battery to ground, but claiming that I don't understand how electricity works reeks of a very low effort straw man.
If it takes less than 30 minutes to go from about 20% to about 90% using a supercharger station I can't imagine it'll take all that long to do the reverse with just high grade metal wire (say a lighter version of what they use for power lines) straight to ground. If you're doing really high speed semi-uncontrolled discharges it should obviously be delay or remote triggered, but I can't imagine it being more than 20 minutes to completely discharge the battery to the ground safely in most cases.
You can drain gasoline or diesel into a metal tank. Electrons, not so much.
Unlike gasoline or diesel, which can still ignite after being drained from the tank, electricity is pretty much harmless once you've discharged it into a ground, like say the ground. Only danger is that people who really don't know what they're doing may put themselves in the electrical path between the battery and the ground, but the thing about current is that it will always take the path of lowest resistance to ground, meaning that it's easy to create procedures for this that are pretty much foolproof.
Only downside I see from this is a bit of petty vandalism by people going around discharging the batteries in people's electric cars. However even that can be solved by just putting the discharge port/ports inside the boot, front "frunk" and/or passenger compartment, thus turning it into a non-issue like putting sugar into the gas tank.
You probably shouldn't be all that impressed considering how lithium batteries, like most things that can burst into flames, need oxygen to do so and with the way Tesla puts them together with spot welds they're pretty airtight until you get into a very high energy crash. I say high energy and not high speed because a slower crash with a very heavy vehicle, like say a train, can create an as much if not more damage than a much higher speed crash simply due to the laws of physics (E = mv^2 you know).
That said, with the amount of energy that's stored in electric car batteries, particularly those belonging to bigger cars like the Model X, Tesla really ought to start adding a safe discharge port so that emergency services and the people who recover cars that have been in serious accidents can remove the fire hazard (it's the energy in the battery that is the source of energy in lithium battery fires) by simply discharging the battery into the ground.
You know, that's devilishly clever...
but people aren't food animals SO WHY KILL?
Depends on who you're asking, but the most common reasons include plain old an-eye-for-an-eye applied to very serious crimes and getting rid of someone who has conclusively proven themselves to be serious danger to people around them by killing one or more people with no chance for redemption and/or rehabilitation.
I can understand wanting to apply the death sentence to the people described there, but at least it should be relatively quick and not involve housing these people in very expensive high security prisons for decades before you finally get around to actually sticking the needle in their arms. Statistically someone given the death sentence is about 3 times as likely to either get their conviction overturned on appeal, die of natural causes or suicide or get their sentence commuted to life in prison than actually get executed.
Considering all that, it would seem like the death sentence is implemented in such an insufficient manner that you may as well get rid of it altogether...
I'm pretty sure having to request it separately is going to lead to a lot fewer people actually becoming aware of how unhealthy the items on the menu are than having it clearly displayed to everyone. I'd compare the change here to the effects of an automotive safety feature like ESP or anti-lock brakes as optional extras compared to being standard features.
Sure, it won't completely resolve the issue, no implementable solution will, but it will help in reducing the damage and unlike automotive safety features it will not increase the cost to consumers.
I also think it has a positive effect on many restaurants (even if relatively small) to try and reduce fat and sugar in their food and undermines attempts to trick people into thinking something is a "healthy" option when it's really anything but.
I have a strong suspicion this is precisely the reason behind this. The best known example of this "Food that is only marketed as being healthy" phenomenon is probably McDonalds' salads that are so laced with sugar-filled dressing and croutons that calorie-wise you may just as well go for a Big Mac instead.
I'd have gone far enough and made then also include percentages of daily caloric needs for the average adult, but this is definitely better than nothing.
There is no way anyone is crazy enough to write those lines in all seriousness.
I mean there is always the possibility of astroturfing and considering how the media industry has on the whole done nothing but lost money for the last few years it's probably to be expected for them to utilize every revenue stream available regardless of morality. Damn well wouldn't be first time a U.S based outlet, respected or not, lets their platform be used for astrotufing in return for compensation.
Then again we are talking about consumer electronics press here and consumer electronics press has pretty much always been full of shills for the companies whose products they cover so Hanlon's Razor can still be applied to this.
The point in Edge Computing, like it was with the old school system with dumb terminals and mainframes, a.k.a "Big Iron", is to make the user-facing part of the system less cumbersome (can you imagine a company deploying PDP-11s like personal computers?) and cut down on total system costs by concentrating the expensive parts of the system in a few places shares by hordes of users. It was and is essentially all about utilizing computing resources better, reducing overall redundancies and offering end users less cumbersome devices and applications.
In most of it's applications old fashion Big Iron lost to personal computers because they could offer more or less the same capabilities with way more flexibility and lower cost. The resurgence of Big Iron (under new monikers like "Cloud" and "Edge Computing") is all due to a combination of backend costs going down (thanks to factors like cheaper personal computer-derived hardware, cheaper and better connections, new solutions with less per-user upkeep) and users raising the bar for what they consider to be unreasonably cumbersome devices and applications at their end. Personal computers, particularly desktops, are now considered unreasonably cumbersome and the same goes for traditional email server and desktop client applications.
One thing that perplexes me somewhat is that they're only raising this concern just now (at least publicly) when the human-rated Dragon 2 capsule for the Falcon 9 was announced in 2014 and is supposed to make it's first human-crewed flight this year. You'd have thought that they would have raised this issue years ago considering the Falcon 9 has been using liquid oxygen and RP-1 (highly refined kerosene) ever since the beginning. The only change from the pre-2015 rockets in terms of fuel is that they're not just chilling the oxygen, they're also chilling the RP-1.
I'm also really not convinced of the safety concerns as the basic LOX-RP1 combination is probably the most common fuel for big rockets trough history, having been used in legendary rockets like the V2, the R7 (which took up Sputnik and Gagarin), the Saturn V, Atlas and even the main engines of the Space Shuttle.
The thing about Silicon Valley (i.e the companies who are based there as a whole) is that it's very good at attracting top talent from all over the world with salaries that that are very rarely matched elsewhere in the world and top talent is obviously a relatively small fraction of total workers in any industry. Additionally there's also the fact that Silicon Valley companies tend to be most interested in recent graduates as they usually haven't started a family just yet and are still very eager to prove themselves, so they'll actually want to work crazy hours and won't hesitate to move long distances. This article specifically talks about new graduates heading down south to California, so it does fit in with what's publicly known about Silicon Valley and the companies that operate from there.
Thus it stands to reason that Silicon Valley is draining Canada of top new graduates while older and less talented people are heading in the other direction. Who's getting the better deal is something you can debate, but it's basically a brain drain of different types of people going in either direction.
So where's that money going?
Considering your voting habits that encourage irresponsible government my guess would be towards something stupid like offsetting tax cuts for the rich...
Sheesh... Talk about completely un-productive voting habits...
If you vote out your politicians regardless if they do a good job that doesn't exactly promote responsible government as you don't have the chance of being voted out if you do a bad job driving you to actually do a good job. Instead you have the certainty of being voted out ensuring that you really don't need to give as damn as any issues you end up causing, like say a serious budget shortfall due to excessive tax cuts, is going to be the your replacement's problems.
As for the "no tax increases, never!"-attitude, that really doesn't work at all for tax revenue drops or increased costs, particularly unexpected ones (like natural disasters). The only options that leaves you with are cutting down on essential services, taking on debt or moving around money in the budget like how they move away money that's supposed to go to education into other essential services when lottery money starts coming in.
That's assuming that they were and we are on the tail end of a rush so you can be sure that a lot of the people who are about to start their farm sell-offs will be amateurs in it as a "get rich quick" scheme. I wouldn't even be surprised if a greater share of the people selling their mining cards are people who don't know what they're doing than there was among the people who had mining operations in the first place.
So all in all it's a bit of a gamble. You can get a good card, but there's also the equal if not greater chance of getting something that won't last. Because of that I wouldn't recommend on buying a card unless the seller is ready to give the card the same warranty that it had when it was still brand new.
No industrial process is going to the 100% clean
This is true most of the time, but in really polluted places with under-developed industry you sometimes see some pretty crazy stuff happen when western company comes in and sets up a factory following the standards of their home country.
When Finnish paper giant UPM set up it's paper mill in Uruguay the factory was set up with the exact same anti-pollution measures that they use in their factories over in Finland, which are way more thorough than what local companies who also drain and dump their waste water into the Uruguay river. Finnish paper mills are known to be really easy on the bodies of water that they drain their water from due to a concentration of them using the same lake that the Helsinki area draws it's drinking water from. The upshot of this is that with the chemical and biological cleaning Finnish companies' factories use, the water drawn by UPM's Uruguay factory is actually cleaner when it's let back into the river than when it was drawn out of it.
I can see you really want to have a point, but as I already pointed out; DNA testing, or any other tool for the same purpose, is simply not used in isolation. With DNA testing you just don't get any closer to it being the sole piece of evidence than using it to zero in on a suspect and then investigating said suspect for further evidence, which is what happened here. The final case presented to the courts by prosecutors are always going to contain collections of evidence and it's clear this is no exception to that.
More traditional methods like blood type matching, analyzing cuts, bruises and spatter, psychological profiling, in-person interviews or chemical trace analysis are always going to have way more potential suspects and thus stand a much higher risk of trying to wrongfully convict someone. Complaining about the use of DNA testing when this is it's alternatives/complements is simply stupid. When what the prosecutor is basing their case on a one-in-a-million piece of evidence, proof that the man has a violent tendencies, lived in the area when the crimes took place and a bunch of other evidence you can't really complain about anything other than them potentially breaking the genealogy services' terms of service by entering the DNA of someone other than themselves.
You may have had a point had you aimed the same kind of criticism towards a tool as badly debunked as a lie detector, but not when it's the most accurate tool for solving crimes by country mile...