I'm not sure how an example of a satellite collision having happened before demonstrates anything here. People get hit by lightning too. The actual odds of it happening are still minuscule. We're talking about danger on the order of dying from tripping walking down the street. It happens, but it's generally not even worth considering. Ditto with this satellite.
The information the article gives about the actual orbit of this satellite is so pathetically bad that it's hard to say anything based on it, but I think we can assume that this is in a low orbit (like the satellites you mentioned that collided). LEO is more crowded, increasing the chance of a collision, but the odds are still tiny and even satellites in stable LEO only stay up a few years, so it's hard to imagine this one will be up there for any significant time at all if its orbit is so messed up. Also, if it did collide with another LEO satellite, the cascading collision scenario would run into a hitch since nearly all of the fragments would probably end up intersecting the atmosphere in relatively short order. It's worth noting that the collision you mentioned does not seem to have resulted in a domino effect scouring all satellites out of the skies.
This article is marginally informative, but the tone of it is clearly an anti-North Korea hit piece. North Korea may well be awful, but putting up a satellite in an uncontrolled orbit is hardly a first. For that matter, if North Korea is dangerously incompetent for launching a satellite that maybe, just maybe possibly could collide with another and create a troublesome debris field, what does that say about the US and China who have both successfully tested anti-satellite weapons? Which is worse, doing something that could potentially create a dangerous debris field if you're very unlucky, or just callously creating one on purpose?
"tumbling out of control" is a bit of hyperbole from the press
I would have to say "the greatest danger is the threat of it colliding with another satellite, adding to the growing debris field around the earth" is another fine example of that hyperbole. I mean, it's probably technically true. The odds may be infinitesimal, but still higher than the odds of any other danger.
NG for vehicles is pointless without liquifaction technology. It can be compressed, but holds nowhere near as much energy per volume as LP gas, much less gasoline or diesel.
Some progress has been made with carbon nanopore tanks for high density natural gas storage at much lower pressures, which allows for smaller tanks which can also be shaped to fit better without all the wasted space of stacks of gas cylinders.
In terms of physical dimensions, ie volume, this thing is a lot smaller than the shuttle. If it were the same shape as the space shuttle, but a quarter the length, it would have only 1/64th the volume. As it is, 29 feet isn't even one quarter of the length of the space shuttle, but instead more like 1/6th, which puts this craft at something like 1/216th the size of the space shuttle. The X-37B is comparable in size to a large consumer pickup truck. From the weight figures that have been thrown around, it's pretty clear that the X-37B is a lot denser than the shuttle, but that's probably mostly just fuel.
While there are problems with the GP's theory, you may not completely be understanding capitalism yourself, at least as it seems to apply to the pharmaceutical industry. For example, there have been many instances of sweetheart deals between drug manufacturers with expiring patents and manufacturers of generics where the original manufacturer has paid the generic manufacturers _not_ to produce generics. As long as the profit margin is high enough on the original and would be low enough on the generics, it's viable. At least, it's viable enough for long enough that, even if you can't say that the industry outright blocks things, it does have a certain... inertia about it.
I'm not sure you quite grasped what the GP said. Take the set of integers. A subset of the infinite sequence of integers is [1,2,3,4,5]. Now, is that subset repeated an infinite number of times in the infinite sequence of all integers?
Policies like that are just so stupid. I remember my University had a policy like that for being excused for classes (those classes that actually cared about attendance in the first place, anyway). The one time I truly felt sick enough to need to do that I ended up trudging uphill through snow in high winds in freezing weather to health services, where I got to sit waiting for over an hour so they could look at me and perform some pointless tests and tell me that I should rest and get plenty of fluids. With all the time I wasted doing that, I should have just gone to class. I wouldn't have gotten any benefit out of it, but I didn't get any benefit out of going to health services either.
Mostly agree with you, but, as I said, if the editors want this content here, they should at least categorize it correctly. As a sports article, I suppose it's fine, but as a math article, it's just not up to the weight class of the kinds of math articles we expect here. I mean, seriously, the typical math article here is generally pretty dumbed down as it is. This is a general purpose nerd site, not a math nerd site, so the math articles are already lightweight ones for general consumption. As a math article, this one was truly pathetic.
Credit risk profiling is part of my job and these models do indeed wok
But as you say, they need large sample sizes to be effective, and they also unfairly disenfranchise a lot of people. It's disturbing enough with credit. It's even worse when you're talking about a basic right like travel.
Good thing you read the article and posted a two-paragraph comment on it then.
Would it be fair to translate that as: "If you don't like it, sit down and shut up!" Seems like it to me and, no thanks. You can go on about how some people are interested and how Slashdot should appeal to a more general audience, blah blah blah. Frankly, I don't want Slashdot to got the way of all those cable TV channels that had a speciality and now are cesspools of "reality" wedding and cake shows.
If this were under an actual sports section, I wouldn't mind so much (not that I even want Slashdot to have a sports section, but it would be easier to opt out of it). It wasn't though, it was under Math. This is not math news. We're all already aware that really basic statistical analysis is used in sports. Woohoo. This is one of those articles intended to get the stereotypical common man who not only doesn't care about math, but actively despises it to pop up his head and say "oh, I guess math can be used for at least some useful stuff". That's not really the Slashdot audience. If you read this site, it's generally expected that, even if you're not a math whiz, you're at least not an anti-intellectual who thinks that it's useless.
I'm going to stick with the sports news is boring and irrelevant position thanks. At the very least, it's irrelevant here on Slashdot. This doesn't mean that I don't personally find many sports fun, I've just never been particularly enthusiastic about watching them. There are some that I find boring to play as well as watch. Cricket and baseball, for example. I mean, it's bad enough watching them being played and realizing that all of the actual action could be compressed down to a few minutes, but to actually play and not even have the opportunity to even participate in 90+% of the action that actually does happen? Bleh.
Also, don't get me wrong. I'm all for improving things through analysis, but I've never enjoyed that very much in sports. Maybe it's because I've always really enjoyed volleyball. I've also always been good at it and I have very distinct memories of seething hatred of people in charge turning what could have been fun games of volleyball between kids into pointless, soul-sucking workshops on bump-set-spike.
Nope on the 28 days. A year is, indeed, 88 days on Mercury and Mercury does, indeed, rotate three times for every two Mercury years. This makes the sidereal day on Mercury 56 days long. That would make the sunset to sunrise period 28 days as you say. It would, except for the high orbital eccentricity. A solar day/night cycle on Mercury ends up being exactly two Mercury years. So sunrise to sunset really is 88 days, or one Mercury year.
Have you used the world wide web lately? Let me give you a hint. At the moment, I'm looking at the URL bar of my browser. The URL in it right now is being displayed without the http:// it just starts with slashdot.org. After the slashdot.org, it's followed with comments.pl which is the name of a script and after that, by a question mark, then by a list of arguments and values separated by ampersands. The same sort of thing is true of many pages people visit. Even when the URL looks like a normal, non-script URL like the one you linked to in your post, it's pretty clear once you get to the page that it's a generated page. The advertising and the comments at the bottom of the page, etc. are all being generated by a script in the background somewhere.
You're basically trying to draw a distinction that isn't particularly meaningful any more. They accessed a URL, accessible to anyone on the Internet, as you said. That's the relevant part.
Nope. Although I wasn't exactly using that event as a direct analogy to the events in the article, just a related anecdote. If we want to use it as an analogy, we have to decide what particular thing is analogous to the downloading of a page. If it's entering the bathroom, using the toilet, flushing, washing and drying my hands, then leaving, then it's one versus 14,000. On the other hand, disgusting as a it may be, we could also count individual droplets or even molecules/ions of water, urea, salt, etc. since those might actually be a better analogy to individual http requests. In that case we can be talking either the same approximate order of magnitude, or even far, far more "uses" in the other direction. Really all this says is that analogies are only thought experiments. Things like this really do need to be considered in their own context and a comparison to something else may be useful, but doesn't have to be an exact fit.
Ultimately, it was the obligation of AT&T to keep that information private and they failed. Anyone with any understanding realizes that there was nothing constituting reasonable security protecting that data. That someone who accessed it faces prison, yet no-one at AT&T faces the same fate is clearly unjust.
Considering that sunset to sunrise on Mercury is about 88 days long, I don't think there's going to be much of a problem. Also, although the output from the sun is pretty intense at that range, it's all radiant heat. It can be dealt with by using some reflective foil, some insulation and a correctly oriented boom to re-radiate what does get through. After all, it's not as if Mariner 10 and MESSENGER had much trouble with the "near-impossible" task of approaching Mercury. Certainly, the solar activity was a design consideration. The bigger problem, however, was likely the delta-v required, which is greater than that required to leave the solar system. The lack of a significant atmosphere could make landing difficult as well. We've landed probes on Mars, which has almost exactly the same surface gravity and about 11% higher escape velocity than Mercury, but aerobraking and parachutes were used in combination with thrusters and/or air bags for those landings. For Mercury, you might be able to do some aerobraking to save a little fuel, but I'm not sure it would save anything because you would need extra fuel for the weight of the shield in the first place, although you could also use a very light shield... In any case, most of the landing would need to be thrusters, maybe combined with airbags for a final drop. It's still doable. We managed the moon, after all, even though it has approximately half the escape velocity of Mercury.
Venera 9 lasted for nearly an hour (maybe more, but the orbiter moved out of radio range). Venera 10 lasted over an hour. It's certainly hostile, but there's no need to exaggerate, the actual survival times of the landers make it sound bad enough.
As for Mercury, it's only hot on the side facing the sun.
If we're going by the recent version of _War of the Worlds_ you would think that, when they're planning an invasion they would just invade right away rather than burying their tripods for centuries or more until humans built their cities above. Seems like a lot of work to go to in order to surprise attack people who haven't even been born yet.
Ha! You're using the invention of the telephone as an example of the patent system working well? I suppose, from Bell's point of view, it worked well. Of course, it looks like he had a mole in the patent office to slip his patent into the pile ahead of Gray's when he filed his. If he hadn't been on the ball, he might have ended up being cheated out of cheating Gray out of the patent.
Face it, the patent system has been bad for just about everyone pretty much since its inception. Not particularly surprising for something that originated as a system for monarchs to grant business monopolies to cronies in exchange for kickbacks.
The information was being served by AT&T's servers without any sort of authentication required. The car analogy isn't a very good one. This is more like an entrance in a commercial building, parts of which are open to the public. When you go to a store, you expect to be able to walk into doors that are open to you, provided they're not marked "employees only" or something like that. If you walk into an open side door, discover it doesn't lead to the sales floor, then tell the store manager about it so that they'll close the door, you shouldn't be arrested for it.
Come to think of it, I've actually done something like that years and years ago. I walked into a restaurant once at around 9 in the morning. The place had one main door, which led to a small entry area with a door on the left and a door on the right. There was I was a bit desperate to go to the bathroom and wasn't really looking around, and the bathroom was right inside the door I took. When I was done using the bathroom, I thought I would see about having breakfast there. That turned out to be a problem because the place was closed. No-one was there at all. Seems that they just left the outer door open, and the inner door that I came in wasn't closing properly, so it didn't lock. When I realized that the place was closed, I left right away. I considered leaving a note about the sticking door, but decided against it. What if they had a security camera, checked it because of my note, got my license plate, then had me arrested? Most reasonable people would have recognized it as an honest mistake, but there are an alarming number of unreasonable people out there. I decided I wouldn't be helping them much by leaving a note. It's not as if anyone with a $5 crowbar couldn't have opened that door even if it wasn't sticking. Stories like this one make me more convinced that I was better off just keeping my head down.
Sorry, when did I say people shouldn't lift weights because there's some small danger? I was just pointing out that "Lifting weights never killed anyone in this age group" is kind of a ridiculous statement. Heck "X never killed anyone" is kind of a ridiculous statement for a pretty huge variety of items X. I wasn't making some sort of argument against weight-lifting, I was just being pedantic.
It gets pretty scary when you start to consider just how many little bits of you fall off and float away through the air every day. All those hairs and skin cells, etc. end up somewhere. They can end up stuck to someone and end up on the other side of the world. With sensitive enough tests, all those little bits can be found and traced back to you, and all of a sudden, you're being brought in to explain what you were doing at a crime scene you never visited.
Then there's the simple fact that biometric identifiers aren't really as unique as people make out. Having everyone's fingerprints on file seems like it would be a great idea, until you realize just how many people actually have fingerprints which are essentially indistinguishable. When you have a suspect based on other evidence and you can compare their fingerprints to ones found at the scene, it's a great piece of additional evidence. When the only evidence you have is a fingerprint found at the scene and it implicates thousands of possible suspects, that's more problematic. Bringing them all in for questioning goes way beyond reasonable. The same is true of DNA. The markers they check for can find just one, or a small number, of matches from a large sample group. Increase the sample group size to the entire population and, all of sudden, a lot of people come up and have the pall of suspicion cast over them. More extensive testing can narrow it down, but the police may simply opt to bring all the positives in and interrogate them. They also might just decide to charge whichever match lives closest, or who matches some vague eyewitness description of someone who was walking down the street at some point within a few hours of when the crime is estimated to have happened. Then that person can spend a few years, and enough money to destroy the rest of their life, to get to the point where they can demonstrate clearly in court that a more complete DNA comparison clears them.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure how an example of a satellite collision having happened before demonstrates anything here. People get hit by lightning too. The actual odds of it happening are still minuscule. We're talking about danger on the order of dying from tripping walking down the street. It happens, but it's generally not even worth considering. Ditto with this satellite.
The information the article gives about the actual orbit of this satellite is so pathetically bad that it's hard to say anything based on it, but I think we can assume that this is in a low orbit (like the satellites you mentioned that collided). LEO is more crowded, increasing the chance of a collision, but the odds are still tiny and even satellites in stable LEO only stay up a few years, so it's hard to imagine this one will be up there for any significant time at all if its orbit is so messed up. Also, if it did collide with another LEO satellite, the cascading collision scenario would run into a hitch since nearly all of the fragments would probably end up intersecting the atmosphere in relatively short order. It's worth noting that the collision you mentioned does not seem to have resulted in a domino effect scouring all satellites out of the skies.
This article is marginally informative, but the tone of it is clearly an anti-North Korea hit piece. North Korea may well be awful, but putting up a satellite in an uncontrolled orbit is hardly a first. For that matter, if North Korea is dangerously incompetent for launching a satellite that maybe, just maybe possibly could collide with another and create a troublesome debris field, what does that say about the US and China who have both successfully tested anti-satellite weapons? Which is worse, doing something that could potentially create a dangerous debris field if you're very unlucky, or just callously creating one on purpose?
"tumbling out of control" is a bit of hyperbole from the press
I would have to say "the greatest danger is the threat of it colliding with another satellite, adding to the growing debris field around the earth" is another fine example of that hyperbole. I mean, it's probably technically true. The odds may be infinitesimal, but still higher than the odds of any other danger.
NG for vehicles is pointless without liquifaction technology. It can be compressed, but holds nowhere near as much energy per volume as LP gas, much less gasoline or diesel.
Some progress has been made with carbon nanopore tanks for high density natural gas storage at much lower pressures, which allows for smaller tanks which can also be shaped to fit better without all the wasted space of stacks of gas cylinders.
In terms of physical dimensions, ie volume, this thing is a lot smaller than the shuttle. If it were the same shape as the space shuttle, but a quarter the length, it would have only 1/64th the volume. As it is, 29 feet isn't even one quarter of the length of the space shuttle, but instead more like 1/6th, which puts this craft at something like 1/216th the size of the space shuttle. The X-37B is comparable in size to a large consumer pickup truck. From the weight figures that have been thrown around, it's pretty clear that the X-37B is a lot denser than the shuttle, but that's probably mostly just fuel.
While there are problems with the GP's theory, you may not completely be understanding capitalism yourself, at least as it seems to apply to the pharmaceutical industry. For example, there have been many instances of sweetheart deals between drug manufacturers with expiring patents and manufacturers of generics where the original manufacturer has paid the generic manufacturers _not_ to produce generics. As long as the profit margin is high enough on the original and would be low enough on the generics, it's viable. At least, it's viable enough for long enough that, even if you can't say that the industry outright blocks things, it does have a certain... inertia about it.
It's good to know that there's still plenty of money to be made by industrious people in good, old-fashioned graft. From home no less!
I'm not sure you quite grasped what the GP said. Take the set of integers. A subset of the infinite sequence of integers is [1,2,3,4,5]. Now, is that subset repeated an infinite number of times in the infinite sequence of all integers?
Also, that's the combination for my luggage.
Policies like that are just so stupid. I remember my University had a policy like that for being excused for classes (those classes that actually cared about attendance in the first place, anyway). The one time I truly felt sick enough to need to do that I ended up trudging uphill through snow in high winds in freezing weather to health services, where I got to sit waiting for over an hour so they could look at me and perform some pointless tests and tell me that I should rest and get plenty of fluids. With all the time I wasted doing that, I should have just gone to class. I wouldn't have gotten any benefit out of it, but I didn't get any benefit out of going to health services either.
Mostly agree with you, but, as I said, if the editors want this content here, they should at least categorize it correctly. As a sports article, I suppose it's fine, but as a math article, it's just not up to the weight class of the kinds of math articles we expect here. I mean, seriously, the typical math article here is generally pretty dumbed down as it is. This is a general purpose nerd site, not a math nerd site, so the math articles are already lightweight ones for general consumption. As a math article, this one was truly pathetic.
Credit risk profiling is part of my job and these models do indeed wok
But as you say, they need large sample sizes to be effective, and they also unfairly disenfranchise a lot of people. It's disturbing enough with credit. It's even worse when you're talking about a basic right like travel.
Good thing you read the article and posted a two-paragraph comment on it then.
Would it be fair to translate that as: "If you don't like it, sit down and shut up!" Seems like it to me and, no thanks. You can go on about how some people are interested and how Slashdot should appeal to a more general audience, blah blah blah. Frankly, I don't want Slashdot to got the way of all those cable TV channels that had a speciality and now are cesspools of "reality" wedding and cake shows.
If this were under an actual sports section, I wouldn't mind so much (not that I even want Slashdot to have a sports section, but it would be easier to opt out of it). It wasn't though, it was under Math. This is not math news. We're all already aware that really basic statistical analysis is used in sports. Woohoo. This is one of those articles intended to get the stereotypical common man who not only doesn't care about math, but actively despises it to pop up his head and say "oh, I guess math can be used for at least some useful stuff". That's not really the Slashdot audience. If you read this site, it's generally expected that, even if you're not a math whiz, you're at least not an anti-intellectual who thinks that it's useless.
I'm going to stick with the sports news is boring and irrelevant position thanks. At the very least, it's irrelevant here on Slashdot. This doesn't mean that I don't personally find many sports fun, I've just never been particularly enthusiastic about watching them. There are some that I find boring to play as well as watch. Cricket and baseball, for example. I mean, it's bad enough watching them being played and realizing that all of the actual action could be compressed down to a few minutes, but to actually play and not even have the opportunity to even participate in 90+% of the action that actually does happen? Bleh.
Also, don't get me wrong. I'm all for improving things through analysis, but I've never enjoyed that very much in sports. Maybe it's because I've always really enjoyed volleyball. I've also always been good at it and I have very distinct memories of seething hatred of people in charge turning what could have been fun games of volleyball between kids into pointless, soul-sucking workshops on bump-set-spike.
Nope on the 28 days. A year is, indeed, 88 days on Mercury and Mercury does, indeed, rotate three times for every two Mercury years. This makes the sidereal day on Mercury 56 days long. That would make the sunset to sunrise period 28 days as you say. It would, except for the high orbital eccentricity. A solar day/night cycle on Mercury ends up being exactly two Mercury years. So sunrise to sunset really is 88 days, or one Mercury year.
Have you used the world wide web lately? Let me give you a hint. At the moment, I'm looking at the URL bar of my browser. The URL in it right now is being displayed without the http:// it just starts with slashdot.org. After the slashdot.org, it's followed with comments.pl which is the name of a script and after that, by a question mark, then by a list of arguments and values separated by ampersands. The same sort of thing is true of many pages people visit. Even when the URL looks like a normal, non-script URL like the one you linked to in your post, it's pretty clear once you get to the page that it's a generated page. The advertising and the comments at the bottom of the page, etc. are all being generated by a script in the background somewhere.
You're basically trying to draw a distinction that isn't particularly meaningful any more. They accessed a URL, accessible to anyone on the Internet, as you said. That's the relevant part.
Nope. Although I wasn't exactly using that event as a direct analogy to the events in the article, just a related anecdote. If we want to use it as an analogy, we have to decide what particular thing is analogous to the downloading of a page. If it's entering the bathroom, using the toilet, flushing, washing and drying my hands, then leaving, then it's one versus 14,000. On the other hand, disgusting as a it may be, we could also count individual droplets or even molecules/ions of water, urea, salt, etc. since those might actually be a better analogy to individual http requests. In that case we can be talking either the same approximate order of magnitude, or even far, far more "uses" in the other direction. Really all this says is that analogies are only thought experiments. Things like this really do need to be considered in their own context and a comparison to something else may be useful, but doesn't have to be an exact fit.
Ultimately, it was the obligation of AT&T to keep that information private and they failed. Anyone with any understanding realizes that there was nothing constituting reasonable security protecting that data. That someone who accessed it faces prison, yet no-one at AT&T faces the same fate is clearly unjust.
Considering that sunset to sunrise on Mercury is about 88 days long, I don't think there's going to be much of a problem. Also, although the output from the sun is pretty intense at that range, it's all radiant heat. It can be dealt with by using some reflective foil, some insulation and a correctly oriented boom to re-radiate what does get through. After all, it's not as if Mariner 10 and MESSENGER had much trouble with the "near-impossible" task of approaching Mercury. Certainly, the solar activity was a design consideration. The bigger problem, however, was likely the delta-v required, which is greater than that required to leave the solar system. The lack of a significant atmosphere could make landing difficult as well. We've landed probes on Mars, which has almost exactly the same surface gravity and about 11% higher escape velocity than Mercury, but aerobraking and parachutes were used in combination with thrusters and/or air bags for those landings. For Mercury, you might be able to do some aerobraking to save a little fuel, but I'm not sure it would save anything because you would need extra fuel for the weight of the shield in the first place, although you could also use a very light shield... In any case, most of the landing would need to be thrusters, maybe combined with airbags for a final drop. It's still doable. We managed the moon, after all, even though it has approximately half the escape velocity of Mercury.
Isn't it: "Autobots, transform and roll out!". The Avengers are the ones who assemble.
Venera 9 lasted for nearly an hour (maybe more, but the orbiter moved out of radio range). Venera 10 lasted over an hour. It's certainly hostile, but there's no need to exaggerate, the actual survival times of the landers make it sound bad enough.
As for Mercury, it's only hot on the side facing the sun.
You're also ignoring a lot of moons.
If we're going by the recent version of _War of the Worlds_ you would think that, when they're planning an invasion they would just invade right away rather than burying their tripods for centuries or more until humans built their cities above. Seems like a lot of work to go to in order to surprise attack people who haven't even been born yet.
Ha! You're using the invention of the telephone as an example of the patent system working well? I suppose, from Bell's point of view, it worked well. Of course, it looks like he had a mole in the patent office to slip his patent into the pile ahead of Gray's when he filed his. If he hadn't been on the ball, he might have ended up being cheated out of cheating Gray out of the patent.
Face it, the patent system has been bad for just about everyone pretty much since its inception. Not particularly surprising for something that originated as a system for monarchs to grant business monopolies to cronies in exchange for kickbacks.
Not to mention that they're all using web-based mail, or tweets, or facebook posts.
The information was being served by AT&T's servers without any sort of authentication required. The car analogy isn't a very good one. This is more like an entrance in a commercial building, parts of which are open to the public. When you go to a store, you expect to be able to walk into doors that are open to you, provided they're not marked "employees only" or something like that. If you walk into an open side door, discover it doesn't lead to the sales floor, then tell the store manager about it so that they'll close the door, you shouldn't be arrested for it.
Come to think of it, I've actually done something like that years and years ago. I walked into a restaurant once at around 9 in the morning. The place had one main door, which led to a small entry area with a door on the left and a door on the right. There was I was a bit desperate to go to the bathroom and wasn't really looking around, and the bathroom was right inside the door I took. When I was done using the bathroom, I thought I would see about having breakfast there. That turned out to be a problem because the place was closed. No-one was there at all. Seems that they just left the outer door open, and the inner door that I came in wasn't closing properly, so it didn't lock. When I realized that the place was closed, I left right away. I considered leaving a note about the sticking door, but decided against it. What if they had a security camera, checked it because of my note, got my license plate, then had me arrested? Most reasonable people would have recognized it as an honest mistake, but there are an alarming number of unreasonable people out there. I decided I wouldn't be helping them much by leaving a note. It's not as if anyone with a $5 crowbar couldn't have opened that door even if it wasn't sticking. Stories like this one make me more convinced that I was better off just keeping my head down.
Sorry, when did I say people shouldn't lift weights because there's some small danger? I was just pointing out that "Lifting weights never killed anyone in this age group" is kind of a ridiculous statement. Heck "X never killed anyone" is kind of a ridiculous statement for a pretty huge variety of items X. I wasn't making some sort of argument against weight-lifting, I was just being pedantic.
It gets pretty scary when you start to consider just how many little bits of you fall off and float away through the air every day. All those hairs and skin cells, etc. end up somewhere. They can end up stuck to someone and end up on the other side of the world. With sensitive enough tests, all those little bits can be found and traced back to you, and all of a sudden, you're being brought in to explain what you were doing at a crime scene you never visited.
Then there's the simple fact that biometric identifiers aren't really as unique as people make out. Having everyone's fingerprints on file seems like it would be a great idea, until you realize just how many people actually have fingerprints which are essentially indistinguishable. When you have a suspect based on other evidence and you can compare their fingerprints to ones found at the scene, it's a great piece of additional evidence. When the only evidence you have is a fingerprint found at the scene and it implicates thousands of possible suspects, that's more problematic. Bringing them all in for questioning goes way beyond reasonable. The same is true of DNA. The markers they check for can find just one, or a small number, of matches from a large sample group. Increase the sample group size to the entire population and, all of sudden, a lot of people come up and have the pall of suspicion cast over them. More extensive testing can narrow it down, but the police may simply opt to bring all the positives in and interrogate them. They also might just decide to charge whichever match lives closest, or who matches some vague eyewitness description of someone who was walking down the street at some point within a few hours of when the crime is estimated to have happened. Then that person can spend a few years, and enough money to destroy the rest of their life, to get to the point where they can demonstrate clearly in court that a more complete DNA comparison clears them.
Why? The various animated relatives of the PNG tend to be a lot more efficient than the GIF format.