@mikedudeRx: Let me make it EXPLICIT that I am not talking about the value of targeted testing for people that already have disease. What is atomb52 going to do with his BCRA status unless he has breast cancer? Also, you do realize that BCRA is patented and you have to pay $3000 in fees to get that scanned.

@armin_i: Also, there are some tests like BCRA that will tell you if your cancer will respond to treatment. This, however, only applies to people who have breast cancer. I'm focusing on the general populous.

@armin_i: I'm not sure of the prognostic value of all trait-based tests but the disease-based tests are not so good. Lactose tolerance and alcohol flushing (liver alcohol dehydrogenase) are single-gene traits so are easy to predict. Very very few traits or diseases exhibit single gene inheritance. Height has to be…

@diehippiedie: You can find relatives because that tech is based on a different system that uses restriction enzymes to cut the DNA and then compares the lengths of different segments. However you would have to have a library of DNA samples from all possible candidates and have them processed in the same way. Not…

@DrunkenOstrich: I don't know much on the psychological disorders in general. I have heard that schizophrenia is highly heritable, which suggests it may behave according to Mendellian genetics. Supposing it was a single-gene recessive disorder, if neither parent had symptoms but your sibling did (making a lot of…

DO NOT DO THIS

There is a standard disclaimer for any Colorware post. Two points. If it is so easy to disassemble and powdercoat a laptop, then you'd expect another company to compete with them on price. Colorware has been around for a long time, no competitors I am aware of that undercut them, therefore it is likely that there…

Comic sans is a good font, this is why: if we define a font's "goodness" as how often it is appropriate, comic sans is appropriate in more situations than most fonts. Seriously. How often is Bauhaus appropriate? How often is Hadley or Cooper appropriate? Comic sans is easily in the top 50% of useful fonts.

@Yerzriknot: Bush did not respond to public demands. The public did not want to go to Iraq (maybe Afghanistan but not Iraq). If you continue Googling, you will find that most of these guys, Chertoff included, take comfy "consulting" gigs with military companies after their tenure. They are getting paid off for…

@Yerzriknot: The people who made these decisions weren't elected. Google "Chertoff".

It is hard to know who to be upset with. Clearly the people responsible for designing the TSA policy bear the responsibility but they are shielded from the unhappy populous.

@xd.Balls: I was going to say something about how I would much prefer Google scanning my files rather than TSA touching my nutsack. Then I saw your username.

@wheresmyjetpack: Reread what I wrote and you'll see that I said they may save lives BUT AT GREAT COST. If we are going to spend money to save lives, there are cheaper ways to save more lives. Terrorism doesn't kill many people compared to, say, diabetes.

@minibeardeath: You make the organism dependent on an unnatural amino acid. Then there is evolution...

@Craig Cragoo Fernandez: Given the amount of money being spent on the TSA, you could definitely save more lives like investing in other areas like healthcare or safety devices in public roads.

If Kinect fighting games get realistic and a player gets good at compensating for the lag, I wonder what happens when the gamer gets in a real fight? Duck a moment too late? I wonder if that is what it feels like to have Parkinson's disease, if it feels a bit like lag.

@KBlack: Both funny and a good point. Well said.

@Zanzan42: I was with you until you said behavior profiling. Without clear, indisputable guidelines, this would be a free pass for any redneck TSA agent to pull over every arab passenger. Then people of middle eastern descent act nervous, they are IDed by behavior profiling... cycle continues.

@wheresmyjetpack: A slippery slope argument is a well-defined rhetorical technique. This is not an example of that.

@balloondoggle: I'm glad things have gone well for you. Our concern here is that evidently the screens do not go smoothly for some and they don't even get an apology, much less an appeal. Because of these enhanced screening procedures, there is now a greater chance that you may get an uncomfortable screen in the…