(1) The NYT has published a piece on the "era of reckoning." That's the time we're living in now. DNA technology allows cold case specialists to solve cases that are 40 years old. One extraordinary item is this: Long ago, cops could not extract a great deal of information from discarded clothing, fingernail clippings. But they suspected that science might one day allow them to do things they could never imagine. So they held on to possessions that seemed not to carry much meaning. And now, of course, those possessions are gold mines. Before sites like Ancestry.com became popular, there was a problem. Cops could take your DNA and try to match you against information in a police database, but if you hadn't committed a previous crime, then the cops weren't going to have any useful information about you. No "match" would be possible. Sites like Ancestry.com solve this problem. You don't need to have committed a previous crime to be "availabl...