Journalist: // Sits at the library sorting through articles, looking for that 2007 piece on O'Neal //
Journalist: Dang, I wish there was a better way of doing this
Google: I can help you!
EU: No. You can't. Journalist, I'm afraid you're going to have to do this by hand if you want the data.
Journalist: But the data is still there... can't Google just help me sift through it?
EU: No. Go home. There's nothing to see here.
EU: // Thinks about removing the data all together. Stupid libraries, always archiving news... We should just write our own history. //

The whole idea behind safety is that you follow certain rules. These simply *cannot* exist in academia the same way that they can in industry.

In academia, you're trying new things every day, often using protocols that you've made up, or have never used before at the very least. This is just the nature of the beast.

In industry you're generally making a well-defined product. You already know how to produce it, or your project would be in academia. If you already know what you're doing and have Standard Operating Procedures already in place, then OF COURSE you're going to make less mistakes!

Yep, mine does the same thing. Always unnerving to know that others have access to -- what should be -- encrypted data / passwords.

I'm guessing they meant that the key necessary to decrypt the data was never on the systems which *stored* the data, but that's just a guess (since as you pointed out, if they used 3DES, the encryption key IS the decryption key, and I doubt they lied about that).

The technology to synthesize DNA has existed for decades, but is limited in the length of DNA pieces that it can produce. Companies like genescript (mentioned in the article) can put the pieces together for you, but there's even a limit to how much they can put together for you. Plus they've been around for many years now. So first off, this is nothing new.

Second, the program that's reference here isn't really that amazing. There are scores of tools that exist for copying and pasting DNA sequences. Back in the day I used to do it in notepad (and still do from time to time). The fact that they let you essentially "edit the text of your essay" and that it integrates databases of "essays" is cool, but there have been lots of tools like this in the past, (I use them all the time).

I guess what I'm saying is this: there's nothing new here, and even if it was... all you're getting in the mail is DNA -- not the organism. As others have stated, it's an entirely different thing. DNA is completely benign and is just a dry powder at the bottom of a vial. You could eat the suff, no matter the sequence.

Perhaps Monsanto isn't as bad as they're portrayed here...

That said, I believe the farmer who sold his seeds to the grain elevator was in the wrong, not the farmer (who didn't even know better) who purchased the seeds. This is similar to the file sharer being in the wrong, as opposed to the pirate.

When farmers use Monsanto seeds, they have to realize that they can't redistribute those seeds (or seeds made from those seeds). If this were legal, then Monsanto could be cut out of the picture after the first sale. Farmers could just go to "special" grain elevators who were known to have Monsanto seed progeny and pick up some good cheap stuff. In this case, Monsanto would never be able to recoup the time and billions of dollars spent developing those seeds. It's important to therefore realize that farmers who use Monsanto seeds forfeit their right to distribute seeds to grain elevators; this is their choice.

Farmers choose to use Monsanto seeds. If they still want to distribute seeds to grain elevators, then they can't use Monsanto's products. If it's so crucial that they use Monsanto products, then all hail Monsanto for saving the grain market -- it would have failed (or at least done more poorly) otherwise. And if Monsanto is price gouging, then competitors should have no problem creating alternative products and undercutting them... but they can't because of the aforementioned time and billions spent (which Monsanto needs to recoup or they can't make these "crucial" products).

Although it's easy to paint a David and Goliath portrait here and shed tears for the poor farmers getting sued by a big corporation, right and wrong aren't so black and white here. There's a reason why the laws (made by the people) are defending Monsanto's products here. It's simply not an easy case.

I think it's much more likely that this problem exists for more than just New Zealand's yahoo servers. A couple years back I deleted my rarely-used Yahoo account because I got a hacked email sent to my common email address from it (as did others in my address book). I hadn't been logged in for quite some time, and I had a very secure password. Whatever the security flaw was, I really don't think it was at the user end (I consider myself to be pretty adept at computer security), and I didn't want any part of it.

I can't wait for false DMCA-ers to start getting sued for BS take down notices.

It's great to keep finding these earth-like planets, but wouldn't it make more sense to first focus our searches on:

1) Star systems of the right elemental makeup where planets could have iron cores
2) Star systems of the right age, where the earth-like planets with iron cores would likely still have a molten core capable of producing a magnetosphere

I think we've all but proven that finding planets of the right size, within the right distance of their star, are perhaps abundant enough (see mars). That's great, and we can postulate that there might be liquid water on them because of this, but what we really need to worry about is their ability to produce a magnetosphere capable of holding in all that good stuff against the sweeping winds produced by their star.

Does anyone have some insight as to how easy or hard it would be to try to identify star systems with these characteristics *before* looking to see if we can find earth-like size/distance planets?