So if much of the commodity seed out there is now roundup-ready, farmers may have an increasingly difficult time buying non-modified seed. That means Monsanto would have poisoned the well of the competition: natural seeds. There are two monopolistic behaviors here: protecting your inventive production method and choking out competing production methods through non-market actions. Patents are only meant to support the former, not the latter. Fostering market competition between production methods (i.e. GMO vs. non-GMO seeds) is the implicit aim of patent law (by promoting the creation of new production methods to be market-tested). The fact that life-based patents have the capacity to cross-breed (literally crowd out) or, at the very least reproduce themselves (having a market-crowding-out effect) should give the courts serious pause in upholding them. Both of these are negative externalities born by consumers of the competing products. The practical implication for a win by Monsanto is that patenters making life-based modifications will seek to make those modifications cross-breedable and pervasive to the "competing" natural versions, since contaminating the natural version will amount to "expanding the user base."

I used to think of smokers as irrational, but perhaps they just don't like surprises -- they want to know in advance how they're going to die. Smoking - it's like buying insurance against accidental death!

RTFA and you learn that they've only been storing the first 16 characters for years, letting you type away in vain. Otherwise they'd have to produce new hashes for the "shorter" passwords that they expect users to use now. (There's no such thing as reading the first 16 digits of a hashed password).

It's not news that electronic systems can be insecure. Those selecting such systems are certainly lobbied to believe that, whatever system they choose, "this time it will be different... this one IS secure."

The truth is all voting systems -- manually or electronically administered -- are insecure. The feature that traditionally manual voting systems have is that the scale of voting fraud exacted is correlated with the scale of corrupt election officials overseeing the process. To increase fraud you either need a) more conspirators or b) higher-level conspirators in the body that oversees the process. That is a feature that is worth keeping in any new version of voting system.

This article is just another example of a voting system that has given up the feature. Not all electronic voting systems forsake this feature, but those that keep it are at most electronic-assisted voting systems that retain distributed verification at multiple stages of the counting process. That's because voting is most secure when it's a distributed activity, not a centralized one. With thousands of tiny precincts collecting pockets of votes, any one could tamper with results -- but many would have to tamper to have a big impact. Election commissioners, keep this feature!