Reader n4djs notes that Monsanto has been known to sue farmers for patent infringement when their crops unintentionally contain genetically modified plants.

This might have happened, but the Percy Schmeiser case is not such a case. The Supreme Court of Canada found that Schmeiser deliberately harvested and planted his field with seed which he knew had Monsanto's genetic modifications.

It rather scares me that one of the leading anti-GMO spokesmen is someone who deliberately planted his field with genetically modified seed and then lied about it when he got caught.

And then you've got to assume that the incoming star hits this dark brown dwarf

Or rather, hope that they don't collide. The energy released by a stellar collision that close to Earth would probably destroy not only the human race, but also all other life on Earth.

Providing that humanity still exists in the year 1.5M but hasn't yet spread to other solar systems, this is a huge opportunity: Rather than needing to travel 3-4 light years in order to reach another star, we'll need to travel less than one light year -- thus making the trip both faster and much cheaper.

Who knows, it might even be possible to slowly spread across the entire galaxy without ever venturing into interstellar space.

This definitely sucks for cryptome. But has PayPal actually done anything wrong?

It seems to me that PayPal isn't trying to be evil here; rather, they made a business decision that cryptome wasn't an organization they wanted to do business with. Businesses make such decisions every day -- car rental companies in Canada, for example, often refuse to rent cars to anyone under age 25 -- so why is it different when PayPal does the same thing?

(For the record, my company only takes payments via PayPal, but I'm eagerly looking forward to the day when Amazon Payments or Google Checkout start accepting Canadian merchants. I don't like PayPal either; I just think they're not being evil in this case.)

At room temperature, CO is lighter than air.

It is more like O(a^(n/b))

No, factorization is more like O(a^(n^b)). For GNFS on RSA-sized inputs, 1000^(n^(1/3) - 2.5) is a good estimate of the number of operations required.

In my dictionary, atheism is defined as "Disbelief in, or denial of, the existence of a God". This is quite distinct from the position of agnosticism, which states that we do not know if there is a God.

The fact that Atheism has a very limited set of beliefs -- namely one, "There is no God" -- doesn't make it any less of a religion.

Apparently the partial question didn't stop people from voting on

Jurists != Jurors.

A jurist usually means anyone with a law degree, although in some countries it is generally reserved to refer to judges.

Wow, an AC is accusing me of being a troll. Never had that happen before.

Tarsnap solves a completely different problem from EncFS, loop-aes, and dmcrypt. Those are tools for encrypted local storage; Tarsnap is a solution for encrypted backups.

I'm not sure what part of the world you're from, but in UTC we're still at December 27th, so the month isn't over yet. I'll known how much money Tarsnap made in December a few hours after 2010-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (since Tarsnap's financial year is January-December UTC), at which point I'll send the money over to the Foundation, a few hours before the end of their year (since they work on a January-December MST year).

And no, it won't be zero. Before announcing this earlier in the month, I checked with the FreeBSD Foundation and gave them an estimate of how much money they would be receiving, and they were perfectly satisfied with it.

Because rsync, sshfs, rdiff-backup, etc. aren't secure. With any of those, your service provider has access to your unencrypted data; with Tarsnap, I have no way to read your files -- or your file names, file sizes, directory tree structure, or even figure out how many files you have stored.

I'm donating all of the profits my Tarsnap online backup system makes for December to the FreeBSD Foundation. As a FreeBSD developer I find the work done by the FreeBSD Foundation to be invaluable, and Tarsnap has benefitted greatly from work done within FreeBSD, so I figured this was a good way of giving back.

I have the opposite problem: Due to excessive caffeine intake and zero exercise, my resting pulse is normally around 95. Add in a bit of white coat hypertension, and it easily goes over 100.

I've tried to donate blood twice, and in both cases a nurse has measured my pulse and then told me that they don't want my blood -- apparently (in Canada, at least) a pulse over 100 translates to "we can't take your blood because it might make you faint".