As I explained in an other comment, part of the field test was exactly to find out the environmental impact. You will have to do a field test at some point. One of the researchers also said that with these potatoes cross pollination does not happen.

This research was happening independently of the industry, with public funding. Also, the research was about making the potatoes immune to a common disease, NOT making them immune to a specific brand of herbicide, so I fail to see how this could lead to a Monsanto situation. Part of the research was also to find out what the environmental impact of GMO is, and you will have to do a field test at some point to scientifically verify this.

So how would you verify that an optimal solution to the travelling salesman problem is in fact optimal in polynomial time?

That is a common mistake. NP means that a non deterministic Turing Machine (a Turing Machine that can "guess" the right path to take if faced with a choice) can solve the problem in polynomial time. It has nothing to do with the time to check the solution.

One of the new additions is hardware acceleration on Windows though, so performance should be quite a bit better.

Encryption algorithms use a wide variety of bit twiddling operations such as rotations, that are not defined as operators in C for example. So it is best to directly use the assembly instructions for those parts, otherwise the compiler would have to be smart enough to see that what you are doing is a rotation. They are in a bit of a unique position compared to "normal" programs.

How do they handle the threat of people getting intimidated to vote for someone? If you vote in a regular voting booth noone can ever know who you voted for, but there is no telling if someone isn't forced to vote at gunpoint.