The only reason they do instant strep tests at MD offices is that they want to know the results before you walk out the door. The same goes for rapid STD tests: If you walk out the door and have to come back to get the results later, there's a chance you won't return.

A DNA test is the ultimate in non-urgent tests, and is going to remain something you head off to the phlebotomist to get done... right up until the day where they are done routinely at birth and you leave the hospital jugging a baby, birth certificate, and a flash drive containing its DNA sequence.

FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE machine images for Amazon EC2 are available for m1.large and larger instance types: http://www.daemonology.net/freebsd-on-ec2/

Tarsnap's snapshotting model is a bit more sophisticated than how duplicity works, and its separate keys for writing/reading/deleting archives makes it possible to do some things you can't do with rsync.net (e.g., you can have a server which does daily backups with Tarsnap while still making it impossible for someone who roots the server to tamper with said backups).

But yes, tarsnap and duplicity+rsync.net are certainly more similar than, say, tarsnap and dropbox.

I love my customers...

If all you ever want to compress is files which contain the same byte repeated many times, then yes, that's how you would compress them.

But most compression formats are tuned to produce good results for the sorts of files which people are more likely to need to compress; so even when run-length encoding is used, it will typically have a low limit -- say, 255 -- on the run length.

If you don't want to live in the bay area, then don't work for RethinkDB, I guess? I don't think they're hiring anyone remote (but I might be wrong).

And what's wrong with rsync for backups?

1. rsync isn't backups, it's synchronization. It will happily synchronize corrupted files and (if you use the relevant option) file deletions.
2. rsync requires you to trust the location you're syncing your data to.
3. Because rsync is designed for synchronization, it doesn't store your data compressed.
4. Because rsync works file-by-file, it can't take advantage of duplication between files.

Probably other things too, but those are the first ones which come to mind.

All WIMPs use icons. If they didn't have icons, they would be WMPs instead.

I've talked to Slava a lot, and he's a really smart guy. Unlike most startups, RethinkDB is actually doing innovative things. If you're looking for work in the bay area and you're good at algorithms, GO WORK FOR RETHINKDB!

(If I didn't have my own startup, I'd be working there right now -- instead I'm cheering them on from afar.)

Somehow, though, I'm guessing Monsanto will prove most unwilling to go around hand weeding "their" IP when it becomes a pest.

They haven't done that personally, no. But they have paid to have it done when farmers have complained about contamination.

When your own saved seeds include them, even if you would not select at all?

That's a good question, but it's purely hypothetical. This guy did actively select the Monsanto seeds to plant them. The court specifically said that they didn't believe it was accidental that 95% of his field ended up having Monsanto genes.

But if his fields had been naturally pollinated, why should he be responsible for Monsanto's inability to contain their pollen?

Because he specifically decided to replant the Monsanto seed. It's one thing to have your crops polluted; it's quite another to say "hey, I like this pollution and I'm going to spread it further".

In fact, if he was in the business of selling non-GMO, the contamination of his fields could cost him value, customers, or even entire markets.

Which is why Monsanto agreed to pay him for the costs of eliminating the Monsanto seed which had been accidentally blown into his field.

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.