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Comment Re:wat (Score 1, Insightful) 227

Black holes aren't "infinitely dense" because that is ridiculous

You're misinterpreting the meaning of "infinite" here.
You're assuming density measurement has an infinite value. Like "How many dollars are there?" Well, you could have any number of dollars from 1 to infinity.
That's not how density is measured.
Another type of measurement is "What angle is the corner of that triangle?"
That could be anywhere from 1 to 359 degrees (rounding to whole numbers)
It's kind of like a percentage.
Infinite density would be like saying the angle is 360 Degrees. That breaks the triangle. The angle is effectively infinite.
Mass, density, momentum, time, etc... are all treated like geometry when you get into relativistic effects.
You can't exceed the speed of light because that to would break the geometry of the system. Once you hit the speed of light, you again are doing the equivalent of making one of the angles 360 degrees.

The "Triangle" of this system is Speed, time and mass. So for speed to exceed the speed of light and therefor be the "360 degree angle" of this triangle, the other two angles... time and mass, must be 0. Therefor time stops, and the moving object must be massless. Does that make more sense?

At least thats how I've always understood it.

Comment Re:Or, maybe there's no paradox at all. (Score 1) 227

But that's exactly what they are saying.
You need to differentiate. Blackholes are NOT singularities. A blackhole is the collection of phenomena and objects in an area of spacetime. It is believe that at the center of the blackhole is a singularity. What this new theory suggests is that there is not a singularity there, but instead that it just behaves very similar to one.

Comment Re:Wait (Score 3, Informative) 227

can some explain why information can't be lost? this is slightly confusing and that assumption makes it seem like they're building a lot of theory on a pretty shaky foundation.

It's actually not as mind bending as you might think.

Quantum mechanics is "Time Symmetrical" meaning that, the laws of physics work the same irrelevant of the direction of time.
This is only at the quantum scale so real world stuff doesn't work so hot.
But take a quantum particle falling into a blackhole...
If the blackhole consumed it, destroying all information about it... if you reversed time, the particle would never exist, and never be ejected back into space.
If, however, time slows as it approached the blackhole and the particle never actually crossed the event horizon... then if you reverse time, time would speed up and the particle would eventually be flung away.

This all depends on you accepting the standard model, and the current interpenetration of quantum physics. They are becoming more rock solid every day however, it would take some pretty amazing discoveries to break them.

Comment Re:umm duh? (Score 1) 176

You do realize there are several flavors of encryption, right? Microsoft SQL Server TDE is an example. You can login, perform queries, update data in any table, but all data is encrypted - it is - transparent as the name indicates.

That also ignores things like encrypted volumes, etc. Just because individual files aren't encrypted with unique keys, doesn't mean that encryption isn't there.

The data he updated was someones password. Wouldn't that concern you? ;-)

Comment um (Score 2) 174

Because the majority of the people getting CS degrees now-a-days have no idea what they are doing.
And I don't mean, they just aren't good. I mean they barely even know how to type.
I worked with a guy a while back that was given 4 projects in a row and did absolutely no work on them. I liked the guy personally so he felt safe in asking me questions... He didn't even know how to define a variable or call an Object in the Language he specialized in. And I've met LOTS of people like that. He was probably the worst, but the quality of people with degrees in programming is awful. I'm not sure if it's just because it's something really hard to test for or if cheating is rampant. But there is definitely a problem. Most of the people I work with that don't have a degree and had to claw their way up are a lot better than the people that have 4yr degrees.

Also, programming jobs don't pay crap anymore. Managers at McDonalds make about the same as entry level program jobs.

Comment Re:What about those of us who aren't sure anymore? (Score 2) 174

How does pushing paper ensure a system is secure?

You've clearly never worked in security.
You can never fully secure anything. All you can do is shift liability away from your business.
You need to reduce the chances of a breach to the point that the number that occur and lead to lawsuits costs you less than the effort to make it more secure.
You could technically require every customer to drive down to your main office in person and show ID before logging in... but what would that do to your business?
Secondly, procedure is everything. How do people handle data? What is the process for updating a router? LDAP? the VPN? etc?
90% of security is writing bulletproof process. 9% are the people that follow that process. 1% is HR firing people that don't.

If you just hire "Security people" and expect them to act "securely" you're just asking for trouble.

Comment Re:Why haven't they fined practically every ISP? (Score 1) 38

If this order still stands, why hasn't the FCC fined practically every ISP under this rule? Plenty of ISPs were (and some still are) throttling YouTube, and I don't think I saw a single notice from the ISPs themselves about it. I would think that YouTube counts as a "certain type of traffic" for the purposes of this rule.

ISP's get fined all the time. The fines are not advertised unless the FCC wants to make a political statement. I suspect this press release is a shot over the bow of one or more ISP's over a particularly egregious case that may even be local and not on our radar yet.

Comment Re:umm duh? (Score 5, Insightful) 176

Yea, we use a very expesnsive cloud service that per the contract is encrypted at rest and in transit. After 5yrs I happened to have a networking issue and did a packet capture on the stream... no encryption. So we approached them... "Encryption? No, we don't do that..." We explained that it was in the contract and they HAD to do that. So after 2 months they had to move us to a "Special" server and we were encrypted. I checked the packets again and we were at least encrypted in transit. A few months later we had another trouble ticket with them. One of their techs was working on it and explained how he logged in an edited the table raw to fix it. So I asked how he could do that if the data was encrypted. "Encryption? No, we don't do that..." ugh... so now we're supposedly "really" encrypted.

The problem with cloud services is they can lie cheat and steal with your data and there's nothing you can do about it. You can't verify it, you can't test it, and if anything happens to it you wouldn't have a clue. You're entirely at the mercy of the provider and as time goes on their internal staff can turn over, competence can wane, controls can get lax, and you'll have no idea any of that is happening.

Comment Re:Death bell tolling for thee.... (Score 4, Insightful) 322

People HATE windows 8 because they are trying to force a touch interface on it, most people do not buy touch montiors so it is less than intuitive.. now they want to make it even more touch oriented? unless they are going to send me FREE 27" and 40" 4K touchscreen monitors it's not going to be worth a damn.

STOP TRYING TO UNIFY THE PC AND TABLET/PHONE WORLDS! I am so sick of companies trying to do this, it's a failure an utter failure.

They certainly can unify the PC and Tablet. They just have to give up on the insane idea that the UI will be identical between devices. The mouse didn't work on a small screen so they put the touchscreen on my 52" TV?!?! Seriously, who thought that was a good idea?

This is a very easy thing to fix... XP/Win7 style desk for PCs, Android style for anything smaller than 10", Remote/MediaPC controlls for TVs. And... wait for it... Alt-windows key toggles between UIs for those that like different ones at different times. Eeegads! Am I the next Wozniak with my insanely brilliant ideas or what? Oh wait... no, it's just that obvious.

Comment Re:McCarthyism v2.0 (Score 1) 242

No, they'll still nail you for associating with the wrong people. This is just how they'll nail you.

I think they took a page Object based programming. They just do:

#include
varMinority = "Jews"

For each person
{
  If Person(i) = varMinority
Then
Terrorist.arrest(Person(i))
else
Terrorist.propaganda.Person(i)
}

etc...
excuse my horrible syntax. I'm not fluent in fake code.

Comment Re:Intel has worked with the NSA (Score 4, Insightful) 91

If I actually cared about the Government breaking into my encrypted files I'd be using a One Time Pad. It might be cumbersome, and it might flag it as actually important info, but if I really didn't want someone to have the possibility of breaking it then only a encryption method that cannot be broken with any amount of processing power will do. However, I don't have any need to worry about some trivial thing like are they looking at me today. I don't have that kind of secret to hide.

You should always be worried about the government breaking into your encrypted files.
There is only 1 group in this country that can legally torture you and put you to death. Only one group that actually does that very thing on a daily basis.
Irrelevant of their current laws and practices, it's in your best interest to protect yourself from their prying eyes.
You've no idea what you're doing today that will be illegal tomorrow. Every device I own has some degree of encryption. Will that protect me if they target me directly? Probably not, but I certainly am not going to make it easy for them if it comes to that. Decent encryption isn't that hard, and just takes a few minutes of your time.

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