What ever you do, if you think you are under legal duress, DO NOT DO THIS!

The first thing even the local cops are trained to do is to make an image of a volume. They do this for two reasons. The first is the legal: don't destroy evidence that the defense may call into question, and keep a chain of custody. The second is because people have tried exactly what you suggest. If you gave them a password that destroyed evidence, then even if they still had the original drive you have "attempted to destroy evidence" and interfered with the investigation, and probably a few other things that will add to your sentence and provided the evidence of the crime just by doing it in front of the police!

The TrueCrypt 'two encrypted areas in a single visible area' is fine if the police can not prove, through digging through windows, that you regularly keep two encrypted drives mounted (say X and Y). If you always mount both as drive X: and don't have other OS signs that it is used for multiple objects (drive UUIDs are unfortunately telling) then you are safer. But if you normally keep X and Y mounted, they'll want proof of what Y is; saying it's a USB stick, letting them plug it in and seeing it automount to G and not having other ids match would be . . . unpleasant.

Destruction of evidence, hindering a police investigation, and so on. And unless it is done at the flash memory chip level, they could get an image of the data.

What might be useful is something like an old article I read on randomly changing 'root's password on a *nix system, so it was next to impossible to log in as root. A user with permission could still use sudo to do what was needed, and "sudo -i" would be available for a single admin. Or the practice of changing the encryption key to /tmp or the swap partition on reboots; the user has no way to recover the data from those locations once a reboot has occurred. A secure encryption method that keeps even the intended user from using it would be a very had thing to sell, unfortunately.

I read it as just barely changing the vector of the light, not the velocity. All photons travel at c, but gravity could make the path of travel curve more than previously thought.

Neutrinos have virtual particle interactions as well. Only low energy photons seem not to (that I remember diagrams for, maybe they do too).
So ALL THINGS are made by the devil except for infrared light and AM radio. Seems to explain why looking at things makes you question stuff (visible light is a lie!) and only AM radio tells the truth.

I'd correct the photon "zig-zagging".
The guy is saying that we know photons can very quickly turns into an electron and it's friend a positron. They almost instantly turn back, but since the electron and it's friend are bigger and heavier than a photon of light they are affected by gravity more.
So, if the author is right, the light we saw took a different path to get to us. Just a little bit different, enough to add an hour over the course of 163,000 years.

Yup, it only affects a small percentage of photons for a very brief time. Schrodinger's equation and the rest of QED let you work out how many photons in a given burst over X amount of time. For most of our observations, in laser labs and other 'short' distances the effect shouldn't even be noticeable. But it might change astronomical measurements by a good bit. (well, 1.7 hours over 168,000 years, 1x10^-9; more or less, since light-years traveled and years traveled aren't identical at that distance due to expansion effects)

And if it affects photons, it will affect other particles as well. Maybe it explains the two neutrino bursts; if one burst traveled in a straight line and the other had a virtual particle interaction.

c doesn't get corrected. Our measurement of the path that the light took gets corrected, as the virtual particle pairs interact with all the forces that photons are less affected by because of speed.

That's what the article seems to suggest, yes. And that the virtual particle pair, if they exist for real time, would move at less than c for their short life-span. But the major change from Earth's perspective is that the gamma rays we saw did not travel in the straight line that the neutrinos did.

That might also explain the second neutrino burst (maybe, wild guess from a programmer). If some of the neutrinos went through a virtual particle state (Z boson, I think?) then they would also arrive at a different time. That would account for neutrinos that made the trip with no virtual particles, those that slowed down due to the mass of Z boson interactions, and, according to the research summarized in the article, all the gamma rays that went through a virtual particle phase and dealt with gravity. If it all works that way, it would be beautiful science explaining more things we thought we understood. Ahh, science!

Bloody good question. They are called virtual particles, though. If forced to answer, I would suspect that the energy added by the observer traveling fast enough to blue shift the light that far, 50,000 times the wavelength (talking about a 500nm green down to 10picometer gamma) and 50,000x to 100,000x energy in keV, would require a good portion of c and would reduce the apparent distance covered to a lower amount that does not offer a high enough chance of a virtual particle interaction.

But that's just me making stuff up and pulling a WAG.

No, we aren't talking about visible photons. The emissions from the supernova were neutrinos and a gamma ray burst, the visible light travels still separately because of the other things in space that it interacts with that are transparent to gamma energy and above. But, yes, over the very large distances between us and the supernova it was not just a few photons that traveled at less than c for some time, but the chance rose high enough that it was nearly all of the photons.

All EM radiation travels at the speed of light. High energy photons can, briefly, become virtual particle pairs that do not travel at the speed of light. The article author noted that the chance, over the time and distance between us and this specific supernova, was high enough that it would account for all of the gamma ray and higher energy photons traveling as particle pairs for some part of their trip and that time would account for the known time delay. This only applies to gamma rays above (i think) 511 keV (one of the gamma rays emitted in an electron-positron annihilation. might need to be 1022keV for a single ray to form both particles from a single photon; ask a particle physicist, not a programmer like me). According to Alpha, a 500nm green photon has only around 2eV. Violet light gets up to 3 eV and a little higher; still not enough to create any particle. E=mc^2, so you need a good deal of energy just to create a very tiny electron.

It isn't a fixed length of time or distance (same thing at the speed of light in a vacuum, excepting spacial expansion). It's a statistical chance; each high energy photon has a chance at each and every point in time to split into an electron-positron pair (annihilation of the pair create gamma and higher photons, so it should only be those photons that split) and then those will travel for some time, being effected by gravity and all the other forces, before re-combining into a photon.

That's my complex way of saying "eh, I dunno, I got far enough in physics but that's above my head to figure out." If you want to understand the Schrodinger equation, or can find a Feynman diagram that lists the chance over time, good luck. I tried googleing phrases I thought would get me an abstract or brief but came up empty.

As a 30-something who read /. in the early days but had no experience to comment from; I had linux 3.5" floppies from bootleg books I got in NYC, the nearest LUG was over an hour away, I could read code but hadn't written any yet. Why comment when I knew how out of touch I was? Eventually registered this UID because my main net name was taken (maybe I did register from one of those long lost 'free pop3 accounts") and used a new persona I had just created for anonymouse purposes.

It is complex but antibacterial soaps do make the problem worse.

The first line of defense your body has against foreign bacteria is not your immune system it is your own bacteria. When you wipe out them you create vulnerabilities in the system. Most antibiotic strains of bacteria don't survive very well compared to the non-antibiotic strains if no antibiotics are present. The same is true for many other resistance.

What this means is don't take things to an extreme. After you go to the bathroom you should wash your hands and if you get a cut you should clean it and seal it. However the constant usage of stuff like purell and putting it all over you in a bad idea. It also means that you should not take antibiotics unless you actually need them since they do wipe out a lot of your necessary bacteria also and can upset the balance of bacterial species within you. Basically we keep all those bacteria in check by making sure they are all in controlled numbers and use the balance between each of them to keep them in check. Your body is actually pretty darn good at this and even if you upset the system it will still usually repair it just fine.

In the end the message is don't take this stuff to extremes.

It takes special skills to program? Maybe if you are doing some rather complex operations, but in the same regard I wouldn't want to re-gear the transmission or rebuild the engine of a car while I'm perfectly capable of customizing other aspects of a vehicle. Programming is the same way, someone can be capable of doing something they want to do (run a website and manage the database; or script their everyday crap into a few lines of code) without being 'an uber hax0r' who understands OS theory at the assembly level and capable of dealing with the full range of network security threats.

Mythologizing programming is what leads to the nephew who knows a little html being assigned as the head of IT; after all that little html takes all that programming knowledge!

And since your opinion of other programmers is so low:

Even most programmers who program for a living suck at their jobs, and I don't expect someone who's not serious about it to be any better.

might I suggest that the D-K effect is in full show and, on behalf of all coders, hackers, code monkeys, keyboard jockies, and everyone who's ever touched a computer, may I ask, beg, and plead, that you to please never write another line of code again.

You should look at something called iGEM. Genetic engineering is really not that hard to do. I have done it in a competition and my team did very well. Teams have been genetically engineering all kinds of useful things to make the world a better place. Everything from sensor systems that require no power and glow if they detect dangerous substances in the water to bacteria that can biodegrade plastics. A German team even genetically engineered some plants to clean up pharmaceuticals in the water supply.

What it comes down to is that all genes are basically compatible across species (more or less). We can take color proteins from sea creatures and put them in flowers or bacteria or mammals and they work fine. We can take human protein coding sequences and place them in other things to grow those proteins for us. It is pretty impressive. Genetic engineering is pretty much like legos. It is really not that hard to do.