The sky is huge. Most supernovas we survive are going to be very far away and are not very bright from our point of view. Therefore you need a big telescope to collect enough light to see them. The bigger the telescope is, the more of a minimum magnification level youâ(TM)ll have. There for youâ(TM)ll only be able to see a small fraction of a percentage of the sky at a time. Projects that survey the entire sky (e.g. those that look for asteroids) can take several months with just one telescope. Most large ground based telescope installations are dedicated to various research projects, usually studying one area of the sky. Not all of them can operate all the time due to weather. Until we have a large array of telescopes in space, itâ(TM)s unlikely weâ(TM)ll be able to constantly monitor the entire sky at any magnitude level enough to catch one off events like this. So therefore, amateur astronomy is still important.

Seems like an obvious error from a statistical analysis standpoint. Makes me wonder how much critical medical research has obvious errors like this.

I'm sure they were encrypted. AES-256 is a symmetric encryption algorithm. The key has to be stored somewhere, many times in the same database the credit card numbers are being stored. How else would the credit card numbers get stored to the database in the first place? If they got system level access (which from what they are saying, it sounds like they did...), I'm sure they have encryption keys as well.

If they don't store them plaintext, they still have to store a hash (MD5, SHA2, etc...). If they know the hash algorithm (which I'm sure they do if they got DB access), they could easily run a brute force attack on the hashes that will crack any weak passwords (which I'm sure many are). Even password hashes on Linux systems can be cracked if the passwords are weak and the attacker has time. See http://www.openwall.com/john/.

Shred works on a filesystem level to delete individual files on the drive. Worse than that, it only works on a subset of filesystems (primarily Linux and Unix based).

You want something that wipes *everything* from the drive, no matter what the filesystem is. dd, or dcfldd (which is what I prefer to use) does a sector by sector copy of data from a source to a destination. So the following command:

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda

Will effectively fill the hard drive with random data making and data recovery impossible.

Who's to say they can't break into systems that control infrastructure or break into systems that are running in hospitals?

Do you think SCADA systems are invulnerable, and are totally separated from the internet? You think critical life support systems running Windows are totally separated from the outside world?