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dfrankeon Speed-of-light experiments yield baffling result at LHC

Isn't the speed at which photons travel, by definition, the speed of light?

Photons speed up and slow down routinely, depending on what medium they're traveling through. c, as it is used in the equations of relativity, is currently believed to be equal to the speed of light in a vacuum. But, with my limited knowledge of GR, my understanding is that gaika is correct and that the rest of the theory can still stand if this equality is broken.

dfrankeon Opening *.txt file is dangerous on Windows

Oh, I certainly agree. But I only agree because my threat model includes adversaries other than malicious coworkers; particularly, it includes innocent coworkers with malware-infected workstations.

By the way, ten minutes I wrote the grandparent to this comment, a coworker IMed me and asked me to break into his workstation :-). He was working remotely, trying to SSH in, his system had gotten wedged due to what turned out to be disk errors, and he needed me to rescue it.

dfrankeon Opening *.txt file is dangerous on Windows

Unless you have an exceptionally paranoid workplace, a much easier way to compromise your boss's computer is just to walk over to it and pop in a livecd after he's gone home for the day.

dfrankeon Opening *.txt file is dangerous on Windows

Windows suffers some famous dain bramage wrt to DLL loading paths: http://unhandledexpression.com/2010/08/23/fixing-the-dll-loa... Basically, even when "safe" DLL loading is turned on, the search path still includes the current directory. I'm guessing that Notepad and friends all look for some (legacy?) DLL that isn't always installed, so if an attacker puts a malicious DLL by its same name in the same path as the file being opened, it'll be loaded and executed. The part about network drives is probably just an assumption about trust boundaries: Microsoft assumes that attacker can't ordinarily put a malicious file in the same local folder that you're opening a text file in, but on a network drive anything goes.

This is all just speculation. I don't code for Windows, and I don't know anything more about this vulnerability than what's stated in the advisory.

dfrankeon Be Careful when Speaking to Federal Agents - 18 U.S.C. Section 1001

For example, if you lie to your employer on your time and attendance records and, unbeknownst to you, he submits your records, along with those of other employees, to the federal government pursuant to some regulatory duty, you could be criminally liable.

Is there anything in the law that makes the "pursuant to some regulatory duty" relevant here? For example, if you wrote something on Wikipedia that you knew was inaccurate, and years later a federal official read it and found it somehow relevant to his job, would you theoretically be breaking this law?

dfrankeon What is in your .vimrc

  dfranke@ancalagon:~$ ls ~/.vimrc
  ls: cannot access /home/dfranke/.vimrc: No such file or directory

dfrankeon Rogue Academic Downloader Busted by MIT Webcam Stakeout, Arrest Report Says

manhunt for a slender guy with a backpack riding a bike on MIT’s campus

Well that must've narrowed it right down.

dfrankeon Monroe or Einstein? Instant eyesight check.

Not for me :-(. I see Einstein no matter what I do. I've never in my life been able to resolve stereograms, either.

dfrankeon Google Plus to relax the "real names only" restriction?

Android phones are usable without a Google account. You need one in order to log in to Android Market, and obviously the GMail app and contacts sync won't work, but the OS can still be used. Cyanogen, for IP reasons, even goes so far as to package all the Google-dependent stuff in a separate firmware image.

dfrankeon Best of Hacker News

Ah ha! This comment explains where my 7 points of mystery karma came from :-).

dfrankeon Google Earned Over $9 Billion In Revenue In Q2

Here's how it works:

Revenue = everything your customers pay you.

Cost of revenue = expenses that scale up directly with revenue. For a manufacturing company, this would typically consist mainly of what they pay to their suppliers. In Google's case, power and bandwidth are major items.

Gross profit = Revenue - cost of revenue

Operating expenses = costs that aren't directly tied to revenue, such as payrolls and building leases. Operating expenses also include depreciation of capital assets, the computation of which is somewhat of a black art.

Operating profit = Gross profit - operating expenses.

Net profit = Operating profit +/- any profit or loss on investing activities, including interest on any money the company has borrowed or lent.

(Disclaimer: IANAA)

dfrankeon RIM’s Response to 'Open Letter'

Take that number and compare it to the numbers you see on their statement of operations. That $3B doesn't keep the lights on for very long if demand for their product evaporates.

dfrankeon Ooops.

The "significant whitespace" here is a space between command-line arguments. For that to qualify, you'd also have to include C as such a language.

  long jmp();
  longjmp();

dfrankeon Guy makes a knife from scratch. He has to make a smelter first.

"If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe." --Carl Sagan

dfrankeon June 2011 Web Server Survey

The canonical linkbait headline would clearly have been, "IIS is dead. Netcraft confirms it."

dfrankeon How AirBnB Became a Billion Dollar Company

All this is true, but has no bearing on the common use of language. When a trader refers to Acme corporation as an $N company, he is indicating that $N is its annual revenue, not its market capitalization.

dfrankeon What would a teaspoonful of neutron star do to you?

That's excessive. As the article mentions, a neutron star can't exceed a few solar masses. You're much less than a light year from the sun without any ill effects from its gravity.

dfrankeon Doctors and dentists tell patients, "all your review are belong to us"

As a consumer, the way deal with this stuff is to cross out the objectionable provisions, sign, and hand it back without a word. Walk out if they put up a fuss, but they usually won't.

dfrankeon Show HN: user generated TL;DRs with a smart scorer

Apparently I can quickly produce extremely high-scoring gibberish using Emacs M-x dissociated-press.

dfrankeon Facebook shoots first, ignores questions later; account lock-out attack works

They have to put it back online with a counter-notice.

No they don't. Doing so merely gives them safe harbor from any liability for having taken it down. Facebook has no legal obligation to its members to maintain the content in the first place, and therefore no obligation to pay attention to a counter-notice.

dfrankeon Facebook shoots first, ignores questions later; account lock-out attack works

I have every right to complain about getting the crappy end of the stick when stuff like this happens in the same way you have the right to complain about a crummy contract with AT&T or your roofer.

You get to complain about AT&T and your roofer because you have a contract with them entitling you to a certain level of service in exchange for your money. Your only agreement with Facebook is Facebook's AUP / ToS / privacy policy, which gives you no such rights. If you don't think it's an equitable agreement, don't accept it!

dfrankeon Amazon Web Services are down

I'm actually surprised if incurring 50% extra hardware costs really is cheaper than the cost of being down. If Netflix is down for a few hours, then it costs them some goodwill, and maybe a few new signups, but is the immediate revenue impact really that great? Most of Netflix's revenue comes from monthly subscriptions, and it's not like their customers have an SLA.

dfrankeon Hating on Candyland: Why most games for kids are awful

If they're all perfectly equivalent then even very young kids will catch on to that quickly. Here's an improvement: make the choices equal in EV but different in variance. That adds a little bit of strategy: take the predictable choices when you're ahead and the risky ones when you're behind. Nonetheless, a child with no concept of this strategy can sometimes win against an adult who plays optimally.

N.B.: I was home-schooled through preschool. My mother designed a bunch of board games that she used to teach me basic math. Then I got to kindergarten and got introduced to Chutes & Ladders. I saw through it immediately and got into arguments with my classmates about what a stupid game it was.

dfrankeon Programming tool: The whiteboard marker

For any notation consisting of ASCII characters, I find that an emacs scratch buffer makes a better brain-extension than a board does. But when I'm thinking in terms of diagrams and math notation, having a chalkboard next to me (a real chalkboard) is a huge help.

dfrankeon Chinese Infinite Magical Hard-Drive

Thanks, that makes more sense.

dfrankeon π = 3 (sometimes) for Nobel laureate

My usage is that which is universally accepted in any university math department. As a freshman in a math/science/engineering major, you take (or finish after beginning in high school) three semesters of Calculus, always referred to with a capital "C" to mean specifically Newton's calculus. Here you learn to calculate integrals and derivatives so that you can use them as a tool. If you major in math, then as a junior or senior you will take analysis. Here is where you rigorously study integrals and derivatives. An introductory analysis course typically begins by defining Cauchy sequences, and then defining the real numbers as equivalence classes of Cauchy sequences of rationals. Building on this foundation, you then construct the basic theory of continuous functions, derivatives, and Riemann integrals. Finally, you use this theory to prove that the transformation rules of Newton's calculus are sound.

dfrankeon Chinese Infinite Magical Hard-Drive

Something about this story doesn't seem to add up. An SSD's firmware presents the raw flash to the OS as a block device. The filesystem is at a higher level of abstraction, above that block device. If the device is handling data that doesn't fit by wrapping back around to the beginning of the file, how is it figuring out where that file begins when all it sees is a bunch AHCI requests?

dfrankeon π = 3 (sometimes) for Nobel laureate

Newton's calculus is just one example of a calculus. A calculus is any set of mechanical rules for manipulating mathematical symbols. Calculation is the process of applying those rules. Cf. the lambda calculus. The branch of mathematics involving limits, functions, derivatives, and integrals is analysis.

dfrankeon What skills do self-taught programmers commonly lack?

I thought "category theory" was a very strange thing to include in the list, so I searched down and found this equally strange comment: "I wish I had time to spend a year learning category theory to better understand how to structure things to be compositional". This is akin to saying, "I wish I had time to spend a year studying fluid dynamics so I can learn how to fly a plane".

dfrankeon Exploiting variable-bitrate codecs to recover phrases from encrypted VoIP

I linked to Schneier's summary because I can't find a non-paywalled version of the new paper, but here's a paper by some of the same authors on the same topic, from an earlier phase of their research: http://www.krypt.cs.uni-sb.de/teaching/WS08/Seminar/reports/...