Are you serious? Have you not seen the dozens of "accidental" code releases in the last several years? People leak their code all the time. Heck, you can get the code to most Microsoft software right now. Not legally, of course, but it is out there.
Your dad sounds like an idiot, not a skeptic. He doesn't have to trust science to know that planes can fly, because you can see the damn things flying. All you have to trust is your own eyes.
Also, science does not require peer-review. That's quite possibly the stupidest thing I've ever heard. Why? Because you don't define "peer".
What science absolutely requires is disclosure. If you say "I have does a study and discovered X", then you damn well have to back it up. Your data must be available for me to see and trust your claims. The process of your thinking must be shown. The results are not the product, they are simply the end-result. The *process* is the product that you're trying to sell to me, because if I don't understand how you achieved what you claim, then I have no reason to believe you at all.
If you don't release your data and process and everything else, then you're not a scientist. You're just a crank.
These methods are even being used in test sites to generate power. Main problems are that there's a lot of crap in rivers that you need to filter out to get high efficiencies.
The simpler and less damaging way is simply to revoke their new domain registrar capabilities. If the servers start rejecting their registration requests, then they'll clean up their act damn quick.
There's no incentive for me to contribute my work, which has value, because I get nothing in return.
Why should monetary incentive be the only one to contribute? E.g., do you ever donate to charities? Wouldn't you consider an organization with effective mission of spreading knowledge one?
It doesn't necessarily have to be monetary compensation that I was discussing, but I get your drift.
While it's true that you *can* rely on donations, it doesn't strike me as a good way to actually have them get the high quality material they're looking for. I mean, Wikipedia basically relies on donations of material right now, and this is obviously still a problem.
In the more general sense, contributing to a cause I believe in makes me feel better about myself. Doing a good thing, altruism and all that.
In the specific case of this discussion, I don't really believe in their "cause". They don't have one that I can see. I think Wikipedia is a good idea, and I contribute my words and such to it, but those have little value. I write a lot of words. Photos on the other hand, have tangible and demonstrable value. Why should I give them something of real value without an obvious cause to give to or any form of compensation?
All major distros have development tracks. If you want the absolute latest and greatest of some software packages, switch them over to the development versions. How to do this varies depending on your distro, of course. I think Ubuntu separates them out into "Proposed" and such.
Of course, things might break, but then that's what would you'd expect to happen anyway with the bleeding edge.
Whether it's "good" or not depends on your end goals.
Yes, if I'm running a server, I want rock-hard stability. Latest version, don't need it unless it has security patches.
For my day-to-day usage and development machine, I'm okay with bleeding edge stuff from time to time. If it crashes, meh, I can back up a version or two.
Different uses, different desires. Having to wait for FireFox (IceWeasel, whatever) 3.5 for months after release on my box is unacceptable. Building it myself is certainly possible, but just having it appear within a couple weeks is a whole lot nicer.
Being both a programmer who releases GPL'd and BSD'd code as well as an amateur photographer, then I'd say that what license I choose depends on the quality of the work. When coding, if I care about the code and want it to be free, then I choose GPL. If it's code I don't care about much, or want to be used in commercial works, then I choose BSD.
I have also uploaded photos to Wikipedia before. However, I can't upload any photos of what I would consider to be high quality, because they require you to basically give up all form of control over those photos. Yes, you still hold copyright, but you cannot exercise any of that copyright.
To put in nerd licensing terms, they won't allow CC-NC in their licenses, which is unacceptable to any serious photographer. I have no problem allowing anybody to use my photos for free, unless you're actually using them to make money, in which case you owe me a cut. That's the way it works. Requiring me to license them for free commercial usage simply means that you will only get "bad" photos, or those which are not commercially viable.
I've never made money on my photos, BTW. But I'm also not fool enough to think that they have no value. And unlike code, I don't get value back from giving it away. The GPL doesn't work for photos, because there's no return on investment.
When I give away code, then other people improve upon it and release their improvements. That's what the GPL guarantees. I get paid in the form of better code, which I can use. I accept that as part of releasing the code. But with photography, there's no give and take there. If I give my photos to Wikipedia, I never get paid for them, in any format. They don't get improved upon. I don't get anything back. There's no incentive for me to contribute my work, which has value, because I get nothing in return.
Not unless there's some downside to there being lots of smithy's as well. Which is often not the case in most games, as the economy is not free-market.
True, if market forces ruled the game. But that's pretty rare, normally prices for items are fixed in such a game.
To get true market forces operating on the price of items, you'd need to have your items basically bidded on (possibly in bulk), then resold by markets at a profit. You could emulate this, of course, and some games have done so, but it's difficult to emulate well without actually doing it with real people. A free marketplace is inherently unpredictable, a computer can't simulate that.
The problem with an open-ended system is that it is always unbalanced. At some point, the system evolves to the point where it makes more sense to be a smithy than to be a baker, or whatever. One profession/class/rank/item always tops out and becomes unbeatable. The only way to balance this is to either a) have mods who arbitrary slap people down by pushing the values this way or that or b) introduce a changing ruleset to balance things out through game events or some other "magic" process.
Either way, the players will find these changes "unfair". "I put all this effort into making this high ranking person, and your changes made me lesser!" is the basic gist of it. The problem of it is that they're correct, the changes did make that person lesser, in order to balance out the game.
Digitally you can increase the audio to the max no-clip volume (normalize it) without serious loss of fidelity. A good player app could do that automatically, but many don't because it involves scanning the entire clip to find the peaks, and sometimes you don't have access to the whole clip (streaming).
Even so, if you don't know where the peaks are, then altering the digital signal level just haphazardly is certain to make your audio sound like complete crap. Which is why you manipulate the system volume for volume control, because that's analog (even if you set it digitally) and doesn't involve changing the signal.
Basically, the problem with the twiddle-the-system mechanism is that my loud music will occasionally be disrupted by a jarring system noise. This is terrible.
Yes, it is, which is why audio playing apps should temporarily turn off system noises. Windows has a call for this, somewhere. Not sure on Linux systems, but I bet there is a way.
Since Chrome the browser has Gears basically built in, and they offer a fairly comprehensive API for that sort of thing with GWT ( http://code.google.com/p/gwt-google-apis/ ), then yeah, Gears is going to be a big part of making "Applications" for this thing.
Seems pretty valid to me. On the more recent linux systems, installing the latest video driver is a matter of going to the install program of whatever stripe, selecting the video driver, and saying "install it". Given that, then installing the video player, it should indeed "Just Work". It's not a matter of having to compile your own, if you're using a distribution that does relatively recent compiles of code (Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch all the popular ones).
You are describing the correct behavior. An audio or video program should not be messing with the system volume (or any auxiliary system volume control).
Actually, no. ALL volume control should be adjusting the system volume controls. There is no such real thing as "digital volume".
If you alter volume digitally, you lose resolution. Take a 16-bit signal. Your max volume corresponds to the peaks of that signal. Assuming that the peaks range from -32768 to 32767 (the signal has been normalized), then all you can ever do is reduce the volume. If you increase it digitally, you get clipping or some other form of loss of quality, depending on how you do it. The system volume controls, on the other hand, are generally directly hooked to the amplifier in the sound card, which is analog, and which doesn't have the same issues.
In other words, volume is an analog thing. It's controlled by the amplifier in the sound card. Emulating it by manipulating the digital signal (which is all that a program has real control over without hitting the system volume) always causes loss in signal quality, in some manner.
Basically, it's exploiting a buffer overflow in the MSVidCtl ActiveX control. It has it load a malformed GIF which causes a buffer overflow somewhere, which then loads in shellcode.
Not much to it, really. You could make this into a static exploit if you so desired and pop it on any webpage you liked.
And finally, it seems kind of foolish to give the guys name/location when people have already made death threats against him. What if the professor is beaten or killed now?
Meh. Internet tough guys rarely do anything in the real world. Most that will happen is that he'll get some pointless and lame snail mail calling him a troll and such.
That said, he does deserve to be beaten with a clue-by-four. I mean, his whole premise is "I tried to be a dick in the virtual world and people hated me for it". Well, duh. I mean, if he ignored the social standards of a society, then what did he expect to happen? Everybody to shower him with lollipops?
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Are you serious? Have you not seen the dozens of "accidental" code releases in the last several years? People leak their code all the time. Heck, you can get the code to most Microsoft software right now. Not legally, of course, but it is out there.
What in the heck are you talking about?
Your dad sounds like an idiot, not a skeptic. He doesn't have to trust science to know that planes can fly, because you can see the damn things flying. All you have to trust is your own eyes.
Also, science does not require peer-review. That's quite possibly the stupidest thing I've ever heard. Why? Because you don't define "peer".
What science absolutely requires is disclosure. If you say "I have does a study and discovered X", then you damn well have to back it up. Your data must be available for me to see and trust your claims. The process of your thinking must be shown. The results are not the product, they are simply the end-result. The *process* is the product that you're trying to sell to me, because if I don't understand how you achieved what you claim, then I have no reason to believe you at all.
If you don't release your data and process and everything else, then you're not a scientist. You're just a crank.
You're not supposed to trust science. That's sort of the whole point.
It's called "skepticism" and it's a required trait if you claim to be practicing science at all.
Without GPL protection (aka, copyright protection), proprietary vendors could do whatever they wanted with your code.
And we could do whatever we wanted with theirs.
I'm okay with that tradeoff.
Sorry, but no. Not to Stallman. "Free" has nothing to do with "cost" in his world.
"Free as in speech" is not a metaphor.
There have been other ways to extract salinization energy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_electrodialysis
These methods are even being used in test sites to generate power. Main problems are that there's a lot of crap in rivers that you need to filter out to get high efficiencies.
The simpler and less damaging way is simply to revoke their new domain registrar capabilities. If the servers start rejecting their registration requests, then they'll clean up their act damn quick.
There's no incentive for me to contribute my work, which has value, because I get nothing in return.
Why should monetary incentive be the only one to contribute? E.g., do you ever donate to charities? Wouldn't you consider an organization with effective mission of spreading knowledge one?
It doesn't necessarily have to be monetary compensation that I was discussing, but I get your drift.
While it's true that you *can* rely on donations, it doesn't strike me as a good way to actually have them get the high quality material they're looking for. I mean, Wikipedia basically relies on donations of material right now, and this is obviously still a problem.
In the more general sense, contributing to a cause I believe in makes me feel better about myself. Doing a good thing, altruism and all that.
In the specific case of this discussion, I don't really believe in their "cause". They don't have one that I can see. I think Wikipedia is a good idea, and I contribute my words and such to it, but those have little value. I write a lot of words. Photos on the other hand, have tangible and demonstrable value. Why should I give them something of real value without an obvious cause to give to or any form of compensation?
All major distros have development tracks. If you want the absolute latest and greatest of some software packages, switch them over to the development versions. How to do this varies depending on your distro, of course. I think Ubuntu separates them out into "Proposed" and such.
Of course, things might break, but then that's what would you'd expect to happen anyway with the bleeding edge.
Whether it's "good" or not depends on your end goals.
Yes, if I'm running a server, I want rock-hard stability. Latest version, don't need it unless it has security patches.
For my day-to-day usage and development machine, I'm okay with bleeding edge stuff from time to time. If it crashes, meh, I can back up a version or two.
Different uses, different desires. Having to wait for FireFox (IceWeasel, whatever) 3.5 for months after release on my box is unacceptable. Building it myself is certainly possible, but just having it appear within a couple weeks is a whole lot nicer.
Fedora isn't a dev release. Fedora-11 is the stable track. Fedora-devel is the development track.
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/collections/id/21 - Stable
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/collections/id/8 - Development
Comparison to Jaunty is perfectly valid, as Jaunty is kept up to date with "stable" packages from time to time.
Being both a programmer who releases GPL'd and BSD'd code as well as an amateur photographer, then I'd say that what license I choose depends on the quality of the work. When coding, if I care about the code and want it to be free, then I choose GPL. If it's code I don't care about much, or want to be used in commercial works, then I choose BSD.
I have also uploaded photos to Wikipedia before. However, I can't upload any photos of what I would consider to be high quality, because they require you to basically give up all form of control over those photos. Yes, you still hold copyright, but you cannot exercise any of that copyright.
To put in nerd licensing terms, they won't allow CC-NC in their licenses, which is unacceptable to any serious photographer. I have no problem allowing anybody to use my photos for free, unless you're actually using them to make money, in which case you owe me a cut. That's the way it works. Requiring me to license them for free commercial usage simply means that you will only get "bad" photos, or those which are not commercially viable.
I've never made money on my photos, BTW. But I'm also not fool enough to think that they have no value. And unlike code, I don't get value back from giving it away. The GPL doesn't work for photos, because there's no return on investment.
When I give away code, then other people improve upon it and release their improvements. That's what the GPL guarantees. I get paid in the form of better code, which I can use. I accept that as part of releasing the code. But with photography, there's no give and take there. If I give my photos to Wikipedia, I never get paid for them, in any format. They don't get improved upon. I don't get anything back. There's no incentive for me to contribute my work, which has value, because I get nothing in return.
Lack of markup? Last I checked, a USB 1.5TB drive was around $150, tops. Not $600.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148406
A good player app takes exclusive control of the sound system, to prevent exactly that sort of thing. VLC has this as a configurable option, in fact.
Not unless there's some downside to there being lots of smithy's as well. Which is often not the case in most games, as the economy is not free-market.
True, if market forces ruled the game. But that's pretty rare, normally prices for items are fixed in such a game.
To get true market forces operating on the price of items, you'd need to have your items basically bidded on (possibly in bulk), then resold by markets at a profit. You could emulate this, of course, and some games have done so, but it's difficult to emulate well without actually doing it with real people. A free marketplace is inherently unpredictable, a computer can't simulate that.
The problem with an open-ended system is that it is always unbalanced. At some point, the system evolves to the point where it makes more sense to be a smithy than to be a baker, or whatever. One profession/class/rank/item always tops out and becomes unbeatable. The only way to balance this is to either a) have mods who arbitrary slap people down by pushing the values this way or that or b) introduce a changing ruleset to balance things out through game events or some other "magic" process.
Either way, the players will find these changes "unfair". "I put all this effort into making this high ranking person, and your changes made me lesser!" is the basic gist of it. The problem of it is that they're correct, the changes did make that person lesser, in order to balance out the game.
Digitally you can increase the audio to the max no-clip volume (normalize it) without serious loss of fidelity. A good player app could do that automatically, but many don't because it involves scanning the entire clip to find the peaks, and sometimes you don't have access to the whole clip (streaming).
Even so, if you don't know where the peaks are, then altering the digital signal level just haphazardly is certain to make your audio sound like complete crap. Which is why you manipulate the system volume for volume control, because that's analog (even if you set it digitally) and doesn't involve changing the signal.
Basically, the problem with the twiddle-the-system mechanism is that my loud music will occasionally be disrupted by a jarring system noise. This is terrible.
Yes, it is, which is why audio playing apps should temporarily turn off system noises. Windows has a call for this, somewhere. Not sure on Linux systems, but I bet there is a way.
Since Chrome the browser has Gears basically built in, and they offer a fairly comprehensive API for that sort of thing with GWT ( http://code.google.com/p/gwt-google-apis/ ), then yeah, Gears is going to be a big part of making "Applications" for this thing.
Seems pretty valid to me. On the more recent linux systems, installing the latest video driver is a matter of going to the install program of whatever stripe, selecting the video driver, and saying "install it". Given that, then installing the video player, it should indeed "Just Work". It's not a matter of having to compile your own, if you're using a distribution that does relatively recent compiles of code (Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch all the popular ones).
You are describing the correct behavior. An audio or video program should not be messing with the system volume (or any auxiliary system volume control).
Actually, no. ALL volume control should be adjusting the system volume controls. There is no such real thing as "digital volume".
If you alter volume digitally, you lose resolution. Take a 16-bit signal. Your max volume corresponds to the peaks of that signal. Assuming that the peaks range from -32768 to 32767 (the signal has been normalized), then all you can ever do is reduce the volume. If you increase it digitally, you get clipping or some other form of loss of quality, depending on how you do it. The system volume controls, on the other hand, are generally directly hooked to the amplifier in the sound card, which is analog, and which doesn't have the same issues.
In other words, volume is an analog thing. It's controlled by the amplifier in the sound card. Emulating it by manipulating the digital signal (which is all that a program has real control over without hitting the system volume) always causes loss in signal quality, in some manner.
And exploit code: http://downloads.securityfocus.com/vulnerabilities/exploits/35558.rb
Basically, it's exploiting a buffer overflow in the MSVidCtl ActiveX control. It has it load a malformed GIF which causes a buffer overflow somewhere, which then loads in shellcode.
Not much to it, really. You could make this into a static exploit if you so desired and pop it on any webpage you liked.
And finally, it seems kind of foolish to give the guys name/location when people have already made death threats against him. What if the professor is beaten or killed now?
Meh. Internet tough guys rarely do anything in the real world. Most that will happen is that he'll get some pointless and lame snail mail calling him a troll and such.
That said, he does deserve to be beaten with a clue-by-four. I mean, his whole premise is "I tried to be a dick in the virtual world and people hated me for it". Well, duh. I mean, if he ignored the social standards of a society, then what did he expect to happen? Everybody to shower him with lollipops?
Or I could not use CFL's.
Do the math. My solution is cheaper, both in the short AND long run.