The problem with the monorail is that it was designed as spectacle, not as transit, yet even as spectacle it fails because it's so out of the way that most people never even stumble across it, and if you do take it, all you see are the backs of hotels. It's even priced as spectacle. $2.75 gets you anywhere in New York City via the subway and bus, but it costs $5 to take the monorail just to go 4 miles along the backs of casinos in Las Vegas.
The monorail should have been built in the middle of the Strip. The Strip is a dystopian nightmare highway bifurcating one of the most walked streets in the United States. It's so dangerous that in many places there aren't even any at-grade pedestrian crossings; you have to go up stairs/escalators set back from the strip, go across a bridge, and then back down, often being forced to detour through one or two casinos in the process. It's the ultimate triumph of automobiles over people for no goddamn reason at all.
The mass transit should have been run right down the middle of the Strip. Instead it was forced to the margins where it remains unused, when it was really the car traffic that should have been forced to the margins. Las Vegas should do a NYC-style "Summer Streets" a few times per year and entirely close down the Strip to car traffic for half a day and let pedestrians use it as they'd like, like Mardi Gras. Then people would realize what they've been missing.
FYI, the HSTS preload list is used by all major browsers (Chrome, Firefox, IE, Edge, Safari, Opera, etc.). This is a good thing, of course; online security shouldn't be enforced conditionally depending on which browser you're using.
The linked article got it wrong. This isn't about Chrome adding TLDs to the HSTS list, it's about the TLDs' owner (which also happens to be Google) adding them to the global HSTS list.
I hate how deficient PC laptop screens are nowadays. They've somehow managed to get worse over time, not better. I'm still using an aging Dell laptop that's six years old because it has a 1920x1200 screen and I cannot even find a replacement that is similarly specced.
The only company that gets it is Apple, but their Retina display laptops start at $1,700, which is an absurd premium, and I'm not interested in running OS X anyway.
Here's what I've learned recently: If I ever discover a major security hole, do not even attempt to release it responsibly. Instead, layer up behind some proxies and Tor and leak it into a blackhat forum or IRC channel. That way the security hole will eventually get fixed, and I can't be prosecuted.
Well, not so much of a joke as an inevitability, but yeah, a lot of the great inventions seem obvious in hindsight. Yet, for some reason, no one figured it out for awhile.
Was the lack of a microwave caused by fears of interference with the aircraft? If microwaves can interfere with WiFi, I imagine they could wreak havoc on an airplane's electronics systems. Just not worth the chance?
> There are probably a fare number of single shot WWI and WWII era rifles we gave them to fight the Russians still floating about as well.
All standard arms of the World War I through World War II period were at least bolt-action, with some militaries issuing semi-automatics as standard (such as the US Armed Forces with the M1 Garand in WWII).
The improvement in rate of fire with a bolt-action rifle that loads from stripper clips is pretty significant over a single shot.
Hate to bring you down, but from everything I hear, the life isn't "arsenic-based" in the same sense that we're "carbon-based". Instead, all indications are that it's "simply" arsenic replacing phosphorus in the DNA backbone.
As a biochemist, I can almost assure you that the rest of the DNA looks the same. That is, these organisms have the same A/T/C/G DNA bases. I'd guess the (deoxy)ribose sugar part of the sugar-phosphate backbone is the same. It's just the phosphorus in the phosphate has been replaced by the chemically similar arsenic. Anything more extensive would be the selling point, and arsenic would be a secondary (but still important) consideration.
Well darn. I was going off the rather incomplete information as released so far. But we'll know for sure soon enough.
I don't know why you jump to that conclusion when it's not possible to concede that either mode of lifeforms came from abiogenesis on this Earth, or that either couldn't be extraterrestrial in origin... It's just as likely that our phosphate based life and this arsenic based life hitchhiked to this rock on other rocks.
Extraterrestrial origin is, of course, even more significant, but my main point was that even if it is homegrown, it still implies two separate abiogenesis events, which is huge. Note that extraterrestrial origin also implies two separate abiogenesis events, of course.
Taking the speculation in the article at face value, and thus assuming that NASA has found an arsenic-based lifeform in a shadow biosphere on Earth, here's why it's important:
All life on Earth that we know of is related. It all uses the same basic DNA/RNA mechanisms (including the same four base pairs), uses the same specific molecules that prominently feature carbon as the basic assembly blocks of the cell, etc. To use the ever-popular car analogy, cars can look quite different from each other, but they're all still essentially made out of the same things: bolts, gears, copper wiring, etc.
Well this other kind of life is completely different. It's so different that we know it cannot possibly be related to all of the other Earth life that we've known about thus far, as there is nothing in common. That means abiogenesis (the spontaneous generation of life from precursor non-living materials) happened at least TWICE on just this one planet.
So while this isn't extra-terrestrial life, it does have all sorts of potential ramifications on the potential existence of extra-terrestrial life. Before today, it was possible to speculate that one solution to Drake's Equation was simply that spontaneous generation of life was so rare that it only happened once, ever. But if we now found that it's happened multiple times just on this one planet... then hell, it could be happening everywhere, all the time.
Kids don't really struggle with projecting a 3D scene onto a 2D plane. They just start drawing what they see on paper. They don't even think about vanishing points and projections. That interpretation is natural as our vision is really based on 2D sensors.
Actually, that's not true. The naive/untrained method is to draw everything from a flat 2D perspective. You can see this both in art by children (or people with no formal art training) as well as in pretty much all art from the Middle Ages and prior. The development of perspective, which is an application of mathematics/geometry to art, is why paintings from the Renaissance Era on simply look so much better and more lifelike than paintings from any earlier era. The rules of perspective (that is, mapping a 3D world to a 2D surface) are not obvious, are not simple, and learning how to draw perspective well is a skill that is hard to master.
So I spent the time to read that overly long article, and the author doesn't even say why he can't play the game with his left hand? I understand he looked through the menus for an option and didn't find one, but what specifically is going on in the game that makes it impossible to play with his left hand? This seems like the central point of the whole story, and yet it is left unexplained.
Um, if they have physical access to the computer (in order to monkey with the power), why would it be considered secure?
This vulnerability is dangerous in the case when the same key is being used in many devices. Cracking one means you've cracked them all. This is a fairly common situation in consumer devices. See the HD-DVD player keys, or the TI graphing calculator signing keys.
Which part is over-estimated? All I can speak on from experience is AntiVandalBot. I ran that on an Athlon XP 2500+ (which wasn't particularly amazing at the time). It wasn't the computation that was hard, it was the network usage of downloading the diff of every edit by a non-trusted user from the RC feed. I would not have been able to run it on any home Internet connection. Thankfully I was able to place my server on an unthrottled 100 Mbps dorm connection at the University of Maryland.
I will grant you that highspeed Internet access has become a lot more widespread since 2006 (I personally have 25/15 FIOS), but at the time, there wasn't anything available residentially that could handle it.
The false positive rate on the anti-vandalism bots is a lot lower than you would think. The bots are written quite conservatively, take a lot of factors into account, and only pull the revert trigger when they are quite sure.
It's the type II error rate that's pretty high. Unfortunately, that's not solvable without strong AI.
In response to whether those two examples are vandalism, the answer is no, they are not.
You'd need a strong AI to be able to make those determinations, and if such a thing existed, it'd make more sense just to have the strong AI write the encyclopedia.
What we're talking about here is obvious vandalism (blanking, insertion of curse words, etc.) of the type that can be detected by an algorithmic/heuristic program.
I'm not sure why he bragged about reversion speed. All that's really dependent on is your network connection. For one, your network connection has to be good enough to download, in real time, the diffs of all edits to Wikipedia. Most aren't.
Anyway, a decision as to whether a given diff is vandalism or not needs to be made in a small fraction of a second, as there are dozens of edits coming in every second, and if you continuously fall farther and farther behind, you lose. Given an ideal network connection, vandalism should be reverted in a couple of seconds or so.
I suppose there's some argument to be made for a large cluster of computers handling all edits on Wikipedia, each one spending up to a full second judging each individual edit, but the truth is that none of the algorithms currently in use for vandalism detection are nearly sophisticated enough to require so much computation time.
Whoever posted this clearly isn't aware of the actual work being done in the field. For instance, I was running an anti-vandalism bot in 2006, and it wasn't new at the time. They've gotten gotten much more sophisticated since then.
Why are they so intent on reinventing the wheel? Do they not even realize that the wheel exists already? Why not just improve on it instead?
You're still forgetting some things, like how the wholesale price is still much less than the retail price, that there are many other indirect employees at the publisher that need to be paid too (PR folk, secretaries, etc.); also, the cost of advertising can be very large, easily more than what the writer, editor, proofreader, and cover artist make combined.
Still, I would very much like to see a source for those numbers he provided, because I'm very interested.
Woosh indeed! It's almost like different people might have different needs than you! But that's obviously a ridiculous idea.
I will grant that others have different needs than I. However, let me offer up a supporting anecdote: I am another one of those people who typically reads only one book at a time (two is stretching it). I am pretty sure I represent the majority of people on that point. I don't particularly need access to the contents of thousands of books at all times. I'm already in front of the computer for many hours every day as it is anyway, so I would just find whatever I needed to find then.
I go to the library, I check out a bunch of books all at once, and then I read them one-by-one, carrying whichever one I happen to be reading with me whenever I go anywhere requiring waits (doctor's office, Metro, etc.). It's practically free; I've only found a couple books so far I wanted to read that the library didn't have, and I was able to purchase those used for about $5 each shipped from Amazon in hardcover. Now compare that to the starting costs of a Kindle (what is it, $200? $300?), and then an incremental cost of, what, $10 per book?
If all you need to do is be able to read one book at a time, and this is where you and I differ, the library makes the most sense by far.
Unless you are paying extra for archival paper, your books will be crumbling before my flat text files become unreadable. I don't rely on the storage medium, I rely on the format.
Sorry, but that's just not true. First of all, nearly every hardcover book you can buy these days is printed on acid-free paper. Note that that study measures the acid-free adoption rate fifteen years ago; it has gotten better since then.
But even your every day low quality non-acid-free paper is going to last a lot longer than any digital format. My dad still has hundreds of pulp scifi paperbacks from the heyday of the era that he bought used. Many are older than seven decades. They feel a little bit "old", and the paper is yellowing, but they're still perfectly readable, and they should still last for a lot longer yet.
Basically, my point is that while the format itself of an ASCII text file will probably be readable hundreds of years from now, you sure as hell aren't going to have managed to preserve your files for that length of time. You're arguing an inconsistent point; the format of "books" will be readable forever. You're making an apples-to-oranges comparisons of individual books on the one hand, which will eventually decay, versus the format of digital files on the other hand. It's not a fair comparison.
Give me a way to store an eBook that you think is going to still be readily usable a hundred years from now without any further modification or periodic maintenance transformation of formats. There isn't any. If you think there is, just tell me one way someone from 1970 could have stored digital information that would be easily readable on a computer today, and then realize we're talking about a much longer gulf of time than that. A paper book, on the other hand, will always just work.
Also, you assume that computers will exist at all many hundreds of years in the future; depending on how we manage our climate change issues, or nuclear warfare issues, that might not be true at all. If society collapses, books will still be perfectly readable; computers will be nothing more than what the ancient Mayan ruins to us.
They're going to be so unimpressed looking at those things through a cheap 4" telescope.
I disagree. The first time I saw these objects in a not-much-larger telescope I was blown away. There's something about seeing them with your own eyes that makes it "real" to you in a way that seeing hundreds of Hubble photos never does.
Jupiter: They won't see any cloud bands -- just a glowing white dot. They might see phases on it. They'll see the Galilean moons as four points of light indistinguishable from stars.
Nah, the Galilean moons are amazing to see for yourself. I bet the only moon that any of these students has ever seen is Luna - now point them at Jupiter and they've seen FOUR MORE in another instant. That's perspective-changing. And they're definitely distinguishable from the background stars; they'll be much brighter, and they're all clustered around Jupiter, in a single line. That teaches you about their orbits right there.
Saturn: They'll see an oblate bright thing -- Saturn with ears, to quote Galileo. Their imaginations should allow them to picture them as rings.
Yeah, Saturn with ears. Exactly. They'll know what the "ears" are because they've already seen close-up pictures of Saturn from Hubble; now they'll be seeing it with their own two eyes. That's a big difference.
Take a look in the app market. MANY of the apps are free, and there is usually a "just as good" free option for most pay apps.
The issue here is free as in speech (libre), not free as in beer (gratis). Most apps do not have their source available, are not freely redistributable with modifications, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
See here for an explanation: https://security.googleblog.co...
TL;DR is the entire TLD is on the HSTS preload list.
The problem with the monorail is that it was designed as spectacle, not as transit, yet even as spectacle it fails because it's so out of the way that most people never even stumble across it, and if you do take it, all you see are the backs of hotels. It's even priced as spectacle. $2.75 gets you anywhere in New York City via the subway and bus, but it costs $5 to take the monorail just to go 4 miles along the backs of casinos in Las Vegas.
The monorail should have been built in the middle of the Strip. The Strip is a dystopian nightmare highway bifurcating one of the most walked streets in the United States. It's so dangerous that in many places there aren't even any at-grade pedestrian crossings; you have to go up stairs/escalators set back from the strip, go across a bridge, and then back down, often being forced to detour through one or two casinos in the process. It's the ultimate triumph of automobiles over people for no goddamn reason at all.
The mass transit should have been run right down the middle of the Strip. Instead it was forced to the margins where it remains unused, when it was really the car traffic that should have been forced to the margins. Las Vegas should do a NYC-style "Summer Streets" a few times per year and entirely close down the Strip to car traffic for half a day and let pedestrians use it as they'd like, like Mardi Gras. Then people would realize what they've been missing.
FYI, the HSTS preload list is used by all major browsers (Chrome, Firefox, IE, Edge, Safari, Opera, etc.). This is a good thing, of course; online security shouldn't be enforced conditionally depending on which browser you're using.
The linked article got it wrong. This isn't about Chrome adding TLDs to the HSTS list, it's about the TLDs' owner (which also happens to be Google) adding them to the global HSTS list.
I hate how deficient PC laptop screens are nowadays. They've somehow managed to get worse over time, not better. I'm still using an aging Dell laptop that's six years old because it has a 1920x1200 screen and I cannot even find a replacement that is similarly specced.
The only company that gets it is Apple, but their Retina display laptops start at $1,700, which is an absurd premium, and I'm not interested in running OS X anyway.
Here's what I've learned recently: If I ever discover a major security hole, do not even attempt to release it responsibly. Instead, layer up behind some proxies and Tor and leak it into a blackhat forum or IRC channel. That way the security hole will eventually get fixed, and I can't be prosecuted.
Well, not so much of a joke as an inevitability, but yeah, a lot of the great inventions seem obvious in hindsight. Yet, for some reason, no one figured it out for awhile.
If you've ever used Usenet, and you've used parity files to recover missing segments of data, then you know exactly how this technique works.
Frankly, I'm surprised it took so long for someone to apply it to lossy network environments. It seems obvious in hindsight.
Was the lack of a microwave caused by fears of interference with the aircraft? If microwaves can interfere with WiFi, I imagine they could wreak havoc on an airplane's electronics systems. Just not worth the chance?
> There are probably a fare number of single shot WWI and WWII era rifles we gave them to fight the Russians still floating about as well.
All standard arms of the World War I through World War II period were at least bolt-action, with some militaries issuing semi-automatics as standard (such as the US Armed Forces with the M1 Garand in WWII).
The improvement in rate of fire with a bolt-action rifle that loads from stripper clips is pretty significant over a single shot.
Hate to bring you down, but from everything I hear, the life isn't "arsenic-based" in the same sense that we're "carbon-based". Instead, all indications are that it's "simply" arsenic replacing phosphorus in the DNA backbone.
As a biochemist, I can almost assure you that the rest of the DNA looks the same. That is, these organisms have the same A/T/C/G DNA bases. I'd guess the (deoxy)ribose sugar part of the sugar-phosphate backbone is the same. It's just the phosphorus in the phosphate has been replaced by the chemically similar arsenic. Anything more extensive would be the selling point, and arsenic would be a secondary (but still important) consideration.
Well darn. I was going off the rather incomplete information as released so far. But we'll know for sure soon enough.
I don't know why you jump to that conclusion when it's not possible to concede that either mode of lifeforms came from abiogenesis on this Earth, or that either couldn't be extraterrestrial in origin... It's just as likely that our phosphate based life and this arsenic based life hitchhiked to this rock on other rocks.
Extraterrestrial origin is, of course, even more significant, but my main point was that even if it is homegrown, it still implies two separate abiogenesis events, which is huge. Note that extraterrestrial origin also implies two separate abiogenesis events, of course.
Taking the speculation in the article at face value, and thus assuming that NASA has found an arsenic-based lifeform in a shadow biosphere on Earth, here's why it's important:
All life on Earth that we know of is related. It all uses the same basic DNA/RNA mechanisms (including the same four base pairs), uses the same specific molecules that prominently feature carbon as the basic assembly blocks of the cell, etc. To use the ever-popular car analogy, cars can look quite different from each other, but they're all still essentially made out of the same things: bolts, gears, copper wiring, etc.
Well this other kind of life is completely different. It's so different that we know it cannot possibly be related to all of the other Earth life that we've known about thus far, as there is nothing in common. That means abiogenesis (the spontaneous generation of life from precursor non-living materials) happened at least TWICE on just this one planet.
So while this isn't extra-terrestrial life, it does have all sorts of potential ramifications on the potential existence of extra-terrestrial life. Before today, it was possible to speculate that one solution to Drake's Equation was simply that spontaneous generation of life was so rare that it only happened once, ever. But if we now found that it's happened multiple times just on this one planet ... then hell, it could be happening everywhere, all the time.
Kids don't really struggle with projecting a 3D scene onto a 2D plane. They just start drawing what they see on paper. They don't even think about vanishing points and projections. That interpretation is natural as our vision is really based on 2D sensors.
Actually, that's not true. The naive/untrained method is to draw everything from a flat 2D perspective. You can see this both in art by children (or people with no formal art training) as well as in pretty much all art from the Middle Ages and prior. The development of perspective, which is an application of mathematics/geometry to art, is why paintings from the Renaissance Era on simply look so much better and more lifelike than paintings from any earlier era. The rules of perspective (that is, mapping a 3D world to a 2D surface) are not obvious, are not simple, and learning how to draw perspective well is a skill that is hard to master.
So I spent the time to read that overly long article, and the author doesn't even say why he can't play the game with his left hand? I understand he looked through the menus for an option and didn't find one, but what specifically is going on in the game that makes it impossible to play with his left hand? This seems like the central point of the whole story, and yet it is left unexplained.
Um, if they have physical access to the computer (in order to monkey with the power), why would it be considered secure?
This vulnerability is dangerous in the case when the same key is being used in many devices. Cracking one means you've cracked them all. This is a fairly common situation in consumer devices. See the HD-DVD player keys, or the TI graphing calculator signing keys.
Which part is over-estimated? All I can speak on from experience is AntiVandalBot. I ran that on an Athlon XP 2500+ (which wasn't particularly amazing at the time). It wasn't the computation that was hard, it was the network usage of downloading the diff of every edit by a non-trusted user from the RC feed. I would not have been able to run it on any home Internet connection. Thankfully I was able to place my server on an unthrottled 100 Mbps dorm connection at the University of Maryland.
I will grant you that highspeed Internet access has become a lot more widespread since 2006 (I personally have 25/15 FIOS), but at the time, there wasn't anything available residentially that could handle it.
The false positive rate on the anti-vandalism bots is a lot lower than you would think. The bots are written quite conservatively, take a lot of factors into account, and only pull the revert trigger when they are quite sure.
It's the type II error rate that's pretty high. Unfortunately, that's not solvable without strong AI.
In response to whether those two examples are vandalism, the answer is no, they are not.
You'd need a strong AI to be able to make those determinations, and if such a thing existed, it'd make more sense just to have the strong AI write the encyclopedia.
What we're talking about here is obvious vandalism (blanking, insertion of curse words, etc.) of the type that can be detected by an algorithmic/heuristic program.
I'm not sure why he bragged about reversion speed. All that's really dependent on is your network connection. For one, your network connection has to be good enough to download, in real time, the diffs of all edits to Wikipedia. Most aren't.
Anyway, a decision as to whether a given diff is vandalism or not needs to be made in a small fraction of a second, as there are dozens of edits coming in every second, and if you continuously fall farther and farther behind, you lose. Given an ideal network connection, vandalism should be reverted in a couple of seconds or so.
I suppose there's some argument to be made for a large cluster of computers handling all edits on Wikipedia, each one spending up to a full second judging each individual edit, but the truth is that none of the algorithms currently in use for vandalism detection are nearly sophisticated enough to require so much computation time.
Whoever posted this clearly isn't aware of the actual work being done in the field. For instance, I was running an anti-vandalism bot in 2006, and it wasn't new at the time. They've gotten gotten much more sophisticated since then.
Why are they so intent on reinventing the wheel? Do they not even realize that the wheel exists already? Why not just improve on it instead?
You're still forgetting some things, like how the wholesale price is still much less than the retail price, that there are many other indirect employees at the publisher that need to be paid too (PR folk, secretaries, etc.); also, the cost of advertising can be very large, easily more than what the writer, editor, proofreader, and cover artist make combined.
Still, I would very much like to see a source for those numbers he provided, because I'm very interested.
Woosh indeed! It's almost like different people might have different needs than you! But that's obviously a ridiculous idea.
I will grant that others have different needs than I. However, let me offer up a supporting anecdote: I am another one of those people who typically reads only one book at a time (two is stretching it). I am pretty sure I represent the majority of people on that point. I don't particularly need access to the contents of thousands of books at all times. I'm already in front of the computer for many hours every day as it is anyway, so I would just find whatever I needed to find then.
I go to the library, I check out a bunch of books all at once, and then I read them one-by-one, carrying whichever one I happen to be reading with me whenever I go anywhere requiring waits (doctor's office, Metro, etc.). It's practically free; I've only found a couple books so far I wanted to read that the library didn't have, and I was able to purchase those used for about $5 each shipped from Amazon in hardcover. Now compare that to the starting costs of a Kindle (what is it, $200? $300?), and then an incremental cost of, what, $10 per book?
If all you need to do is be able to read one book at a time, and this is where you and I differ, the library makes the most sense by far.
Unless you are paying extra for archival paper, your books will be crumbling before my flat text files become unreadable. I don't rely on the storage medium, I rely on the format.
Sorry, but that's just not true. First of all, nearly every hardcover book you can buy these days is printed on acid-free paper. Note that that study measures the acid-free adoption rate fifteen years ago; it has gotten better since then.
But even your every day low quality non-acid-free paper is going to last a lot longer than any digital format. My dad still has hundreds of pulp scifi paperbacks from the heyday of the era that he bought used. Many are older than seven decades. They feel a little bit "old", and the paper is yellowing, but they're still perfectly readable, and they should still last for a lot longer yet.
Basically, my point is that while the format itself of an ASCII text file will probably be readable hundreds of years from now, you sure as hell aren't going to have managed to preserve your files for that length of time. You're arguing an inconsistent point; the format of "books" will be readable forever. You're making an apples-to-oranges comparisons of individual books on the one hand, which will eventually decay, versus the format of digital files on the other hand. It's not a fair comparison.
Give me a way to store an eBook that you think is going to still be readily usable a hundred years from now without any further modification or periodic maintenance transformation of formats. There isn't any. If you think there is, just tell me one way someone from 1970 could have stored digital information that would be easily readable on a computer today, and then realize we're talking about a much longer gulf of time than that. A paper book, on the other hand, will always just work.
Also, you assume that computers will exist at all many hundreds of years in the future; depending on how we manage our climate change issues, or nuclear warfare issues, that might not be true at all. If society collapses, books will still be perfectly readable; computers will be nothing more than what the ancient Mayan ruins to us.
They're going to be so unimpressed looking at those things through a cheap 4" telescope.
I disagree. The first time I saw these objects in a not-much-larger telescope I was blown away. There's something about seeing them with your own eyes that makes it "real" to you in a way that seeing hundreds of Hubble photos never does.
Jupiter: They won't see any cloud bands -- just a glowing white dot. They might see phases on it. They'll see the Galilean moons as four points of light indistinguishable from stars.
Nah, the Galilean moons are amazing to see for yourself. I bet the only moon that any of these students has ever seen is Luna - now point them at Jupiter and they've seen FOUR MORE in another instant. That's perspective-changing. And they're definitely distinguishable from the background stars; they'll be much brighter, and they're all clustered around Jupiter, in a single line. That teaches you about their orbits right there.
Saturn: They'll see an oblate bright thing -- Saturn with ears, to quote Galileo. Their imaginations should allow them to picture them as rings.
Yeah, Saturn with ears. Exactly. They'll know what the "ears" are because they've already seen close-up pictures of Saturn from Hubble; now they'll be seeing it with their own two eyes. That's a big difference.
Take a look in the app market. MANY of the apps are free, and there is usually a "just as good" free option for most pay apps.
The issue here is free as in speech (libre), not free as in beer (gratis). Most apps do not have their source available, are not freely redistributable with modifications, etc.