This is a necessary consequence of speaking truth to power. You've unnerved them. Good for Wikileaks, you go girl! First they fight you, etc. (Then here came some cynicism about betraying the very values for which... but nevermind. European citizen, sorry.)

Good honest question. Here's why:

- I hack ZoneMinder for profit on company time. I have no personal interest in getting the package to work, since I don't personally need or use the software. If I forked, I'd get a lot of correspondence from people, which my employer will not let me answer on their dime. On my own dime, I have other projects.
- C++ and Perl are not my fortes. Shell and C are. So I'm not the chosen one.
- I am a Slackware person. Most of the ZoneMinder folks are Debian people. This clashes. I "corrected" a lot of assumptions that didn't hold on Slackware, but I wouldn't want to bench an alien codebase against an alien platform.

So this is just not for me, sorry. I will probably release my patches to the ZoneMinder forums though, for what it's worth, even though I hate jumping through hoops to generate a "username" and a "password" for a one-time contribution, and prefer to mail the maintainer.

As someone who's been trying to whip up ZoneMinder into a marketable state for over a year now, I have to say it's not all it's made out to be. The capture daemons are brittle and crash frequently due to resource and memory leaks. When they exit abnormally, they always do so with the same code 255, and don't produce workable logs. Timestamps of " 1 january 1970" happen all the time, which mess up the timeline view of events. The web front end is arcane, spartan, and really time-intensive to learn. (E.g. clicking on a monitor's name does something different from clicking on its IP address, even though both screens go to a different subset of camera settings. The difference between a "modect with no zone" and a "monitor" is arbitrary. All the different camera "modes" are strange in my opinion. That there's ten different ways to view events is weird. And so on. It's not unlearnable, but it's far, far from usable.)

So instead of just whining, I patched a lot of these issues, along with adding some new cameras to the database and improving the translation for my native language. I sent the maintainer a pretty nice patch set, if I say so myself. Guess what? Absolute silence, never heard anything back. Which I could live with, if my patches at least showed up in the next release. But no new releases for over a year. So my patience with this project is pretty much over.

Simple. You don't have to install anything to use PHP (let your webhoster take care of that), and you can see the results immediately in not just a sandbox but *in your actual browser*, which is tremendously gratifying to a newbie.

While Python is obviously the better language (I really won't defend PHP there, the language is patently silly), the trouble of having to install it and then use a console for your output is going to turn people off. Most won't even get past the download-and-install stage, and the ones that do, will miss the thrill of having something that "does something cool" and is shareable with others through the web.

I like the suggestion to use PHP, it's perhaps the closest we have to oldfashioned BASIC. You hardly need anything to get started, apart from web hosting, an FTP client and Notepad. The language is well documented, its error messages are often helpful (except for that crazy hebrew one), and you get immediate reward and feedback when you refresh the page. It also has real world uses. Programming goes naturally from there, if you're curious and stick with it.

Actually, my original command would have worked, but the above is cleaner.

You're right, I mistakenly assumed that ~ would be aliased to /root when sudo'ing, but the shell expands the tilde, not sudo. So:

sudo chown root::root ~/.adobe/Flash_Player
sudo chmod 0000 ~/.adobe/Flash_Player

I did this and it sort of broke Flash for me on a lot of sites, so YMMV.

sudo chown root::root ~yourusername/.adobe/Flash_Player
sudo chmod 0000 ~yourusername/.adobe/Flash_Player

There was talk about installing these devices on ships passing through Somali waters as an anti-piracy measure.

Yes. Those are photos of a defocused patch of light. My original statement still stands. The only way this would work is by taking pictures through an SLR viewfinder, which has, you know, a ground glass on which the projected image forms. You cannot otherwise stack two photographic lenses.

This thing cannot work, unless they remove the iPhone's original lens, of which the article makes no mention. You simply cannot stack lenses like that. Compare it to what you see when you look (with your eye, which is a lens) through the rear of a lens. You see a round patch of light, not a whole view of the world. The iPhone would see the same thing. Also, if you _did_ remove the original lens, you'd end up with an enormous crop factor, turning every SLR lens into a very long tele. Try holding that steady with a mount like this. In short, I call shenanigans, get the brooms!

Holland has an infection rate of "eventually 80%" (source: http://www.nvkc.nl/tijdschrift/content/1999/nr%201/p65/1999-1-p65.pdf ), which does eerily correlate with our soon-to-be world cup win. (Disclaimer: there are orange crowds singing outside after "our" win to Uruguay, and to Germany I would like to say, "Schade Deutschland, alles ist vorbei!" ;-)

Sorry for shooting for the obvious, but the old trope about correlation and causation seems exactly in order here.

Passwords are the wrong solution. Trying to make people remember a short string with high entropy is hard, so people write them down. The other way around is much better - long passphrases with less of the tedious entropy. Quotations, lyrics, names, whatever. They're much easier to remember and much harder to brute-force. Sprinkle in some punctuation and you're golden.

Well, as long as it's closeted, I don't care what safety blanket they need to survive the realities of life. Let them believe in Dog. But never, ever let them get away with fusing it into their science. Religion is at best "outside the realm" of science, which is a polite way of saying it's irrelevant to reality, which is a polite way of saying it's a harmful delusion. Fine with me if you live your life that way, but keep it to yourself.