Reality is indeed scarier than fiction, but my facts aren't crossed. The Snopes articles is correct, but you're conflating two separate episodes: the one referenced by Snopes occurred when she was mayor; the one referenced in my quote from the NYT article occurred a year or two earlier, during her tenure on the city council — before being elected mayor.
The latter episode, as I understand it, came in the context of a loyalty test of the librarian who had balked her earlier. That librarian was subsequently fired, then re-hired after convincing Palin of her loyalty.
I'm unclear who you think you're responding to. I most certainly did not claim that Palin "literally" banned books from library shelves: my exact words referred to "her campaign of attempted book-censorship" (emphasis added). Even if she didn't ultimately succeed in that campaign, the episode is not only noteworthy but entirely to the point in illuminating her conduct as an elected official.
Oh, believe me, I didn't miss it. I picked that passage to counter the claim that "Palin wants to ban specific books" had been "thoroughly debunked". I had hoped that people would read the linked article for the rest of the story. (Yes, I'm aware this is Slashdot, and yes, I realize that was wishful thinking.) I am a little surprised by the number of people who didn't even bother to read my comment in its entirety before responding.
That's a good point, and well taken, except that the Palin book-censorship "myth" was never debunked — the (truthful, as far as it goes) claim that she never attempted to ban specific books as mayor of Wassila is a straw man, a cynical diversion from the fact that she embarked on her campaign of attempted book-censorship as a city councilwoman, before being elected mayor.
But in 1995, Ms. Palin, then a city councilwoman, told colleagues that she had noticed the book "Daddy's Roommate" on the shelves and that it did not belong there, according to Ms. [Laura Chase, the campaign manager during Ms. Palin's first run for mayor in 1996,] and Mr. Stein. Ms. Chase read the book, which helps children understand homosexuality, and said it was inoffensive; she suggested that Ms. Palin read it.
"Sarah said she didn't need to read that stuff," Ms. Chase said. "It was disturbing that someone would be willing to remove a book from the library and she didn't even read it."
"I'm still proud of Sarah," she added, "but she scares the bejeebers out of me."
Jeezus. With an attitude like that, I hope you also choose to leave "grown up matters like politics" to others. The last thing this country's (or any's) politics needs is more people who didn't bother to contrive a political awareness until they were 18.
And who are you to assert no one cares about children's opinions, political or otherwise, asshole?
But everyone who supports more government ought to take a look at the incompetence here.
Right. Because there's no incompetence in private corporations. (Or "conflict of interest", whatever that is.) We'd be much better off farming out responsibility for civic infrastructure to the private sector.
Not because "people suck", you misanthrope, but because it doesn't provide any of the benefits which have made Flash video so popular. In particular, since it doesn't attempt to define a standard video codec/container format, it doesn't guarantee the ability to deploy a single video file for viewing regardless of UA, as Flash does (at least, in all UAs for which a Flash plugin is available).
...and without an SSL certificate that identifies the owners to inform you where the data might really be going to.
If you truly believe an SSL certificate does any such thing, you've been sadly (and dangerously) misled. A standard SSL cert reliably informs you only that someone with administrative access to the site to which you're currently connected (whether or not the site is the one you believe it to be) managed to obtain a certificate for that site's domain. It does nothing to verify the identity of the owners or the legitimacy of the site.
Extended Validation (EV) certificates take this a couple of steps further by requiring the involvement of lawyers and company officers in a considerably more rigorous verification process, but at upwards of $1200 a pop, you shouldn't expect to see these provided for every minor web form you're asked to complete. (Currently only a small handful of sites implement them at all — even most of the major banks still use normal x.509 certificates.)
You don't think a name, address, DOB, and password all going plaintext is troublesome? How many people use the same password for half a dozen websites? How many password recovery systems use address or DOB?
That's great. How are they going to correlate that information to the other sites you use?
It's easy to be paranoid about theoretical risks on the Internet, but often difficult to concoct practical scenarios under which they could be leveraged against you. Even assuming someone could launch a successful man in the middle attack against this site (hint: it's harder than you think), there are far easier and more effective ways for fraudsters to obtain access to accounts and data than this piecemeal approach you posit.
Apparently Rezko made roughly a $54,500 profit on the overall property. Here's more on that story from FactCheck.org (a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and generally extremely careful and even-handed in their analysis): http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/rezko_reality.html
I don't necessarily wish to disagree with your overall point, but your way of making it is asinine. Claiming that Valeri Polyakov "did a 437 day flight"? Disingenuous at best, assuming you're referring to Polyakov's 14 monthsin orbit on a space station and not some hitherto undocumented atmospheric flight of his. Why are you comparing this to a manned flight record set in a Cessna?
What's your definition of an "application" versus a "web page"? That seems a pretty useless distinction on the modern web.
Invented (and thoroughly implausible) statistics like "99% of everything" aside, it's not hard to find egregious abuses of Flash on the web. It's also not hard to find abuses of popular AJAX and DHTML Javascript frameworks, or of images — or practically any other variety of web content you care to name. How many web sites have you seen, for instance, composed entirely of massive screen-resolution JPGs sliced or image-mapped into links? I don't believe that the use of Flash on the web is any more characterized by its most flagrant abuses than the use of JPGs, or animated GIFs, or Javascript, for that matter.
Ironically, it wasn't so very many years ago that use of Javascript garnered the same sort of attitude from die-hard web purists that the use of Flash does today. Now hardly anyone so much as blinks at our increasing reliance on Javascript for core functionality.
I'm not arguing that Flash is destined to play a similar role in the evolution of the web, or that it should. But to dismiss its usefulness out of hand seems needlessly limiting and short-sighted to me.
Firstly, "you can't use obscurity for security," is the sort of common wisdom that fails rational examination. Of course you can use obscurity to provide some degree of security. It's simply foolish to rely on it as your sole deterrent. But code hiding/obfuscation is mostly an incidental benefit. As you say, it's quite possible to circumvent by using a decompiler and/or sniffer to figure out what's going on. More to the point — and the issue you didn't really address — is the relative difficulty of tampering with (running) code as compared to Javascript. XSS/script injection attacks against compiled Flash applications are next to impossible: you might be able to use a naively-written Flash application with unvalidated inputs to bootstrap a script injection attack targetting other page elements, but the application itself is effectively inviolate.
As for examples of (non-gaming) applications for which Flash is better suited than Javascript — I think I can come up with dozens of examples, but let me grab one from another open tab: an image-processing application demonstrating a sophisticated image redimensioning technique. (Which of course could also be done in Java — but what if you wanted to make an application like this as widely and easily accessible as possible? Java might not be the better solution.)
"Better choices?" To do what Flash excels at? Name two (aside from Silverlight, which I don't think anyone is prepared to seriously evaluate, yet).
AJAX/DHTML isn't a better choice, it's a different choice. I'll give you that there's significant overlap in capabilities — and all else being equal, I'd rather see Javascript used where possible — but there are a lot of things you can do in Flash that you wouldn't want to try in Javascript, or which would be flatly impossible. (Including hiding your code and protecting it from tampering. Yes, those are legitimate goals in some cases.)
Java (or a Java-based language like Processing) might be a better choice in some respects, if it had Flash's near-ubiquitous install base, or even Flash's ease of installation on most platforms — but it doesn't and it isn't. Pragmatically speaking, if you don't want to torture your users (and/or your support staff) Java just isn't a very good option outside of controlled deployment environments like corporate intranets.
Even if they had universal browser support, SVG and VML aren't intended to do 90% of what Flash does.
So what are these other, better alternatives? I'm curious to know.
As for online video, why the fuck is every sonofabitch out there making their own fucking flash client for video? Video should be distributed in a proper file none of this "Compress->Re-encode/resample for flash->stream to my computer" bullshit...
Because it Just Works, and Flash is ubiquitous whether you like or not. According to the stats on the commercial site I maintain, upwards of 96% of visitors have some FLV-capable version Flash installed. That means I can deploy video without forcing some large percentage of my users to install yet another player/plugin/codec just to see it. That just isn't true of any other comparable streaming video technology.
Slashdot Mirror
Holy crap, a TV that receives programming wirelessly, over the air??? What will they think of next??
Reality is indeed scarier than fiction, but my facts aren't crossed. The Snopes articles is correct, but you're conflating two separate episodes: the one referenced by Snopes occurred when she was mayor; the one referenced in my quote from the NYT article occurred a year or two earlier, during her tenure on the city council — before being elected mayor.
The latter episode, as I understand it, came in the context of a loyalty test of the librarian who had balked her earlier. That librarian was subsequently fired, then re-hired after convincing Palin of her loyalty.
I'm unclear who you think you're responding to. I most certainly did not claim that Palin "literally" banned books from library shelves: my exact words referred to "her campaign of attempted book-censorship" (emphasis added). Even if she didn't ultimately succeed in that campaign, the episode is not only noteworthy but entirely to the point in illuminating her conduct as an elected official.
Oh, believe me, I didn't miss it. I picked that passage to counter the claim that "Palin wants to ban specific books" had been "thoroughly debunked". I had hoped that people would read the linked article for the rest of the story. (Yes, I'm aware this is Slashdot, and yes, I realize that was wishful thinking.) I am a little surprised by the number of people who didn't even bother to read my comment in its entirety before responding.
That's a good point, and well taken, except that the Palin book-censorship "myth" was never debunked — the (truthful, as far as it goes) claim that she never attempted to ban specific books as mayor of Wassila is a straw man, a cynical diversion from the fact that she embarked on her campaign of attempted book-censorship as a city councilwoman, before being elected mayor.
But in 1995, Ms. Palin, then a city councilwoman, told colleagues that she had noticed the book "Daddy's Roommate" on the shelves and that it did not belong there, according to Ms. [Laura Chase, the campaign manager during Ms. Palin's first run for mayor in 1996,] and Mr. Stein. Ms. Chase read the book, which helps children understand homosexuality, and said it was inoffensive; she suggested that Ms. Palin read it.
"Sarah said she didn't need to read that stuff," Ms. Chase said. "It was disturbing that someone would be willing to remove a book from the library and she didn't even read it."
"I'm still proud of Sarah," she added, "but she scares the bejeebers out of me."
(From this article in the New York Times.)
Jeezus. With an attitude like that, I hope you also choose to leave "grown up matters like politics" to others. The last thing this country's (or any's) politics needs is more people who didn't bother to contrive a political awareness until they were 18.
And who are you to assert no one cares about children's opinions, political or otherwise, asshole?
But everyone who supports more government ought to take a look at the incompetence here.
Right. Because there's no incompetence in private corporations. (Or "conflict of interest", whatever that is.) We'd be much better off farming out responsibility for civic infrastructure to the private sector.
They are both an equally valid approach, but the target demographics are incompatible. It would be stupid to try and combine them.
Well, you could, but then you'd have Windows.
It will focus on improving boot times and the convergence of desktop and web.
Wait, they're remaking Win98?
No.
Not because "people suck", you misanthrope, but because it doesn't provide any of the benefits which have made Flash video so popular. In particular, since it doesn't attempt to define a standard video codec/container format, it doesn't guarantee the ability to deploy a single video file for viewing regardless of UA, as Flash does (at least, in all UAs for which a Flash plugin is available).
You don't say where this 8,000 miles away is...
Uh, he practically did if you were paying attention. How many places is the US being "defended" 8000 miles away?
Let me spell it out for you: GP is a GI.
...according to trusty old Wikipedia there's no way to distinguish between a false memory and a true one.
Sure there is, just check the revision history and talk pages.
I think he just said that.
Speaking as a PC gamer: that's fairly ironic.
You didn't mention, but I'm pretty sure from those definitions it isn't software development...
...and without an SSL certificate that identifies the owners to inform you where the data might really be going to.
If you truly believe an SSL certificate does any such thing, you've been sadly (and dangerously) misled. A standard SSL cert reliably informs you only that someone with administrative access to the site to which you're currently connected (whether or not the site is the one you believe it to be) managed to obtain a certificate for that site's domain. It does nothing to verify the identity of the owners or the legitimacy of the site.
Extended Validation (EV) certificates take this a couple of steps further by requiring the involvement of lawyers and company officers in a considerably more rigorous verification process, but at upwards of $1200 a pop, you shouldn't expect to see these provided for every minor web form you're asked to complete. (Currently only a small handful of sites implement them at all — even most of the major banks still use normal x.509 certificates.)
You don't think a name, address, DOB, and password all going plaintext is troublesome? How many people use the same password for half a dozen websites? How many password recovery systems use address or DOB?
That's great. How are they going to correlate that information to the other sites you use?
It's easy to be paranoid about theoretical risks on the Internet, but often difficult to concoct practical scenarios under which they could be leveraged against you. Even assuming someone could launch a successful man in the middle attack against this site (hint: it's harder than you think), there are far easier and more effective ways for fraudsters to obtain access to accounts and data than this piecemeal approach you posit.
Car analogies are welcome ;)
Well, it's not a big truck. We know that much.
Apparently Rezko made roughly a $54,500 profit on the overall property. Here's more on that story from FactCheck.org (a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and generally extremely careful and even-handed in their analysis): http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/rezko_reality.html
>
So I guess that the rules for flight now specifically excludes orbital flights in order to disqualify MIR. Eppur si vola.
"Orbital flight" would be a misnomer at best. An object in orbit isn't "flying", it's falling.
And no, I don't think that's nitpicking. Once you're in orbit, it's not much of a feat to remain there, supply logistics notwithstanding.
I don't necessarily wish to disagree with your overall point, but your way of making it is asinine. Claiming that Valeri Polyakov "did a 437 day flight"? Disingenuous at best, assuming you're referring to Polyakov's 14 months in orbit on a space station and not some hitherto undocumented atmospheric flight of his. Why are you comparing this to a manned flight record set in a Cessna?
What's your definition of an "application" versus a "web page"? That seems a pretty useless distinction on the modern web.
Invented (and thoroughly implausible) statistics like "99% of everything" aside, it's not hard to find egregious abuses of Flash on the web. It's also not hard to find abuses of popular AJAX and DHTML Javascript frameworks, or of images — or practically any other variety of web content you care to name. How many web sites have you seen, for instance, composed entirely of massive screen-resolution JPGs sliced or image-mapped into links? I don't believe that the use of Flash on the web is any more characterized by its most flagrant abuses than the use of JPGs, or animated GIFs, or Javascript, for that matter.
Ironically, it wasn't so very many years ago that use of Javascript garnered the same sort of attitude from die-hard web purists that the use of Flash does today. Now hardly anyone so much as blinks at our increasing reliance on Javascript for core functionality.
I'm not arguing that Flash is destined to play a similar role in the evolution of the web, or that it should. But to dismiss its usefulness out of hand seems needlessly limiting and short-sighted to me.
Firstly, "you can't use obscurity for security," is the sort of common wisdom that fails rational examination. Of course you can use obscurity to provide some degree of security. It's simply foolish to rely on it as your sole deterrent. But code hiding/obfuscation is mostly an incidental benefit. As you say, it's quite possible to circumvent by using a decompiler and/or sniffer to figure out what's going on. More to the point — and the issue you didn't really address — is the relative difficulty of tampering with (running) code as compared to Javascript. XSS/script injection attacks against compiled Flash applications are next to impossible: you might be able to use a naively-written Flash application with unvalidated inputs to bootstrap a script injection attack targetting other page elements, but the application itself is effectively inviolate.
As for examples of (non-gaming) applications for which Flash is better suited than Javascript — I think I can come up with dozens of examples, but let me grab one from another open tab: an image-processing application demonstrating a sophisticated image redimensioning technique. (Which of course could also be done in Java — but what if you wanted to make an application like this as widely and easily accessible as possible? Java might not be the better solution.)
"Better choices?" To do what Flash excels at? Name two (aside from Silverlight, which I don't think anyone is prepared to seriously evaluate, yet).
AJAX/DHTML isn't a better choice, it's a different choice. I'll give you that there's significant overlap in capabilities — and all else being equal, I'd rather see Javascript used where possible — but there are a lot of things you can do in Flash that you wouldn't want to try in Javascript, or which would be flatly impossible. (Including hiding your code and protecting it from tampering. Yes, those are legitimate goals in some cases.)
Java (or a Java-based language like Processing) might be a better choice in some respects, if it had Flash's near-ubiquitous install base, or even Flash's ease of installation on most platforms — but it doesn't and it isn't. Pragmatically speaking, if you don't want to torture your users (and/or your support staff) Java just isn't a very good option outside of controlled deployment environments like corporate intranets.
Even if they had universal browser support, SVG and VML aren't intended to do 90% of what Flash does.
So what are these other, better alternatives? I'm curious to know.
As for online video, why the fuck is every sonofabitch out there making their own fucking flash client for video? Video should be distributed in a proper file none of this "Compress->Re-encode/resample for flash->stream to my computer" bullshit...
Because it Just Works, and Flash is ubiquitous whether you like or not. According to the stats on the commercial site I maintain, upwards of 96% of visitors have some FLV-capable version Flash installed. That means I can deploy video without forcing some large percentage of my users to install yet another player/plugin/codec just to see it. That just isn't true of any other comparable streaming video technology.