This is insanity. From what I can tell, they basically want to hook everyone going through up to a smaller polygraph machine.
Hasn't anyone got it yet that the polygraph test is fatally flawed?
It's flawed in finding people who are guilty because they can easily cheat the test by knowing how it's administered. Basically, certain questions (the "control" questions) establish a baseline for lying, which everyone will generally have the same answer to, but will feel uncomfortable answering, like, "have you ever cheated on a test?" or "have you ever lied to your spouse?" If one responds more to the "relevant" questions (the ones related to that which they're actually investigating) more than one responds to the control questions, one will fail, so the key is to artificially increase your reaction (blood pressure, etc) to the control questions.
It's also flawed for people who are innocent because false positives are easy to come by. If you're nervous while doing the test, regardless of what they tell you, you can easily be more nervous about the easily recognizable "relevant" questions, making you appear to be lying and fail the test. Per the article, 8% of people going through this system caused a false positive, falsely identifying them as being suspicious. What if this wasn't strictly a test? Do you really think that in a busy customs port an officer is going to trust someone who's failed a lie detector? At that point, the best they can hope for is to be sent back; further investigation and possible detention are certainly not out of the question.
The thing I dislike about relying on these sorts of tests is that they're nowhere near objective, and so if one fails, they'll always require additional investigation afterward anyway, and if one passes, one could have just gotten away with smuggling or worse without anyone asking questions. It's simply not right. Customs officers should be the ones asking questions, not a flawed machine and methodology.
This story reminds me of a short story called Melancholy Elephants, which gives a theory on what could happen is copyright were extended indefinitely.
"Senator, if I try to hoard the fruits of my husband's genius, I may cripple my race. Don't you see what perpetual copyright implies? It is perpetual racial memory! That bill will give the human race an elephant's memory. Have you ever seen a cheerful elephant?"
See, this makes me think that there would be a good spot for a scaleable, open source, free (as in beer and speech) replacement for Access. SQLite is good for application backend, and MySQL is good as a server backend, but AFAIK nothing quite fits into the spot where Access is right now: A tool to quickly stamp out both a database AND a UI without a whole lot of effort.
Maybe even if there were some more prominent free tools to convert Access databases to other RDBMSes it would help.
Hell, don't use Access if it's going to be used by more than five users simultaneously. It's designed for occasional, personal, direct usage. Using it as a backend to a single-user application would be OK, as long as that application isn't used over the network, though there are probably some bettter solutions out there.
NEVER, EVER, EVER use an Access database as a backend to a server. It's just asking for trouble.
Unfortunately I get the feeling that a lot of these Access overusage problems stem from managers with just enough knowledge to be dangerous saying to themselves "hey, I've got a great working database right here," and storing their mission-critical data in it without knowing the consequences of that action down the road. I kinda wish that Microsoft would put a fairly prominent warning on Access that that's simply not what it's designed for... maybe when it's been used by more than a few users simultaneously it could pop up a warning to the next one.
It should, of course, be noted that this is really only the case in XP, while running in the default user configuration. Want Windows 2000-style user configuration / login?
Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Local Users and Groups
Or, alternatively, for the actual old Control Panel dialog:
Start -> Run -> control userpasswords2
Want to access the (much more powerful) ACL-based File Sharing and Security from 2000 rather than the simple one presented by default in XP? You need Pro, but:
Unfortunately if you have XP Home, you can (apparently) only get the advanced Security tab when booted into Safe Mode.
So yeah, it should be possible to do things as an unprivileged user. Microsoft just made it really obscure in XP. Windows 2000 (and 2003) has been running unprivileged users for ages.
Well, it would scare me more, if I lived in the United States. I'm a born Canadian citizen.
But I think even for those of us that do live there (and it's really not a bad country except for the government), people need to avoid being scared and start standing up for what they believe in. At the core, it's still a democracy; people need to take hold of that now and start initiating change. A good start would be heavily protesting the current electronic voting machines as they really do threaten democracy and accurate representation.
I'm actually thinking about moving to the US (as being with my girlfriend is more important that where I live). At least if things get really crazy, I'll still have my Canadian citizenship to rely on.
Clearly, the solution is to personally escort every passenger to their seat (possibly in handcuffs and/or restraints), then inject / gas them with a fast-acting sedative for the remainder of the flight a la Fifth Element. No need to worry about hijackers if nobody can move, now is there?
God, I hope this bullshit doesn't get to US airports. Flights are boring enough as it is with my MP3 player.
What surprises me is that the way that WGA is supposed to work is via a combined white- and black-list; only keys that Microsoft have actually dispensed are in the whitelist and those that Microsoft finds to be pirated are placed in the blacklist. To get past WGA, you have to be in the whitelist and not in the blacklist. So here's what's odd: Are these Volume License Keys that have been sent out with pirated copies (or that nice keychanger list) actually still in legitimate use? One would think that Microsoft would at least replace the keys in the compromised legitimate installs and blacklist the old key, rather than simply allow both to keep working. Maybe they're too widespread to replace?
So great, DHS is recommending that people keep their machine patched. Anyone who says this is a bad thing has their tinfoil hat on a little too tightly. The only thing that concerns me is that DHS's responsibility in the US government seems to get more and more broad; anything that can be deemed in the protection of "Homeland Security" they can control, from intelligence to customs and border patrol to cyber security.
Just thought I'd step in to say: As much as I hate Flash, embedding a Java applet is much worse.;^)
Re:Flash as an Application Development Platform? N
on
The Future of Flash
·
· Score: 1
Wrong. Flash has had an API since ActionScript 1.0, albeit less robust than.NET or J2EE. As for ActionScript 2.0, its API is based on the ECMA Script standard and can be as "complex" as JavaScript. I don't think you want to get into ActionScript 3.0 either because that my friend is about as close as you're going to get to a strongly-typed OO language. And, let's disucuss your usage of the word "complex". That's a pretty relative descriptor, don't you think? Whose "yardstick" are you using anyway? I wrote a job tracking system in Flash/ActionScript 2.0 that plotted jobs in two-dimensional conical space based on latitude and longitude using very "complex" trigonometry.
I agree that my wording was a bit ambiguous. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that by "complex" I mean a session-based web application running, say, an online store. Your argument as to your graph-plotting application is a good use for Flash, because it's mostly vector graphics with some calculation in the backend. However, when it comes to managing multipage applications like the one I mentioned, I believe it's much better to stick with HTML as it doesn't fall prey to the issues I described earlier.
Wrong, and really just a bad argument. You are most certainly not limited to using Flash exclusively as your presentation layer. You can easily establish communication between HTML and Flash with Adobe's Flash/JavaScript Integration Kit. Now, I will agree there aren't many ways to do this communication but the Flash/JavaScript Integration Kit is the de facto standard. My question is, how else would you suggest doing it? Fortran and smoke signals? At least there is a standard way of accomplishing said communication.
You're ignoring my original argument: That there is only one real way to do it. Once again, you're stuck with Adobe or nothing. As to using Flash as your exclusive presentation layer, I concede. I did not know about this integration kit. (Though why you'd want to complicate things by having one client-side component talking to another, I do not know.)
Flawed reasoning, and here we go again with the relative terms. "Weird"? For whom? A PHP developer? C++ developer?.NET developer? Java developer? And, "limited" how? You have quite an arsenal at your disposal in terms of executing server-side code when using Flash with Flash Remoting. I agree, most people won't be able or be willing to cough up the coin for Flash Remoting but with Flex 2.0 most of that functionality is built-in. I will say if you choose to use some of the data components in Flash (e.g. Web Services Connector) you are somewhat limited and have to do some extra work to get the desired results.
Weird from my perspective personally. But fine, let's take the word "weird" out of my argument. I argue that you are limited to what Adobe lets you do. Funny how you mention that you'd have to purchase another product to obtain that functionality in pure Flash. Not only are you limited by the ActionScript itself, you're limited by the license you'd have to purchse in order to use said functionality.
Wrong. HTML is universal? Have you heard of the browsers Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera? Yes, they all render HTML but the result can be and usually is very different between them.
Only if you use bad / proprietary extensions in your HTML, which can easily be avoided by sticking to standards like XHTML. The only real exception is IE, but even then it's just a case of working around its bugs, and those only come up if you're trying to do some pretty advanced things. And yes, HTML is universal. Coded correctly, it's readable in a major browser, a screen-reader, or even a text-mode browser like Links. Try doing that in Flash and tell me how far you get. Also, as I've mentioned elsewhere, there's still no Flash Player 9 for Linux. Adobe says there will be one soon but Linux users are at their mercy until then.
I really think you should investigate Flash more thoroughly before using your "jump to conclusions" mat and making arguments you can't back up.
Consider my arguments backed up.
Re:Flash as an Application Development Platform? N
on
The Future of Flash
·
· Score: 1
I'm not saying it can't be done. I'm saying, "why bother?"
Well, thanks for telling them what they need! Here's my question: If they want to use a screen reader, could they?
If used correctly a full-blown flash only site can be the best web experience ever.
I disagree.
First off, there are the compatibility issues that are mentioned elsewhere through this thread (like the lack of a Flash 9 for Linux). So assuming you're coding for Flash 9 players, you're basically limiting yourself to the Windows crowd, which is almost as bad as using Microsoft-proprietary HTML / CSS extensions.
Second, are you really going to argue that Flash is more accessible than HTML, which is basically plaintext? For a search engine to follow Flash links, you have to have separate, invisible links below the Flash embed in the HTML. If a website is pure Flash throughout, you completely break the back button and any in-site history. Sure, you could code your own back button, but that's once again completely proprietary and different for each site, whereas sites in HTML allow the user to click the buttons in their browser, which are always in the same position.
Third, sites coded using HTML / CSS allow the user to change the display of a page to match their own personal preferences. Let's say your vision is bad and you want to make the site high contrast, or you're colourblind and want to make the site easier to see. With CSS, correctly implemented, the user can replace the presentation and formatting of a page so they can make these changes rather easily. Try doing that in a Flash app without the author having to code these separate styles themselves. It can't be done.
So you stay with your proprietary apps coded in Flash. Perhaps control is more important to you than accessibility. I'll stay with HTML, a universal standard.
Re:I've started using Flash inside my dev enviro..
on
The Future of Flash
·
· Score: 1
My guess is Captivate. I've used it before, it's pretty good for creating demos.
Flash is in the same space as Ajax, and has been for a while.
Flash: Client-side animation component. AJAX: Javascript that connects to a server-side script to select / create / update / delete data and update the page.
Slashdot Mirror
This is insanity. From what I can tell, they basically want to hook everyone going through up to a smaller polygraph machine.
Hasn't anyone got it yet that the polygraph test is fatally flawed?
It's flawed in finding people who are guilty because they can easily cheat the test by knowing how it's administered. Basically, certain questions (the "control" questions) establish a baseline for lying, which everyone will generally have the same answer to, but will feel uncomfortable answering, like, "have you ever cheated on a test?" or "have you ever lied to your spouse?" If one responds more to the "relevant" questions (the ones related to that which they're actually investigating) more than one responds to the control questions, one will fail, so the key is to artificially increase your reaction (blood pressure, etc) to the control questions.
It's also flawed for people who are innocent because false positives are easy to come by. If you're nervous while doing the test, regardless of what they tell you, you can easily be more nervous about the easily recognizable "relevant" questions, making you appear to be lying and fail the test. Per the article, 8% of people going through this system caused a false positive, falsely identifying them as being suspicious. What if this wasn't strictly a test? Do you really think that in a busy customs port an officer is going to trust someone who's failed a lie detector? At that point, the best they can hope for is to be sent back; further investigation and possible detention are certainly not out of the question.
The thing I dislike about relying on these sorts of tests is that they're nowhere near objective, and so if one fails, they'll always require additional investigation afterward anyway, and if one passes, one could have just gotten away with smuggling or worse without anyone asking questions. It's simply not right. Customs officers should be the ones asking questions, not a flawed machine and methodology.
An interesting read.
See, this makes me think that there would be a good spot for a scaleable, open source, free (as in beer and speech) replacement for Access. SQLite is good for application backend, and MySQL is good as a server backend, but AFAIK nothing quite fits into the spot where Access is right now: A tool to quickly stamp out both a database AND a UI without a whole lot of effort.
Maybe even if there were some more prominent free tools to convert Access databases to other RDBMSes it would help.
Oh yeah, Access as a UI is great for a few things. Just not as a backend database under any significant amount of load.
...to be an ESA attorney!
Hell, don't use Access if it's going to be used by more than five users simultaneously. It's designed for occasional, personal, direct usage. Using it as a backend to a single-user application would be OK, as long as that application isn't used over the network, though there are probably some bettter solutions out there.
NEVER, EVER, EVER use an Access database as a backend to a server. It's just asking for trouble.
Unfortunately I get the feeling that a lot of these Access overusage problems stem from managers with just enough knowledge to be dangerous saying to themselves "hey, I've got a great working database right here," and storing their mission-critical data in it without knowing the consequences of that action down the road. I kinda wish that Microsoft would put a fairly prominent warning on Access that that's simply not what it's designed for... maybe when it's been used by more than a few users simultaneously it could pop up a warning to the next one.
It should, of course, be noted that this is really only the case in XP, while running in the default user configuration. Want Windows 2000-style user configuration / login?
Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Local Users and Groups
Or, alternatively, for the actual old Control Panel dialog:
Start -> Run -> control userpasswords2
Want to access the (much more powerful) ACL-based File Sharing and Security from 2000 rather than the simple one presented by default in XP? You need Pro, but:
My Computer -> Tools -> Folder Options -> View -> Uncheck "Use Simple File Sharing (Recommended)".
Unfortunately if you have XP Home, you can (apparently) only get the advanced Security tab when booted into Safe Mode.
So yeah, it should be possible to do things as an unprivileged user. Microsoft just made it really obscure in XP. Windows 2000 (and 2003) has been running unprivileged users for ages.
Here's some more info about accessing Win2K-style Security controls in XP Pro.
One would think that could be used as precedent.
Well I know the key will still work in terms of allowing an installation, I meant in terms of WGA.
Normally this would invoke Godwin's Law, but I have been thinking that for a long time.
Well, it would scare me more, if I lived in the United States. I'm a born Canadian citizen.
But I think even for those of us that do live there (and it's really not a bad country except for the government), people need to avoid being scared and start standing up for what they believe in. At the core, it's still a democracy; people need to take hold of that now and start initiating change. A good start would be heavily protesting the current electronic voting machines as they really do threaten democracy and accurate representation.
I'm actually thinking about moving to the US (as being with my girlfriend is more important that where I live). At least if things get really crazy, I'll still have my Canadian citizenship to rely on.
Clearly, the solution is to personally escort every passenger to their seat (possibly in handcuffs and/or restraints), then inject / gas them with a fast-acting sedative for the remainder of the flight a la Fifth Element. No need to worry about hijackers if nobody can move, now is there?
God, I hope this bullshit doesn't get to US airports. Flights are boring enough as it is with my MP3 player.
Hmmm... I wonder if I should click through those?
What surprises me is that the way that WGA is supposed to work is via a combined white- and black-list; only keys that Microsoft have actually dispensed are in the whitelist and those that Microsoft finds to be pirated are placed in the blacklist. To get past WGA, you have to be in the whitelist and not in the blacklist. So here's what's odd: Are these Volume License Keys that have been sent out with pirated copies (or that nice keychanger list) actually still in legitimate use? One would think that Microsoft would at least replace the keys in the compromised legitimate installs and blacklist the old key, rather than simply allow both to keep working. Maybe they're too widespread to replace?
So great, DHS is recommending that people keep their machine patched. Anyone who says this is a bad thing has their tinfoil hat on a little too tightly. The only thing that concerns me is that DHS's responsibility in the US government seems to get more and more broad; anything that can be deemed in the protection of "Homeland Security" they can control, from intelligence to customs and border patrol to cyber security.
Anyway, this isn't that big a deal.
It's my commerce, education, and ... uh ... love life.
This is Slashdot, that last bit was assumed.
Nice work if you're completely morally bankrupt and want an easy way of gaining money at everyone else's expense.
One could say the same about stealing.
Gee, calling us "Slash-tards"... I wonder how on Earth anyone could have thought that was Flamebait?
Just thought I'd step in to say: As much as I hate Flash, embedding a Java applet is much worse. ;^)
Wrong. Flash has had an API since ActionScript 1.0, albeit less robust than .NET or J2EE. As for ActionScript 2.0, its API is based on the ECMA Script standard and can be as "complex" as JavaScript. I don't think you want to get into ActionScript 3.0 either because that my friend is about as close as you're going to get to a strongly-typed OO language. And, let's disucuss your usage of the word "complex". That's a pretty relative descriptor, don't you think? Whose "yardstick" are you using anyway? I wrote a job tracking system in Flash/ActionScript 2.0 that plotted jobs in two-dimensional conical space based on latitude and longitude using very "complex" trigonometry.
.NET developer? Java developer? And, "limited" how? You have quite an arsenal at your disposal in terms of executing server-side code when using Flash with Flash Remoting. I agree, most people won't be able or be willing to cough up the coin for Flash Remoting but with Flex 2.0 most of that functionality is built-in. I will say if you choose to use some of the data components in Flash (e.g. Web Services Connector) you are somewhat limited and have to do some extra work to get the desired results.
I agree that my wording was a bit ambiguous. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that by "complex" I mean a session-based web application running, say, an online store. Your argument as to your graph-plotting application is a good use for Flash, because it's mostly vector graphics with some calculation in the backend. However, when it comes to managing multipage applications like the one I mentioned, I believe it's much better to stick with HTML as it doesn't fall prey to the issues I described earlier.
Wrong, and really just a bad argument. You are most certainly not limited to using Flash exclusively as your presentation layer. You can easily establish communication between HTML and Flash with Adobe's Flash/JavaScript Integration Kit. Now, I will agree there aren't many ways to do this communication but the Flash/JavaScript Integration Kit is the de facto standard. My question is, how else would you suggest doing it? Fortran and smoke signals? At least there is a standard way of accomplishing said communication.
You're ignoring my original argument: That there is only one real way to do it. Once again, you're stuck with Adobe or nothing. As to using Flash as your exclusive presentation layer, I concede. I did not know about this integration kit. (Though why you'd want to complicate things by having one client-side component talking to another, I do not know.)
Flawed reasoning, and here we go again with the relative terms. "Weird"? For whom? A PHP developer? C++ developer?
Weird from my perspective personally. But fine, let's take the word "weird" out of my argument. I argue that you are limited to what Adobe lets you do. Funny how you mention that you'd have to purchase another product to obtain that functionality in pure Flash. Not only are you limited by the ActionScript itself, you're limited by the license you'd have to purchse in order to use said functionality.
Wrong. HTML is universal? Have you heard of the browsers Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera? Yes, they all render HTML but the result can be and usually is very different between them.
Only if you use bad / proprietary extensions in your HTML, which can easily be avoided by sticking to standards like XHTML. The only real exception is IE, but even then it's just a case of working around its bugs, and those only come up if you're trying to do some pretty advanced things. And yes, HTML is universal. Coded correctly, it's readable in a major browser, a screen-reader, or even a text-mode browser like Links. Try doing that in Flash and tell me how far you get. Also, as I've mentioned elsewhere, there's still no Flash Player 9 for Linux. Adobe says there will be one soon but Linux users are at their mercy until then.
I really think you should investigate Flash more thoroughly before using your "jump to conclusions" mat and making arguments you can't back up.
Consider my arguments backed up.
I'm not saying it can't be done. I'm saying, "why bother?"
...and they won't even need a screenreader.
Well, thanks for telling them what they need! Here's my question: If they want to use a screen reader, could they?
If used correctly a full-blown flash only site can be the best web experience ever.
I disagree.
First off, there are the compatibility issues that are mentioned elsewhere through this thread (like the lack of a Flash 9 for Linux). So assuming you're coding for Flash 9 players, you're basically limiting yourself to the Windows crowd, which is almost as bad as using Microsoft-proprietary HTML / CSS extensions.
Second, are you really going to argue that Flash is more accessible than HTML, which is basically plaintext? For a search engine to follow Flash links, you have to have separate, invisible links below the Flash embed in the HTML. If a website is pure Flash throughout, you completely break the back button and any in-site history. Sure, you could code your own back button, but that's once again completely proprietary and different for each site, whereas sites in HTML allow the user to click the buttons in their browser, which are always in the same position.
Third, sites coded using HTML / CSS allow the user to change the display of a page to match their own personal preferences. Let's say your vision is bad and you want to make the site high contrast, or you're colourblind and want to make the site easier to see. With CSS, correctly implemented, the user can replace the presentation and formatting of a page so they can make these changes rather easily. Try doing that in a Flash app without the author having to code these separate styles themselves. It can't be done.
So you stay with your proprietary apps coded in Flash. Perhaps control is more important to you than accessibility. I'll stay with HTML, a universal standard.
My guess is Captivate. I've used it before, it's pretty good for creating demos.
Adobe? Is that you?
Anyway, wow. Adobe is working on Flash 9 for Linux only a good year or so after it premiered on Windows.
Don't you understand that this just reinforces the argument that programming in Flash will limit your audience?
Flash is in the same space as Ajax, and has been for a while.
Flash: Client-side animation component.
AJAX: Javascript that connects to a server-side script to select / create / update / delete data and update the page.
Completely different.