Yes, DARPA will do the fundamental R&D.

But when the private sector sees the results (assuming they're promising and cost effective), they'll definitely want to jump on this. And when the Rust Belt politicians get wind that it'll help revitalize the manufacturing sector, they'll be throwing their support that way too. Gives them something to tell their constituents.

So...a factory that can more quickly and efficiently adapt to changes in demand? That can, instead of needing mass layoffs or closing up shop entirely, reconfigure their processes and retrain employees (increasing their skill sets if they ever need different future employment) to produce different things? Moving suppliers one level closer to being able to swiftly and effectively respond to the economic climate?

And all this research is only going to cost $3.5 million or so?

If they can make this work, and can be spread to other US suppliers, that $3.5 million investment will be paid back in no time in economic development. Hell, if it's a significant enough improvement, it could eventually help revitalize the US manufacturing industry by significantly upping our competitive advantage.

This article might have been interesting if it had actually suggested replacement icons.

But just pointing out that they're old?

It doesn't matter that their old, everyone that uses them knows what the icons mean because they've 'always' meant that. And those that don't just use menus.

Sort of.

Apple is having to try and shift the industry away from Flash, which dominates, to a new standard. But HTML 5 wasn't, and still isn't, quite ready for prime time. And people are always going to resist moving to a new standard if the old one works 'good enough'.

But if Adobe changes Flash, then the industry standard has no choice but to change with it. And if Adobe could ever figure out how to make a decent Flash product that was still fairly backwards compatible, it could be a significant blow against Apple and HTML 5. If nothing else, it would give everyone using Flash a better internet experience.

Flash has become a bloated, security hole riddled piece of software. And over all these years, Adobe seems to be so concerned with handling backwards compatibility by just tacking on more features to an old product.

What Adobe needs to do is completely overhaul Flash. And by overhaul, I mean throw it away and create a brand new Flash player from scratch that fulfills the specifications. And if the specifications lead to security holes, then change the specifications. But Adobe is either unable to do this, or too scared to do it.

If a more secure Flash player requires sacrificing backward compatibility, causing programmers to update their work. then so be it. Because, at this rate, Flash will be dead soon, and they'll have to recode for its replacement anyway. And if they don't want to update their work, then their work isn't important enough to worry about anyway.

At this point, Adobe either needs to hire an entirely new project team, or open source Flash in someway and let the FOSS community make the improvements.