Yes, it seemed a bit strange to me as well when i found out too.

But what astounded me is that a similar thing applies to websites. One of the apps that people keep holding up as an example of how powerful the ipad is and apple even features in their ads, is an animated periodic table...

but instead of paying quite a lot of cash for it http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-elements-a-visual-exploration/id364147847?mt=8# you could just visit the website http://periodictable.com/; its almost exactly the same and completely free. When you consider that the app is 2 gigabytes and apparently crashes quite a bit (from the reviews) it seems even more strange...?

Easy enough to say that the product isn't aimed at me, but still, magical is not the word that springs to my mind.

What really amazes me about this business is the behavior of the mainstream media in relation to the development of this 'story' in the first place.

Wakefields paper was just a collection of 12 anecdotes - meaningless in any clinical sense. He's clearly an idiot and should simply have been struck off and ignored.

You don't need to be an expert to work out that MMR and autism are both fairly common, and to find some cases of kids that have both is not that unusual - certainly not enough to start the newspaper and TV frenzy that occurred. That the media decided not to ignore him and tried instead to promote the scare, is to their great shame.

What is also incredible is the fact that that media deliberately ignored studies that proved no connection at all between MMR and autism.

It's appalling that this effort to boost ratings almost certainly cost the lives of infants and probably still does.

It looks like a lot of the studies that suffer from this effect are concerned with people and their behavior. Personally I don't think its a matter of whether the science is hard or soft but just that the domain has some issues that are not so important with other fields, e.g. the structure of a galaxy or the behavior of a gas with respect to pressure.

The main problem is that when you're looking at anything that has something to do with humans then the tool with which you carry out the investigation is in part the very thing you are investigating [the mind.] This increases the potential for bias no end, and in the opinion of some, renders the whole exercise a completely futile and confounded endeavor. But I would tend to believe that this problem is the exact reason why one should study the mind, exactly because it is the lens through which we view the universe.

In many respects it's a flawed tool for research. Not only filters but active perceptual mechanisms are at work, and function in such a way as to ensure that people seem to create a large part of the reality that they live in. This shouldn't stop scientists from investigating imho, but means that in looking at an area such as the mind, humility is indeed appropriate.

Soft science as you call it should not be conflated with astrology - like many other practices astrology is closer to a very ancient and wonderful art- that of separating people from their money, than it is to scientific investigation. But then perhaps i would say that, being a virgo.

I quite liked the computer graphics and the look they achieved on the first Tron movie really - apart from Sin City I don't really think that any of the modern cgi looks that good - but that's just me.

Ken Perlin (http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/) did some fantastic work on the code behind Tron - very clever guy.

I didn't say anyone was dumb. When i referred to idiots i was talking about fanboys that might deliberately introduce bias into their test.

The point is that if I've seen evidence that something works (youtube vids) and i also have direct personal evidence that it works (my own experience) then when someone suggests that this something does not work then i will tend not to believe them, and will question whether they are testing in a fair way.

Let me know if this is clear or i can rustle up a car analogy for you :)

I've seen quite a bit of evidence to suggest that Flash video runs fine on Android ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stW8gS6rBvg & http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cb9jfdltkUU ) and I don't have any problems myself - so the youtube tests showing awful Flash performance would have to be entirely disregarded.

Unless their phones are faulty - the simplest explanation is that there are some idiots out there with an axe to grind on this issue - something it would be quite difficult to argue against.

Well it's a surprise because its not true - people have had video working fine with version 10.1 of flash on their mobiles - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stW8gS6rBvg & http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cb9jfdltkUU

This is something of an achievement really when you consider flash is not just about video but in every situation needs to hold the capacity to render vector and dynamic raster graphics at the same time as/overlay on the video.

I think the fact that android is picking up steam and the way that flash is along for the ride is great news, but maybe not for everyone...

Who would want to compete fairly with a product that already has almost complete ubiquity and is well on the way to becoming a write once and then deploy anywhere platform...?

Something doesn't seem to be right with the links you've posted - have a look at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stW8gS6rBvg and you'll see that the experience is actually pretty far from the picture you are trying to paint here.

hedgewars is worth a look - it's like worms back when it was good - worms 2. http://www.hedgewars.org/

fwiw ReturnFire, Goldeneye and Burn Cycle are the games that i'd nominate. all incredible games on very lame systems.

Nokia drops flash...? Do you have a source for that...?

I got the impression that is not the case - http://www.openscreenproject.org/partners/current_partners.html and http://openscreen.forum.nokia.com/ seem to suggest otherwise.

As for Google, they're made it pretty clear that they're sticking with Flash - http://apiblog.youtube.com/2010/06/flash-and-html5-tag.html.

And maybe the reason other devices haven't destroyed the ipad might perhaps be because they haven't been released yet?

I'm surprised you haven't heard of flash player 10.1?

Its been out for over a month and works fine on my android phone...

From what i've heard its good for all the latest devices out there.

All apart from the iphone of course :)

...the video is very old and faked.

watch the way that milo looks directly at the girl around the 40 second point. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8aUhsrM0sA explains things.

Peter Molyneux has ceased to be taken seriously by most people when it comes to his rather crappy games - perhaps he has realized he has nothing to lose and has decided its time to engage in outright deception.

believe it or not html5 has been around since 2004.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5#W3C_standardization_process

it just hasn't progressed as quickly as you might have expected.

Who was it that said "The biggest mistake is denying a mistake." Well this news suggests that someone is taking that to another level.

While a certain mindset is bound to appear in a small section of a companies fanbase, especially when it purveys such a complete lifestyle choice, to see this dysfunctional nonsense creep all the way to the top is really something else. After the way this reception issue has been dealt with you have to wonder what's coming next?

The new mantra might end up being "Think happy place...think (different) happy place."