You see, the issue is that Adobe's reader ALREADY HAS this protection. It always did! Try reading the "researcher's" (notice the quotes) so-called attack, use a version of Adobe Reader however old, and see how it works - guess what, you get a warning telling you that the PDF is trying to execute code and you should only allow it in case you trust it.

Read the report people, this is a non-issue where Adobe's name was only mentioned because it is fashionable to bash Adobe for whatever "security" issues (saying Foxit had a security issue - because it did! - would not have been news; but put Adobe too in the press release - now you have something that people will read! ).

Well, but SWF format is open, did you know that? You're free to do your own player today. In fact some people are trying now to run SWF files in HTML5 (effectively a player made using HTML5 technologies - see http://paulirish.com/work/gordon/demos/ )
So your analogy is backfiring... if "text is open whyle AppleWorks is not", Adobe can say the very same thing: "SWF is open format, Flex SDK is open source, only Flash Player and Flash Pro are not".
As for Webkit being open-source.... it's the engine of Safari, right? Safari is not. open-source, right?
Now let's see... the engine of Flash Player is Tamarin. Flash Player is not open-source, but Tamarin itself *IS*.

What a surprise.... guess Adobe is just as open (scratch that, sorry, it's much more open... they don't restrict what you can and cannot run on their platform).

Actually, the first cellular mobile phones were as big as a brick as well; I wouldn't say that this was a "technical error", again, it's a failure of marketing to recognize that they wouldn't sell.
And even the phone wasn't the biggest problem; the problem was the huge cost to make a phonecall... it was simply prohibitive. Had it been reasonably cheap, I'm sure there woulb've been plenty of uses (if only for enabling people in isolate places, adventurers, ship & oil platform crew etc. to communicate).

my father and hist twin brother (my uncle). Seriously.

Oh, so I guess people buy the iPad because HTML5 is ubiquitous *TODAY*, and nobody uses Flash
Ah, and because Hulu already launched its iPad app.

I don't get it, how does it "transcode" the VIDEO PLAYER? The main reason Youtube doesn't deliver all video through the tag is that some videos require overlays (e.g. for subtitles, or ads). The main reason why Hulu delivers video through Flash is (I think) DRM. How do they work around this? It's not about the video stream they need the video player itself (which is written in Flash) - so the only viable solution would be something like what Opera Mini does... but they don't seem to say they are doing this.