This isn't the first time. Remember the original Gameboy? It destroyed pretty much every color competitor that tried to go up against it.

This answer will probably get modded down into oblivion, but get Flash CS5, and you can write for both with the same code. See: http://blogs.adobe.com/cantrell/archives/2010/04/one_application_five_screens.html

I believe there are other code platforms that are write once run everywhere, in case you have an allergic reaction to Flash.

Were these the same regulators that were "inspecting" Deepwater Horizon?

Republicans = Party to support rich
Democrats = Party to support poor
? = Party to support middle class

And no offense, but it has been known for the last month at least that CS5 was getting ready to launch. If you went ahead and purchased CS4, and could have waited those few weeks, well, you have no one to blame but yourself.

It surprises me that in all of the discussions about how HTML5 is going to murder Flash, the one thing that everyone overlooks is the exact reason why Flash continues to be popular - Cross-browser consistency.

I mean, right now, you cannot expect any of the five browsers to display CSS2 consistently, and that spec has been around since 1998. Why is it that everyone expects HTML5 to be perfect out of the box on every platform?

Out of curiosity, do you not believe of the ice ages (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age), which is a scientific theory that has been accepted since 1870s? Doesn't it stand to reason that the opposite occurs - periods where the temperature of the world is much higher on average? And so, there are periods of global cooling and warming.

The climate changes. It has long before we showed up, and it will continue long after we are gone. You may not agree that our industrial nature is impacting how the climate is changing, but you cannot dispute that the climate of the Earth changes regardless.

To do so, you put yourself in the same class of individuals who thought that the idea of the world revolving around the sun was "junk science."

This is only half right. Climate is changing, but humans are not responsible for it happening. We may be responsible for it accelerating, but the climate of the Earth has been changing for millions of years.

This is what irritates me about the whole argument from both the left and the right. What we need to be arguing is the human influence of climate change, not the fact of climate change.

You know, man-made global warming may be in dispute, and may fit every thing that you are saying, but climate change does not. The climate on this planet has swung from massively hot to incredibly cold hundreds of times throughout the life of this planet. And it will continue to do so long after we are gone. This is what this office is about - understanding what is going to happen next to the world's climate, and giving that information to people and local governments so they can plan better.

We have an office that tries to tell people what the weather is going to be like in 10 days. Sometimes it gets it right, some times it doesn't. Should we get rid of the Weather Service because it misses the mark? No, because the more it predicts - even when it gets it wrong - the better the predictions will be the next time.

You obviously missed the part where the Climate Service is going to be part of NOAA. What they are doing is taking the already existing, climate related offices in NOAA that are scattered about in different line offices, and putting them in to their own line office. The offices don't change what they are doing, or even where they are located. What happens is they can now more easily work with each other on a shared mission.

Whether you believe that we are impacting the climate or not, the climate has changed quite a bit in the past, from one extreme to another, and there is absolutely no reason to think that suddenly, after millions of years of both warming and cooling, it is going to stop changing now that we are around. This office exists to help people and governments plan for that change, in the exact same way that the Weather Service exists to help those same people plan for what is going to happen tomorrow.

The web stats of the sites you manage should be dictating your support of any browser, not just IE6. For instance, I work as the Lead Designer for a government agency, and - depending on the target audience of the site - IE6 ranges anywhere from 9 - 15% of our users.

As such, I just don't feel that we can drop IE6 support from our websites yet. And I would encourage you not to rely on what Slashdot tells you, but instead look at your web stats and go from there.

"...unfindable by search engines..."
That is absolutely not true. Anyone who uses Google knows that the search engine can read PDFs, identify if any of the keywords are located within, and then provide a link both directly to the PDF as well as to an HTML version.

I have always thought that the best cure for traffic jams would be cars that drive themselves and that are in constant communication with the cars around them. Cars that drive themselves won't slow down to rubberneck, allow cars to merge properly, and in general will work to keep the flow moving.

You obviously don't do any work in the GIS arena. Flash/Flex API from ESRI is going to allow for some amazing mapping applications. They also have a Javascript API, though after testing it in our shop, we ran in to some cross browser concerns, so we opted for the Flex option, and haven't regretted it yet.