Because their user-agent sniffing doesn't work well for more obscure browsers. I'm using Camino, a lightweight gecko-based browser for OS X, and the demo page defaults to Flash, when it actually runs better with the native SVG option.

I'm actually in Portland, and while the clouds do often obscure the Sun and Polaris, I can substitute on those occasions with the rivers, Mt. Hood, and the hills to the west.

Heh, I can see how that would really mess your cardinals up. Most cities are tilted slightly one way or the other... but that's almost dead 45 degrees.

One solution would be to try to adopt a consistent left-handed or right-handed preference for labeling which direction is what-e.g., a left handed preference means NW is N, NE is E, etc. Of course, you'd have to get everyone else to use it, too...

Highways never make sense on a local scale, since they always twist around to accommodate cities. You kind of have to keep a large-scale picture in your head to work out which local directions correspond to the labels.

As long as you can keep track of your cardinal directions, you're almost always going to know roughly where you are and how to get anywhere else. And between the sun, polaris, and familiar surroundings, I don't really know why most people can't keep track of their cardinal directions.

That's now how you would pull off this attack. It would go something like this

"Hey, I think my keyboard's acting up. Could I borrow yours for a sec?"

"Sure."

So, if you can't be bothered to RTFA, the AP obviously has no idea what they're talking about. Some snake oil salesman came along and told them that Microformats are magic digital beans that will protect their content with some sort of "tracking beacon" that will phone home and prevent infringement.

This is so cluelessly ridiculous that I can't decide if it's hilarious or just sad.

Why not? Just set up a SOCKS proxy via ssh to your home box, and configure firefox & thunderbird to use it for all traffic. Now you've got a secure connection anywhere.

According to Jon Gruber, who has reliable sources inside Apple, AT&T pulled their weight to make this happen.

Please, YouTube does not even begin to do this gorgeous trailer justice. The only way to watch this is in 1080p.

*salivates*

Being in a college environment, I have the luxury of using & supporting Mac & *nix machines exclusively, so luckily that's not an issue for me

With a laptop, I've never really seen the need for Thumbdrives. If there's no network around, I can create an ad-hoc one. If I'm trying to transfer something really big, I have a firewire 400 cable I carry around for such a reason.

Why would they use an external visualization library? Since the sound is encoded in executable (using a format similar to MIDI), it would be trivial to sync the contrails with those notes in code. Furthermore, there's no way that WMP is good enough to pick out individual notes from a raw audio feed like that. There are a lot of smart people working on audio rhythm/beat analysis, and nobody's produced anything nearly that good. Hell, nothing's that good even when the audio file is available, so the analysis doesn't have to be done in real time and can take multiple passes.

The contrails appear to be a simple shader effect. There's no need to use texture maps for something like that.

The opt-out page is apparently slashdotted. Convenient....

It's a bad sign when the guy demonstrating the thing has trouble bringing up the keyboard!

The UI gestures on this thing are terrible. They're not at all obvious. I don't imaging anyone will be able to figure out how to bring up, say, text entry without being told. It's also unclear how some of the gestures (such as the upward swipe) are distinguished from scrolling. Just stick an address bar and a few buttons in there, it'll make all of your user's lives easier. There's definitely room. Sacrificing usability for a "full-screen-web" aesthetic isn't a good idea.