Actually, make that less affordable items made of plastic, since buying and maintaining a domestic-size 3D printer and keeping it fed with raw materials is almost certainly going to cost more per item then buying mass-produced stuff. That's without factoring in the time needed to load up the printer, trim and assemble the output etc (So, how long is it going to take your home 3D printer to grind out a soap dish, shower nozzle, curtain rail, 20 curtain rings... and how much hand-finishing will they need?) When 3D printing technology evolves beyond making simple plastic widgets very slowly, you'll bet that factories will be installing industrial-strength ones that can turn out items at 1000 times the rate and at 1/1000 of the cost of your home printer...

Nothing much - apart from lack of simple (both for the developer and the end-user perspective) tools to do the job and some problems with security features in browsers (e.g. they won't recognise 'file://some/local/dir as a 'domain' when checking for cross-domain scripting and either just plain don't work or pop up scary security warnings). Actually, Adobe Air sorta did that, except that Adobe knobbled any of the webkit functionality that might have competed with Flash...

To duplicate Flash functionality in HTML5 you need an extensive graphics/animation library sitting on top of canvas or SVG, plus a decent timeline-based graphics editor/authoring system. All the bits exist (Inkscape, various HTML5 application frameworks and libraries) but nobody has yet put them together into a package quite like Flash.

As for the 'native' bit - for me it was more about providing an all-in-one bundle, with the correct versions of everything, that could be used by the sort of people who's answer to "What version of Internet Explorer do you have" is "Uh... XP, I think... or maybe Office 2010?".

Not that there aren't problems with Flash - notably Adobe/Macromedia's determination to completely re-invent the API and Actionscript language with every release and the mind-bogglingly stupid situation wherein Flash and Flex (the code-centric XML alternative to the visual/timeline-based Flash authoring tool) used completely different APIs...

Sitting down with a cup of herbal tea and having a chat with a sympathetic person*, then lying down and listening to whalesong while someone gives you a massage is probably a lot better at reducing stress than a regular placebo... and while reducing stress won't cure anything serious it will probably at least have a palliative effect. If only doctors did all that and then, instead of getting out the Magic Healing Crystals, did Science on you, there probably wouldn't be such a demand for alternative medicine. Maybe hospitals should hire alternative therapists to get patients chilled out before and after treatments. I think thats the vacuum that alternative therapies fill. (* who, in the more respectable branches of alternative medicine, might actually know more about human physiology and diseases than, say, your mate at the pub, and might even give you some valid tips on lifestyle, diet etc.)

My grandfather used anecdotal evidence every day, and he lived to be 95!

Flash can create a 'native' PC or OS X app (OK, it consists of a standalone Flash player bundled with your flash App, but the practical upshot is the same unless some strange permutation of misconceptions has led you to expect 'bare metal' efficiency from something like Flash).

Flash was actually a great system if you wanted something to write relatively small, animated, resolution-independent applets that can be embedded on web pages and downloaded as pseudo-native PC/Mac apps (Java was obviously better at coping with substantial projects - but its been getting a bigger and bigger pain for non-techie end users to install). Of course, it got abused as a way to add gratuitous animation to websites, and its only merit as a video player was that it was less annoying than RealPlayer...

The real killer, though, is that it doesn't run on tablets... however, when it was briefly available on Android I tried some existing Flash stuff and it quickly turned out that Jobs was right - apart from the bloat and security nightmare, lots of existing Flash stuff just broke on a touch screen.

Nonsense. There's no need to make it literally impossible to unlock a stolen iPad (probably unattainable, and certainly liable to deprive legitimate owners of the use of their property) - you just need enough of a hurdle to make it unappealing to thieves. I'm sure that the value of a stolen iPad is much less than $400 - and equally that the value of a locked, stolen iPad is much more than $0 (just use a bit of sleight of hand to sell it to some mug and leg it - thieves don't generally do warranties).

A solicitor's letter (for US readers: Solicitor = Lawyer, and probably a notary public to boot) is easy to verify and should be more than sufficient to confirm the identity of the new and previous owner. No thief in their right mind is going to go through the risk and expense of obtaining a credible fake solicitor's letter for the value of a stolen iPad - and I'm sure that bent lawyers are even more expensive than real ones.

Requiring a legitimate owner to produce a court order is going to cost them more than the value of a legally acquired iPad.

Flame:

...see definition of fire in GP post.

Bzzt. Wrong. That's cartoon physics. Hollywood physics assumes the audience is stupid. Cartoon physics assumes that the audience is intelligent enough to recognise and laugh at the absurdity.

You're underestimating what "a lot of kinetic energy" is when you're talking about speeds measured in km per second - and kinetic energy goes with the square of the velocity.

A lot of kinetic energy gets transformed into a lot of heat. Hot things give off light (they don't need to be "on fire") - fire gives off light because it is hot. A light bulb gives off light but it isn't on fire - but it is hot. Lightning isn't on fire. The sun isn't on fire. Probably what you see is most of the asteroid (and a chunk of the moon) getting turned into a plume of superhot gas, if not plasma.

No Hollywood physics involved, or there would have been a loud 'kaboom' at exactly the same time as the flash, a perfectly circular blue shockwave ring shooting out from the moon and Harrison Ford in a fridge.

For starters, you can find Opera in the official Mac App Store, Chrome & Opera in the official iOS store... Prior to the App Store you could always easily find alternative browsers via the 'Get software...' links that Apple included.

And, since we're talking about 1999, guess what the default browser on Mac OS was back then? Clue: it had a logo like an 'e' with a whoosh around it, and wasn't Safari. Kids today don't remember what a stranglehold MS had on PCs in the late 90s.

If only it supported routers with built-in ADSL (which was the dealbreaker last time I looked at DD-WRT - and it took me some digging to discover that was why none of the routers I wanted to use it on).

If that's since been fixed - and supports a router I can actually buy somewhere - then mod me happy.

Personally, I could put together a low-power Linux box, get an ADSL modem, an ethernet switch, wireless access point (sounds like Belinksysco crap would be just as big a liability in WAP-only or modem-only mode) but (a) that's replacing 1 always-on box with 2-3 always-on boxes (b) there's the non-zero chance that I could screw up and (c) it doesn't really help joe public who need a reliable, secure plug-and-go box.

Any trustworthy all-in-one ADSL Modem/Routers/WAPs out there?

The consequences of that could be terrible!

The shark would be safer - at least they can't climb trees.

RTFA. She was already in the Sheriff's office on another matter when they discovered the outstanding warrant. She was only in jail for one night and then let go, which would be quite consistent with the cops doing exactly as you suggested.

You appear to be responding to a story about a woman rotting in jail because she failed to return a $5 video cassette.

TFA is actually about a woman who spends one whole night* in jail after ignoring served warrants and certified letters for years - and then only after she was in the Sheriff's office for some other reason and they discovered the outstanding warrants.

TFA doesn't specify what led to the original arrest, whether it was the store being heavy handed, or a last resort after trying to impose a reasonable penalty.

So, really, "10 years ago, police fail to send SWAT team to drag woman to jail for unreturned video." would be a better, but less click-worthy headline.

(* note the cunning journalistic use of 'Feb 13 arrest report' and released on 'Valentines day' to misdirect anybody capable of subtracting 13 from 14).

Sorry - I don't understand the article. Too much text on the page confuses me.

Please could you re-print it with double-line spacing and a large bit of generic stock photography of a rocket or something so I know what it is about?

Maybe a big chunk of white-space at the top so I'm not confronted with a whole paragraph of text on the first screen.

Also, the screen appeared too suddenly and made me jump - which is dangerous because today is my first day wearing my big boy pants. Maybe more javascript effects would slow it down?

Yours,
A.N. Audience