If at any time, I could:

* trade in my phone for another phone one at no monetary cost
* switch to any carrier at any time with no monetary cost
* Replace all of the apps I had previously purchased on my phone with no monetary loss

Maybe then I could agree with you. But in the real world, there are financial barriers to changing phones. Maybe your argument makes sense if we were talking about iPod's, but they don't hold with cell phones.

An amendment can also be passed at the state level, avoiding Congress altogether.

I can agree with most of that when it comes to the bulk of the Creative Suite, but since the purchase of Macromedia, Adobe has done some new good things, like Flex, Flash Catalyst, AS3 and the ability to load PSD's into Flash (the app not the plugin).

I still say they should open source Flash (whatever the license, just let people help secure it) since it has become so ubiquitous and suffers from the frequent security issues.

You are missing the point. The point is that it is entirely possibly to create good-performing, good-ui apps using Flash for mobile. It is also possible to create poor-performing apps for mobile, or try to run apps that weren't designed for mobile with mixed results. (Using apps here generically for flash embeds or app store standalone.) But the same can be said for ANY technology, and certainly 'HTML5' (preumably javascript combined with the canvas tag) fares much worse. But for Steve Jobs to say that even good-performing, good-ui apps should be banned from Apple devices just to prevent the possibility of the bad ones, is hubris.

I have suggested that Apple could have avoided all of this mess (bad PR) by simply adding a warning for apps that use 3rd party toolkits, and possible segregating them in the app store or with a setting to hide them by default.

Most likely this is about Android versus "Android by Google" being labeled on the phone. One is pretty much free to do anything with, the other is if you agree to conform to some additional requirements, you can put the Google label on your phone. If Motorola decides that they want the Google label, then yes they have some restrictions,. If they opt out of the Google label, then they can do whatever they want. Part of this is an attempt to force the carriers to not cripple the phones too much if they decide to leverage the Google brand, though obviously there are other benefits to Google.

Yes, in this specific case of 9 lines of code that aren't doing anything with many outside libraries, etc., it may be possible to read the documentation, and assuming the documentation is correct, rely on the default behavior. That is very rarely the case however.

However when I have come across a particular problem that is resolved by being thorough, and ensuring things are initialized, my tendency is to remember that and keep doing it in the future, which is the case for srand/rand.

Just sharing my story.

I thought the same thing, until I ran across a situation in ruby's Passenger, where they were initializing the srand with time or something similar, but of course all the servers were restarted at the same time. This then caused my UUID's to collide in another library because we had removed a 'superflous' srand in our code that was masking the problem.

Just saying you don't always know what the code that isn't yours is doing, so it is probably a good idea to assume it isn't done and do it explicitly.

You obviously haven't seen the RedLetterMedia reviews then, which explain in excruciatingly funny detail why the prequels are so awful.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfBhi6qqFLA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxKtZmQgxrI

Hide empty drives can be pretty annoying when you are ripping a few discs in a row (pretty much the only time I use my DVD drive) as it keeps moving the selected folders each time you pop the drive. Obviously your suggestion is valid, just that as with many things in windows, it is a double edged sword, lol. Kind of like auto-hide taskbar...works great *most* of the time, but not all of the time. Gets stuck open often enough that I have a shortcut that kills and restarts explorer.

There is a price threshold, at least for me. Right now HDD's cost say 5-6 cents per GB. Once Flash starts to hit the 3-4 cents per GB level (assuming HDD have gone below 1 cent/GB), it starts to make up for itself for many applications because of the performance/reliability factor. Right now I have say 200 'videos' per drive on a single 1.5TB drive (2TB just recently became more cost effective if you wait for the $99.99 sales at newegg). However, if that drive goes, it will tend to go in a catastrophic way, and I would lose all or a large portion of that drive. The hope/expectation is that a Flash drive sitting around without moving parts, would be much less likely to have a catastrophic failure like that. More likely for Flash is you would lose a single file or two. When you realize it might take two to three months to recover a completely lost HDD (redownload the 'videos'), at a reasonable download rate, it makes a lot more sense to make that switch as soon as you can.

A naive analysis of my Comcast Business Class service: $59.99 per month, bandwidth usage 1 TB, but lets say 1TB. A naive analysis already values a GB at 5-6 cents per GB just on ISP costs alone. You could say knock this down to 2-3 cents if you assume that even if you stopped downloading, you would need to spend $30 a month for decent internet if you didn't want good bandwidth.

Plus the labor involved in organizing your 'video' downloads, etc. might run into 4-10 hours per drive.

Once that threshold is met, and the perceived reliability of SSD versus extra cost becomes negligible in the overall cost, a lot of people will be jumping on SSDs, which should ultimately drive the costs even lower.

Unfortunately the name is "Tree Style Tab" not "Tabs" which is probably a BIG reason why more people don't use it.

When you do a search on addons.mozilla.org for "tabs" it isn't anywhere near the top.

And this is why you still can't find a decent trackball controller ala the Reflex:
http://gizmodo.com/175126/bodielobus-ps2-controller-with-trackball

Sony/MS won't release one because they know it would destroy joystick users, and no one else can make one because of patents (is my guess).

For those of us with RSS, etc., we would pay pretty much anything to get one of these. My 'one of these days' projects is to build one.

I think the 21st point was say at waist level :P

It isn't a requirement that they provide the HD versions, just *a* version. In many cases they will encrypt the HD version of the channel but leave the SD version clear.

You seem to be missing the point that people don't want it to be trivial to save the h264 file to disk and then redistribute it. If someone in the right zone can just download the link to the file, those that feel they need DRM/content control won't be using it. Heck, even Youtube makes it non-trivial(to most users) to download the actual FLV to preserve it, even without Youtube using DRM on that particular file.

Not saying that is good or bad, just pointing out why your argument about IP doesn't address the desire for a 'secure' client.