Unfortunately not true. HTML5 isn't even an approved standard and won't be for another year or two. Adobe has said it will have HTML5/Canvas capabilities built into the Flash IDE by then (it already has been demonstrated to do this).

A chief strength (and criticism) of flash is that it is a compiled format, now using an ahead-of-time compiler. Try to do AR in javascript or something similar -- you can't. Flash has tried to be the web's bleeding edge; they do not need to wait for anyone before building in new capabilities.

PS Flash supports C++ libraries as well via the alchemy project, introducing great speed boosts over AS3 as well as interoperability with AS3.

I smell bullshit. The Star Trek Utopia thing bothers me because all Utopia is Dystopia from someone else's perspective (to me, the concept of utopia/dystopia is one inseparable beast). It's ironic that the article would blame the "free market," when we have not had a free market for 100+ years. In an actually free market the economy describes society pretty closely and wealth grows all around (the distribution of wealth is not even, but that's a poor measure of quality of life just check out the fallacy of the "depression" of the 1870's where we had more people employed at the end than at the beginning of it). It wasn't a coincidence that slavery ended as capitalism emerged. There's this propagandistic belief most people have about trade -- where one person must be getting the better. What happened to mutually-beneficial exchange? It's true! People can actually both be better off after an exchange. Imagine that. I think the belief about trade being evil is directly linked to the reality of our corporatist, protectionist world. No one can conceive of money as being a positive thing, because on a daily basis we are collectively being insulted and denigrated with it. That's just not right.

The language is messy.

lol :) It's useful, but it's a pain in the butt for compatibility issues.

I don't think that's a fair assessment -- there are third party development tools like FDT FlashDevelop, Eclipse can compile SWFs and the entire Flex Framework is open source. Have you tried making a CMYK or lab color image in linux without Adobe suite (or another proprietary program)? Third party open-source software for image and video manipulation on linux tends to suck. It doesn't need to, but it does.

This is hypocritical, especially considering that the SWF format is totally open and people have written their own interpretters.

Why? All it does is remove any incentive for ad agencies to switch to HTML 5. Again, you need to think bigger than flash video, for the most part digital ad agencies practically breathe flash and very often develop simultaneous desktop/web deployed applications with it (Zinc, AIR).

What about the fact that these are trained soldiers, who ought to understand what a weapon looks like better than your average citizen (RPG's don't have an outward-tapered nozzle on the front whereas cameras do to prevent lens glare)? What about the way they blew up the van, where the wounded were being carried? What about the fact that they were using restricted weaponry on civilians? What about the chuckling of the soldiers in their act of killing people? What about the fact that the army pretended this never happened, and disavowed any knowledge of the incident?

Does none of this matter, or is aggressive and murderous ignorance okay?

Au contraire: the user is clearly talking about man's natural rights, not American law. Government does not give rights - it restricts certain rights.

This delves into the concept of positive and negative rights -- that you either don't have any rights whatsoever until a government grants them to you, versus that you have the full rights entitled to your naturally-born freedom until they are taken away.

Given that man has been around longer than government, I am inclined to say that governments restrict existing rights and cannot grant anything that does not already exist.

The right in question is essentially the right to self-defense.

Apple has a personal interest in pushing HTML5 (and h264), because they have a stake in the h264 format. You are supporting one proprietary format over another. That said, any hardware capable of running flash can generally do so, unless it is artificially restricted (Apple).

Think about web designers. There need be no artificial barrier between web design/development -- flash is the perfect way to learn programming from a design background. It is user friendly, accessible, and it's really easy to animate with. Frankly, a good CS-background web developer is the exception in the industry, because they don't give a shit about transitions or the design being pixel-perfect.

?????

I don't think you have any experience working with Apple -- they do not offer any insight into their OS APIs, do not consult with regards to their platforms, and they do not like to be open in any sense (they are also really bad to have to work with on the design front).

Adobe has tried to reach out to Apple many times, but have been turned away (and certainly not just Adobe). There are performance and access issues with their guarded OS/X API. Flash sucks on Macs simply because Apple will not offer support in regards to memory usage issues. Adobe still has had success hacking away on their own.

With the upcoming release of CS5, publishing flash as an iPad/iPhone app will be trivial. There are also rumors that Adobe started, where it has figured a way out to bring flash websites on to the iPad.

Adobe has put a majority of their effort towards making their platform more accessible, more efficient and more open -- Apple has been a major hurdle. Anyone with experience as a third-party working with Apple (or trying to work with it) has their own horror story.

There are distinct differences between any objective accomplishment, personal accomplishment or socially-accepted accomplishment. In some sense, status is utility -- but money, power and status are all ephemeral and inconsequential because they are removed from reality (they are all socially-defined and maintained).

why the hatred toward flash?

Not seamlessly, but yes.