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.

Meh, it has a near total penetration rate and building a site in flash 10 is completely acceptable within the agency web development community. It's unfounded speculation to say all web development is moving away from flash. If anything, all web development is moving toward accessibility -- a very different thing to say.

Flash can not only be accessible, but also merged within a CMS seamlessly to allow straight content presentation vs the flash-powered version (for animation and seamless access to any other part of the site).

So, are you against all versions of Chrome, Safari, Opera and IE? Against all licenses that are not totally free? Against mp3s, pdfs, aacs, movs, avis, rtf, wmv, GIFs? Where do you draw the line. I should think the public ought to be given the choice whether they want to use something that has a basis in a proprietary technology.