Yes, thanks, I'm aware. Darth asked why noone was addressing the hardware acceleration issue. I addressed it. Read the context -- I never said it was the only reason Flash sucks.

Apple says that Adobe is dog-lazy. All I'm saying is that Apple is dog-lazy too, and Steve's letter painted an inaccurate picture by only telling half of the story.

Darth Snowshoe said "what about the HW vs SW argument?" I answered his question, and never extended my reply to claim that hardware acceleration was the sole reason why Flash sucks. I merely said that this letter from Steve was less than up front about the reasons why nobody had hardware accelerated video before April of this year. While Adobe may be "lazy" in their own rights, Apple is "lazy" too. If Apple is getting blamed for Flash's crashes, then Adobe is getting blamed for Apple's lack of hardware acceleration. Tit for tat and all that, but Apple only told one side of this story in Steve's "letter". Apple has been dragging their feet on this for much of the last decade, and I think it's unfair for Adobe to have to take all the fall on this.

It's hardly a magical cure-all. Both of my Macbook Pros are dual-core with 2 gigs of RAM running the latest Apple OS/X, but neither of them are supported by Apple's new hardware acceleration API because they're 2 years old, and not supported by Apple's API. That gives me warm fuzzies, lemme' tell ya'.

Citations please -- I'm not finding these benchmarks, and your statement smacks strongly of hyperbole.

Besides, Silverlight 4 does use hardware acceleration, and does use this new API, so I'm not sure where you're getting your (mis)information. You're obviously out of date, and I'm starting to distrust the authority of your words.

Darth Snowshoe's post did, which is what I replied to. Did you read the quote block at the beginning of my post? It's called context.

Thanks -- Adobe is no saint. The main point of my post is that Apple needs its own fair share of the blame as to why there isn't good hardware accelerated video in Flash or Silverlight. Apple has been very lazy, and they're trying to paint themselves as free, open, fair-minded, and never lazy -- when the actual situation is a lot muddier than that. This is slanted Apple whitewashing propaganda, and as a Mac user, I find it distasteful. Don't get me wrong -- my wife and I have only owned Macs for several years now -- we love the operating system and the hardware. But intellectual integrity demands that I cannot accept Steve's letter as gospel truth -- there is quite a bit he has left out, and it's only half the picture.

No. If you read my post, you would see that I was addressing Darth's accusation that everyone was failing to address Flash's lack of hardware acceleration. I was merely trying to set the record straight that -- up until this month -- nobody did because there was no operating system support. That was the point of my post. You need to read the context of posts that you're replying to before you accuse them of saying things that they aren't.

How was Microsoft able to deliver a better product without whining? Why is Silverlight's performance, lacking any hardware acceleration, still better than the hardware-accelerated Flash beta?

Silverlight 4 does use hardware acceleration on OS/X. Regarding your accusation -- I'm not saying Silverlight's software renderer isn't better than Adobe's -- it very well may be. But I've not yet found any data to back up your claim that Silverlight's software renderer is superior to the Apple beta. So I'll end this post by reiterating my earlier [citation needed].

Because I would like to have a more open web experience, that lets me view web content at my discretion.

I want an operating system that does what I tell it to do -- not a nanny that slaps me on the hand and refuses to do what I say because they somehow know better than me.

The HTML5 audio support isn't even close to Flash.

Anyone with a "basic clue" wouldn't spend their time seriously writing apps in HTML5 if something more reasonable like Flash were available. Write your game's audio synthesizer / mixer in HTML5, and then do it in Flash, and lemme' know how much HTML5 has "going for it".

In HTML5, you can't even play two copies of the same sound at the same time. It's a joke for any reasonable game development. If you think that HTML5 is a serious competitor to Flash, then that tells me that one or both of the following are true: 1) You haven't seriously developed in both HTML5 and Flash, and/or 2) You've completely bought into Steve Job's reality distortion field where HTML5 is somehow a drop-in replacement for Flash.

Okay, let's talk about the HW vs SW argument. Adobe needed API support from Apple before they could add hardware video decoding to their Flash Player. This API was only added in OSX 10.6.3, and even then, won't even run on my Macbook Pro, because it's older than a year and a half old, and Apple is not (yet?) providing API support for older hardware. You can rest assured, that now that Apple has finally provided an API for developers to use, Adobe has jumped on it, but due to Apple's half-way job of it, much of Apple hardware is not supported.

Oh right, I forgot -- I'm supposed to believe Adobe has been the sole lazy company here. Adobe recognizes they have more resources available that they're not yet utilizing -- but these were only recently made available by Apple.

Somehow Steve forgot to mention this in his tirade, didn't he? Convenient.

Troll? I'm not the one comparing people who legitimate reasons against ESC with those who bomb abortion clinics. Who's flame-baiting here?

The first article you gave me showcased using IVF leftovers (which I addressed in my post). Using stem cells harvested in this way has the major problem that they are only suited to academic research where tissue rejection is not a problem, because their genetic material cannot match the patient. I covered this in my post already.

The second article you sent me showcases a modified form of standard SCNT, where they add the twist of crippling the embryo, because they think that people will object less to destroying a crippled human embryo rather than one that is created with normal SCNT.

Do you want to see how the public ethic responds to stuff like this? Imagine the KFC headless chicken scenario, only with humans instead of chickens. Yeah, that'll fly like a lead balloon.

But even on a practical level, the technique listed in the second article suffers from the issue that there are simply not enough IVF leftovers to fuel widespread ESC-based treatments. There just aren't enough eggs.

Neither of the articles you quoted address the criticisms referenced in my original post, and all of the arguments remain untouched.

ESC-based treatments remain as unviable as the Whitehead Institute's crippled embryos, and there are no answers on the horizon that solve both the issues of tissue rejection and human egg supply.

False. ESCs have trouble in that they differentiate _too_ much -- they are too unstable, and multiply without regulation (cancer). One of the markers used in detecting if ESCs "took" in rats is to measure tumor rates. While they theoretically have the most potential for forming different tissue types, they have the worst track record for actually behaving how we want them to.

If that's true, then it's interesting that James Thomson, the father of modern ESC research has moved onto ASCs with IPSC. While some people may think that ESCs are "better", many of our top researchers (Thomson being of note) have changed direction to the more promising ASC line.

ASCs are also the only ones that have any fruit, with IPSC being in the news most often, despite it being the youngest of the three fields that you listed.

I would like to note that there is a big difference between "stem cells" and "useful stem cells". Sure, you can take any discarded IVF leftover or abortion remains and get stem cells, but if you inject those into a patient, you will have severe tissue rejection issues. To obtain ESCs usable for treatment in a patient, the only avenue available for that is SCNT, which necessitates the destruction of one or many embryos.

That's what SCNT solves, and why so many were anxious for the recent reversal of the Bush order to deny funding to SCNT ESC research.

Of course the book is never closed. But there currently exist over a hundred treatments using ASC and IPSC, and (despite it being the oldest), zero treatments involving ESCs. There is no viable avenue for ESC treatments now, nor there is there any on the horizon that anyone can name. If you're the budget director for a large amount of scientific funding, at what point will you cull the fat and move on (as James Thomson has done) to things that have actually produced?

Sorry, that should be "hundreds of thousands". An order of magnitude doesn't solve the problem, and the point still stands.

Okay, I'll bite.

Citation please. Maybe it's because IANA cell biologist, but I am not aware of any mechanism outside of SCNT that provides an avenue for ESC treatment that wouldn't result in severe tissue rejection by the patient.

Are you hinging the weight of your statement here on "viable"? If so, how is a SCNT embryo not "viable"? If so, those embryos are quite viable, and the usefulness of the stem cells largely depends on their viability. Who wants to take stem cells to cure a disease if the stem cell has bigger problems? I mean, seriously -- whole companies are founded based on cloning dead pets through SCNT. Your statement is false, and you're spreading mis-information. Citation, please.

You word this as if it's such a slam dunk. If it's a point not worth debating, then would any reasonable person object to the non-consentual harvesting of organs from death-row criminals? I mean, they're already discarded anyways.

So what happens if you run out of newspapers? You give a faulty analogy, because newspapers are fairly common -- IVF leftovers, while they do have a surplus supply of tens of thousands, is a supply that has built up over the last thirty years. And as we have gotten better at IVF, we create and save fewer and fewer embryos with every treatment. If ESC with SCNT reaches the point of actually having a viable treatment available, we would burn through our IVF reserves incredibly quickly. A simple look at the numbers will show you that the demand for embryos will far outstrip the supply, and we will have to start farming human eggs.

All that to say, I'll call your bluff. Citations, please.