I did something similar, I held the connected drive in different angles in my hand and "snap rotated" it while restarting. After an hour not giving up, countless restarts in different angles, the drive did start and we could copy the content to another drive. Saved a long day and nights work when we were making a small news paper for an organization, and had no backup.

Flash is doing more than hogging the CPU. I have one first and one second generation MacBook Air. When the machine gets almost unusable (the Air often does), things like switching to a new space takes forever. Starting a new application takes a very very long time.

When looking at Activity Monitor, Flash is often just at 1-5% CPU. Still, if I kill Flash the machine most often gets back to life, I can instantly switch spaces again.

So Flash is doing "something" more than hogging the CPU, that Mac OS X or MacBook Air doesn't like. I don't know what.

I have a Time Capsule and is not too impressed by time machine.
After months the backup got corrupt, and I find out that all of the
backup is stored in one single object, a sparse bundle. So Time
Machine has one gaint single point of failure.

Disk Utility failed to repair it so I bought DiskWarrior that all are raving
about, didn't even work repairing the sparsebundle itself on a remote
disk, and then of course can't repair it. With lots of trouble copied the
sparsebundle to a USB connected disk, to find that because DiskWarrior
stores all information in RAM and a backup disk the way Apple has done
the backup storage contains tons of files (inside the sparsebundle I
guess), DiskWorrior has to begin swap, and after 24 hours it had not
showed any progress at all. Guess it would require a week or more.....
(Alsoft support thinks it is no need to inform customers about the RAM
requirements with many files, even if swapping it *will* eventually do
its job weeks later so not a bug, we customers should after all
understand the internals of DiskWarrior).

Time Machine to my Time Capsule is also slow like hell and loads
my machine more than I expected.

Adobe has managed to get Flash to be the de facto standard for most web pages on the Internet, yet I would not have needed Chrome or other browser with this process separation if it wasn't for Flash. It crashes my browser, and as a Mac OS X user, it slows down not only my web browser, but my whole machine almost to a halt.

I so wish that either Apple do a deal with Adobe so that they get source code and can fix it themselves, or that Apple secretly are writing a clone that will be part of Snow Leopard.

Hmm.... I wonder how many watt/h of energy Flash is wasting in total over the world, CPU's going up to max when could be in low power mode, forcing us to buy a faster CPU with multi cores just to browse the web. I think Adobe should pay some sort of energy tax ;)

Or, as I imagine they don't make money from the flash plugin, make it OpenSource so that others can help them fix it.

If you have enough water power I imagine you can use it as a "battery". You use
water power during the night, and during the day you produce more solar power
than you need and direct the waste power to pump up the water again to the
reservoirs/dams. I.e. you use water power to even out the irregular power pattern
of wind and solar energy. Water power has the advantage of very short switch time
between different power levels.