) http://www.xkcd.com/859/

Ethiopian goat herders don't have nuclear-tipped missiles aimed at the US. China does.

Expanding on that: lots of 2D applications require the GPU to perform well nowadays. Games and graphics apps especially, but lots of other parallel data processing like physics & audio processing benefit from the GPU too. Personally I'm hoping WebGL will enable more of that rather than the "check out my spinning 3D cube homepage!" sort of crap.

A couple weeks?? We should be so lucky for it to be that short... These days it feels like almost continual year-round campaign mode. Even on November 5, hey, the midterm elections are less than two years away!

Nooo, not true at all. The Constitution, like the bible, is rarely given a literal reading. The Supreme Court has always ruled that the government can place limits on speech. You can't shout "fire!" in a crowded people, you can't incite a mob to immediate and specific violence, you can't slander another person, you can't communicate "obscene" material (e.g. child pornography), and there are many limits on advertising ("commercial speech") and limits on the free speech of minors at school. Take away virtually any of those time-tested restrictions and you'll have complete anarchy.

"Successfully" might not be the right word to use in this case... ;-)

100% code coverage might be a better requirement -- if any code is dead from the standpoint of all the testing you've done, then it's either unnecessary (truly dead code) or trouble waiting to happen (as in this case).

Really? Perhaps you'd care to explain why gun control laws are still on the books then? For examples of the Supreme Court upholding gun control, consider reading United States v. Miller or District of Columbia v. Heller ("nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on... laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms").

Obviously a restriction that is effectively identical to a ban – like your hypothetical 1,000,000% tax – would be treated the same as a literal ban by the courts. But that doesn't mean all regulations would be struck down. Courts are perfectly capable of distinguishing between reasonable restrictions and unreasonable ones (in fact you might argue that's their main purpose).

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Poor BlackBerry, who always get all the flack, actualy got this one right: in the PlayBook app store anything with in-app purchases shows a little tag saying "Contains items for sale." It's a great help for weeding out those "free"-in-name-only apps you describe.

That sort of depends on your perspective, no? If I was a government employee I would hope that using toilet paper was pretty much mandatory for all my coworkers that I had to sit next to all day. :-)

The thing is, the government is a large organization with a lot of employees, and employers have lots of fringe expenses that scale up per employee. Restroom expendables being one. It's easy to trot out absolute values as ridiculous and wasteful when you disregard how many people they're split across.

For all I know you pulled that $3.7M out of your... well... let's just assume that's a real data point from somewhere. According to this page, the average person goes through ~$21 worth of toilet paper every year. The federal government has about 2.5 million employees, so if just 10% of their toilet usage occurs at work, that's $5 million the government spends on toilet paper for its employees every year. Wasted money? I dunno, good luck finding competent people willing to work in an office with no toilet paper.

Hmm, way to not actually respond to any of the points I was making. If I'm such a shill it should be easy to shoot them down, no?

Truth is, I've spent a bunch of years doing serious HTML/Javascript development and a bunch of years doing serious Flash development. I think I'm in a position to compare them fairly. There are lots of things on the web you should never use Flash for, but there are plenty of things where it's still clearly the better choice. So sure, I get annoyed and speak up when people who don't know any better run around screaming "omg Flash is teh sukz"... but believe me, I'm equally annoyed by people who are 100% all about Flash and can't build an HTML site/app to save their lives.

I'm comparing equivalent apps to each other. Lightroom went 64-bit over 1.5 years before Aperture (July 2008 vs. February 2010). Premiere and After Effects went to Cocoa/64-bit 14 months before Final Cut Pro (April 2010 vs. June 2011... and FCP X is much more limited). iTunes only just moved to Cocoa in July, and iLife/iWork are still Carbon afaik. I don't care if a few smaller Apple apps migrated over sooner -- if you sum it all up, Apple has no right to call others "lazy" over this transition.

Btw, I'm not saying Apple is lazy either. Rewriting any complex piece of software to use totally new platform APIs is a crap-ton of work. Apple puts third party devs (as well as themselves) through these massive transitions a lot, but it never really gets any easier...

Some of the apps I'm talking about hit #1 on the App Store charts, and many climbed into the top 10. You have a funny definition of "suck" if you think all those apps suck.

For all intents and purposes, those apps ARE Flash. An iOS AIR app is basically a copy of the Flash runtime glommed together with the app's Flash content (with all the ActionScript code pre-JITted to get around Apple's "no interpreters" rule). Afaik the Flash runtime part is almost exactly the same as what would be running in the browser if Apple allowed a browser plugin.

So the difference between Flash that Apple allows and Flash it doesn't isn't technological. I think there's two reasons for the difference: Apple prefers to have all rich iOS content go through their App Store gateway (they don't believe HTML5 will compete with the App Store yet, but Flash sure could); and they want iOS browsing as unencumbered by legacy website design as humanly possible. It doesn't hurt that blocking all Flash ads gave Apple a huge opening to push an iOS specific ads platform too.

Man, I am so tired of this meme going around. Have you ever quantitatively compared Flash's performance to HTML? Because others have, and they found Flash to be twice as fast . Have you ever quantitatively measured Flash's impact on battery life? Because it turns out battery life is almost exactly the same as equivalent HTML content (despite running 2x-4x faster in many cases). And do you have statistics on how often Flash crashes on mobile devices, compared to other apps? In my experience at least, Safari on my iPad crashes more often than Flash on my Android devices (which has never crashed to my knowledge).

Fwiw, that only hard data I've ever seen totally contradicts what you're saying. In performance tests, Flash runs 2x as fast as equivalent "HTML5" content, so it's actually more CPU efficient. This means it's probably more battery-efficient too. Another test shows an older, less optimized version of Flash running up to 4x faster but only using 10% more battery than HTML.

I can't find any statistics on crashing, but anecdotally... for a year I've owned three mobile devices that run Flash, and it has never crashed on any of them. Not once. Meanwhile I also have an iPad, and Safari crashes on it once every several weeks. Safari doesn't need Adobe's help to be crashy :-)