and it bit them in the ass. They successfully screwed over the author of the book the movie was based on. Rumor has it that they wanted to film a sequel, but said author refused to allow it. As clearly there is no point in filming a sequel to an unprofitable film.

If what you claim is true then why was every season finale hinged on an island mystery and not some character arc. Simple answer because its never been about the characters, which haven't grown since s3, the writers had written themselves into a corner and lacked the skill/motivation/desire to solve said mysteries.

Your forgetting that proper video players just have to output yuv12 or whatever colour format the video is in. Flash has to convert to rgb32 and then potentially overlay html, css, javascript etc over the top of that. The GPU accelerated windows version will do that in hardware when possible something that apparently isn't possible on OSX.

You are missing out on why flash video became the dominant format for videos on the web. Flash has always had a very high install base on PCs (90+%), and back then videos where primarily real video, WMP or quicktime which required people to install the requisite software. This was obviously not a popular solution for end users that hate installing software to browse a website and video providers often had to provide said videos in all three formats. Then Adobe come in and implement video support and develop a near instant 100% base for flash video. Requiring people to install codecs will lead to a similar issue, people hate installing extra crap, let alone extra crap thats going to cost money to use legally.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TetriNET

If all you want to do is block a handful of specific sites I would recommend YesScript https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4922 its essentially the exact opposite of Noscript (blacklisting instead of whitelisting) without the constant annoying updates.