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please, allow me to retort.

Show me one instance where Flash truly is the best choice out there.

As has been said a hundred times, homestarrunner.com. Plus Newsmap. The latter should give you an idea of a whole class of applications where Flash is truly the best choice. A related competitor is the baby name wizard (google it), which is a Java app. It's neat, but on my dual-proc G4, it's slow as molasses and takes forever to load. 'Nuff said.

grrr...Clickable link

http://www.marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/newsmap.cfm has an interactive almost-realtime flash map of google news.

News are shown as rectangles, color coded by topic, size-coded by the importance (number of related news), etc. And you can back track topics by time, you can see a topic grow as news spread and shrink as people stop writing about it. Best viewed on huge screens.

A Flickr World Map developed in php and flash by me (Mark Zeman).

The Flickr Graph which maps the social relationships between people by Marcos Weskamp.

A very playful Colrpickr that shows images by hue and luminosity by Jim Bumgardner.

There's more examples at Flickr Services

It's been done years ago here

The OS is irrelevent. In the future software will be on a layer above the OS. Any OS. Just look at the vast number of very sophisticated web applications which not only exist, but work together in unimaginable ways (like this.)

And this is just the beginning.

This is why Microsoft makes their browser noncompliant -- if it followed standards, they'd be fucked! The more confusion they can create in the minds of consumers, the greater the chance they can keep their market share. After all, why should people start using FireFox if most websites are designed for IE? The standard is what the majority is using, and right now the standard is Microsoft.

The future isn't in building hardware or writing software. Prices will be so cheap for over-powered systems that they'll for all intents and purposes be commodity items. Software will be provided by open-source. One age in the evolution of computing is ending, and a new one is beginning.

In the future the big money is in providing services.

And Microsoft missed out. They stumbled, and are racing to catch up, but it's probably too late. The decline has begun.

We'll know in ten years or so.

Flash is NOT evil.

When it's used properly there are things that flash can accomplish that HTML and Java simply can't.

Saying Flash is evil is like saying guns are evil. Flash does not ruin user experiences, designers that use it to make eye candy ruin user experiences. It is totally possible to use Flash is a beneficial and useful way. It's just not used for that most of the time,

Flash is NOT evil.

When it's used properly there are things that flash can accomplish that HTML and Java simply can't.

Saying Flash is evil is like saying guns are evil. Flash does not ruin user experiences, designers that use it to make eye candy ruin user experiences. It is totally possible to use Flash is a beneficial and useful way. It's just not used for that most of the time,

I think Newsmap, a quasi-graphical google-news site, will be a model for how news is "viewed" in the future. check it out here. It's quite easy to use.

One trouble regarding many semantic visualization techniques involving large datasets is: the more visually appealing a graph is rendered, the less useful it often becomes. Many projects undertaken over the past 6 years (including Welkin) have focused on 2- and 3-dimensional renderings of a dataspace, using lines, proximity, node-shape, fly-over metadata display, etc. to classify and relate nodes, only to find there is no room left for persistent display of the textual metadata that ultimately drives a user toward the content he/she is looking for.

Marcos Weskamp's Newsmap (slashdot) on the other hand demonstrates an excellent balance of form and function, emphasizing textual metadata over symbolic graphic representation. How might this approach be applied specifically to RDF? One possibility: 5 axes rendered in a 2d visual space: color (category), saturation (relevance), size (interest), x/y position (age) and text (metadata). Just a thought anyway.

Um, so what's so different about the fetus's personhood 1 day before the third trimester?

It's not viable, even with serious equipment.

Now the intersting thing is that "serious equipment" is a moving target. But the basic argument is that it can't develop outside the womb if it were, for instance, born that prematurely.

I think this is the definition of viability for fetuses, but I'm getting a little murky on the terms. Of course that's a grey area too, which is why doctor's have to consult with women to determine that a fetus is not viable before a regular abortion takes place. Please disagree with this if I'm wrong.

However, I do agree with your point that it is the snuffing out of a potential human life. It just doesn't bother me, what with the overpopulation and AIDS killing a zillion people a day.

Shit, starving people all over the world who have kids are basically sentencing a certain percentage of them to death. Where's the outrage about that? At least abortion is a well reasoned choice, where you take responsibility for your own action when it matters: before you make a mistake that leads to years of easy-to-measure human suffering.

To really clear the air, I'd even let you say life began with conception, and that abortion was actually killing a real live person. I just wouldn't call it murder, with all the punishment attached. If we're gonna have penicillin, clearly a human invented way of choosing which people to keep alive, I can't see the moral dilemma in choosing which people to prevent from being alive. The same could be said about distribution of food and medicine on a world wide scale. The Catholics are at least consistent on this one, they're pro-life for everything.

Interesting point about the not-aborted daughters, but I totally disagree. Certainly some of those girls are happy and have an excellent life and relationship with their mothers because they were born at the right time. How many too-young unwed mothers produce children that will go with them to political rallys? So I think their sentiment does make sense, choosing to end a pregnancy through abortion allows you to provide the best life for your eventual child.

"I had a dream the other night that all the babies prevented by the pill came back.

They were pissed."

- Steven Wright

dea9: Visualize your mailing lists to actually SEE trolls!

Or isn't MS allowed to do that any more?

While we're waiting, why not try newsmap, which does some interesting things with Google's news feed.

This thing seems confusing and incomplete after newsmap. You only get a noun-type 2-3 word blurb for each story. Its interesting for the time-based approach, but it doesn't seem very useful for actually browsing the news.

Slashdot should consider using some kind of treemap interface as an alternative interface, based on number of comments and clickthroughs and such. I would definitely use something like that, just on the front page, to see what's getting attention. If you're anything like me, you often scan the stories to see how many comments they've received, and thus where the raging debate is.

(Of course, newsmap was made in Flash, which a lot of Slashdotters are chronically allergic to. Cue chorus of FlashHatas(TM) in 3, 2, 1...)

Yeah... At first I thought it was something like the newsmap, with different sizes for frequency of visits (i.e., Fark and Slashdot would show up huge in mine). That might be a great way to represent this kind of information. As it it, I don't see it as being a killer app.