Well if you just want the information, it is a waste of bandwidth. However it does give the producer the ability to know how the viewer will actually see it. For instance, I run with no graphics, my own color scheme(orange on black), and my own fonts. The flash will look the same to me as it will to anyone else, but plain text or html won't. Sadly, news is not about content anymore, its about "spin". So flash will allow the "mass educators" to present the stories in a way that spins well for them, and force you to view advertisements as well. Actually, I think flash is useful to advertisers for exactly that reason. Since it is a plug-in, it will load even if you have "images off" in the browser. I think the sponsors got "hip" to the trick of people turning off the "animated gifs", now they are all using flash. Of course you can still circumvent them, with a scheme of copying libflashplayer in and out of it's plugin location....but most people don't do it.

They probably build the flash-gui with php, and use Perl to collect the RSS feeds, fetch and resize the pictures, and stick it in the Mysql-database. Now it would be really interesting (and actually usefull) if they would have used the brand new video capabilities of ming.

teabag

Holy muvver o' gawd. Why do these idiots do this? I refuse to wrangle my system settings to satisfy some uptight site designer that not only requires Flash, but the newest version of Flash. It's as though keeping up with the Joneses is mandatory, else they don't consider one worthy to partake of the splendiferousness that is their (blankety blank blank) website.

'fraid I'll just remain ignorant of the site's wonders