ptalk > June 2006

Sharing != Stealing

Anonymous post from Bill Gates’s “Piracy” Confession

Stealing is bad. Why is that? When I was a child, my parents explained it to me very clearly. Stealing is bad, because if you steal another kid’s toy, that other kid cannot play with it any more. Stealing means taking people’s property away from them. And that is exactly why it is bad.

Copyright infringement is NOT stealing. It is like not paying your taxes, or not paying the money the mafia demands from you so they won’t burn down your house. It’s still up for debate which of the two it is, but calling it “theft” is just propaganda.

If two people can profit from something that used to belong to only one person, without anything being taken away from the first person, that is called “sharing”. Sharing is good. Your parents probably taught you that.

Theft is evil. Sharing is good. If you promise to stop referring to copyright infringement as “theft”, I will stop referring to it as “sharing”, and maybe there can be a fair debate then.

Anonymous

It's Fresh!

So it must be Legal. We’ve released the first snapshot of our multi-target runtime (code named Legal’s, because the initial outline of the project came over a lunch meeting there).

Read all about it here: Introducing Legals.

Don't be a Zombie

Microsoft: Zombies most prevalent Windows threat

You had me at "Hello".

We had the BOS "Pizza, Beer, and AJAX" meet up last night at Optaros [Thanks, for hosting, guys!].

The format was a little different than the SFO event. (Aside from the local pizza and beer.) Lots more informal chats. David gave a great presentation, showing some of the amazing things that have been already done with OpenLaszlo, such as LaszloMail, Gliffy, and Pandora. He gave a glimpse of Laszlo in 10 Minutes, which of course starts out with the usual "Hello World!" example. He finished up with a demo of LZPIX, showing it running identically on the Flash runtime and on the AJAX runtime.

An audience member raised his hand with a question: I just wanted to say, "You had me at 'Hello'".

Thank you Henry for the pictures, and Amy for transcribing the quote of the night.

Typekey, XHTML and Firefox

Several people have complained that they could not make comments on my blog. I eventually tracked this down to Firefox’s strict XHTML interpretation disabling the (somewhat sloppy) Javascript that tries to dynamically generate the comment form. Cleaning up that Javascript was all that it took, although it took me more than an hour to find the bits that needed cleaning.