Apparently Bayer took a medication that they new to be infected with the AIDS virus off the market in the US after they were forced to do so by the FDA and then proceeded to dump it in France, Germany and Japan. How is still company still in business?

Creative Commons (CC) is a wonderful initiative to make it possible for mere mortals to allow other such beings to make use of their works in ways that they deem acceptable. It is a system that is at once based on traditional copyright law and yet provides a modern alternative to it. Personally, I try to license as much of my work as possible under CC licenses. This includes the content of this blog as well as the collaborative work that comprises the OSFlash wiki.

For an initiative that aims to make it easy to share data and intellectual property, however, Creative Commons can appear, at first sight, to be very un-Web-2.0 [do not sue me O'Reilly]. A developer who happens to casually surf the CC website can easily leave thinking that the only way to integrate a CC license into her web application is to use an ugly HTML-based system that requires users to be redirected to the CC website. She may be left thinking, as I was: "Where is my open Creative Commons API?"

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I was initially very excited to see that an article had been posted on DevNet on the topic of Flash Player detection and how best to embed SWF files into HTML pages. The mechanism by which you embed a SWF file into your HTML page plays a primary role in determining the user experience of your Flash sites, especially for users without the Flash Player or with earlier versions of the Flash Player. Unfortunately, the Adobe article fails to mention the most important single solution in this field: SWFObject.

I'd recommend that you refer to the SWFObject page as your own private Best Practices for Flash Player Detection article. Or, if you'd rather, there is an Adobe DevNet article on SWFObject with the same content that you can refer to.

FlashMagazine just published a review written by veteran Flash developer and my good friend John Dalziel of the panel on "The Future of the Internet as an Applications Platform" that I was on at Adobe Live.

FlashCodersBrighton is a new initiative by my friend Seb Lee-Delisle modelled on FlashCodersNY.

The inaugural meeting is on June 6th, 2006 and Paul and I are going to be there.

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