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Allowing people to take screenshots is obviously a bad idea in general. How often can you take a screenshot of your computer screen without including copyrighted material? A Firefox logo here, a Windows start button there. Of course I already wrote about an even bigger hole here.

The GP isn't mainly talking about what the laws are like but what they should be like. So pointing out what is illegal is irrelevant.

There is no moral problem with filesharing as I see it. Culture is meant to be shared. I blog about the absurdity of trying to control ideas and expressions of ideas here.

I write a Java Swing application for a living and trust me, it's not about not being able to 'get' it. It just is that bad. I believe Swing was not designed to be useable in practice, but just to have a 'really nice looking API'. That's a very cute goal but it doesn't cut it when writing real software.

In most UI toolkits you aren't expected to reinvent the wheel or fight with the API to achieve a normal native look and functionality. Try to create a simple JTable sortable by clicking the column headers to see what I mean. Once you're done implementing everything from logic to UI drawing, without any assistance from Swing, it still won't look anything like the user expects in most cases.

Here's a blog entry where I talk more about the 'designed for beauty' vs 'designed for use': Java Grows Up.