In the movie, when the British shoot peaceful protesters, Ghandi encourages more peaceful protests instead of revenge killings. Revenge is satisfying in the moment, but damaging to the cause in the long term. Or as Gandhi puts it: “Victory attained by violence is tantamount to a defeat, for it is momentary.”

Not only did he ask his people to exercise incredible restraint, but to stand still and knowingly receive beatings and sometimes even death. Gandhi said that the nonviolent activist, like any soldier, had to be ready to die for their cause. In fact, during India’s struggle for independence, 100′s of Indians were killed by the British. The difference was that the nonviolent activists, while willing to die, were never willing to kill.

Gandhi pointed out three possible responses to oppression and injustice. One he described as the coward’s way: to accept the wrong or run away from it. The second was to stand and fight violence with violence force. Gandhi said this was better than acceptance or running away. But the third way, he said, was best of all and required the most courage: to stand and fight solely by nonviolent means.

Impressive … Gandhi was an incredible visionary and not only an effective leader of his people, but an inspiration to us all.

• http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2009/12/hello-stack-overflow.html

No community manager wants to send its members away from its forums, but in some cases it just makes sense. In this case Stack Overflow is doing a great job of handling entry level questions about Google Android. And the Google Community managers realize that they are helping, not harming their cause. It takes an experienced community manager to understand that your own forums aren’t what matters most. What matters is that developers are getting answers from places and ways that they prefer and find most convenient. Plus, the Google managers must realize that they will get some additional visibility by encouraging the Stack Overflow to discuss Android.

There might be a back story that I’m not aware of, but on the surface, this makes sense. Kudos to the Google Android crew.

We’re also having a lot of fun. The other day while having lunch at a sushi restaurant, I explained why I think the most well-known Japanese phrase in America is … “domo arigato Mr. Roboto”. Of course it was immortalized by the band Styx in the early 80’s. But I used Kunio Kato’s Acadamy Award acceptance speech as an example of how popular it is even today (the end of the video is priceless). The next day, we get an email from Steve announcing that “mr roboto” will be the codename for the NorthScale “instrumented” memcached AMI.

I wonder how many other code names come from jokin’ around during lunch.

After the sessions, we’re throwing a party, during which we’ll have Lightning Talks on subjects loosely related to Cloud Computing from the likes of Jeff Barr and others.

With over 300 people registered on Upcoming, I don’t think I missed anyone. But if I did, please excuse me and show up anyway!

For example, doing a search for “will you marry me” returns the page in the Acknowledgements section where I proposed to my fiance! You can try it here yourself, here … Search PayPal Hacks.

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