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Your argument is crap. If you had been paying any attention to the stories for the entire past year, you'd know the RIAA will file a complaint about any file which has a filename containing any words in a artist's name or a song name. I could have the right to download, upload, and burn the file on a disk then crap on it. I could even own the copyright to that file. Yet the RIAA would still file a complaint. They don't care. They want to stop the flow of information on the internet no matter if they own the rights to that information or not.

So you are saying no one has the right to distribute files which have words such as "Christina", "Madonna" (Whoa! I didn't know the RIAA owned an inn!) or "love"? There are many other words which would be banned too. In fact, probably every word in your post, so if you don't want to "infringe" on "copyrights", you will have to stop posting on Slashdot and everywhere else on the internet.

• I agree that time is expensive, but a PC with the Required specs is a commodity that could be set up as a standalone kiosk at the mall requiring lower rent and lower salary costs. These may offset the time factor.
• Knowledge - You're right, downtime will kill sales and increase costs. I don't have an answer besides get it right the first time
• Quality and compatibility are still issues. It's probably possible to add some artwork at burn time (I personally like to add fractal art from fractalus.com to my mix discs. I don't have any preference for burnt versus pressed since all of my CD players recognize the CD-Rs. Actually, I typically only "play" a CD once to encode it and put it on my Nomad Jukebox.
• The Retailer and Customer fraud cases are both possible. I don't have a good answer for this one. Bruce Schneier, someone whose opinion I trust in security matters, seems to think that it's impossible to have a foolproof system in the hands of end-users.

You've bought up some interesting points. I don't think that they are entirely insurmountable and I think that it's entirely possible to come up with a touchscreen CD kiosk that even my Mother could use. Currently, the convenience stores in my location use touchscreens for sandwich orders, so the UI should be easy enough. Someone will be able to overcome this issue and that person will probably make a fair share of money. I'd be surprised if the entire concept hasn't been patented yet.

If you've got no content, your site doesn't need to be dynamic. A static blank page will do.

On a more serious note, it depends on what the site does. Having built a fair number of sites--both for myself and, as part of my job, for big companies--I can say there are pros and cons to driving your site from a database.

Databases are primarily useful when you have a consistent structure to your content and you need to be able to update that content easily. When I built this site it was done from a database, but I used a script to build all the pages one time; it's a static site, because the content doesn't get updated. I'm in the process of rebuilding the main site now, and it really will be dynamic, because I want to be able to update the database with new content and have it automatically appear on the site.

But more importantly, there are advantages from a fully dynamic site that you just can't do with static HTML. Any kind of interactivity, be it searching, multi-step forms, or even checking on financial systems like I built with this site. You can't reasonably do that kind of thing without connecting with a database.

Sounds like this book is a good starter guide for folks looking to learn how to build dynamic web sites. It gets you to the point where you're ready to deal with establishing sessions, and once you're there, then you can really get the ideas flowing... you have to tools to do what you want, instead of being limited by what you know.

Is this the first sighting of a space dredger?