The law penalizes advertisers that use the spammers, specifically because the spammers are usually extremely difficult to locate, while the advertiser must be extremely easy to locate in order for the advertisement to be effective. So even if a spammer forged all headers, and in all ways concealed their identity, ultimately the point of spam is to get someone to buy something from someone. And to buy something from someone you have to be able to contact them. And once they're contacted, they're liable for $1,000 per email up to $1,000,000 per "incident". Of course, the advertiser would then have a million reasons to identify the spammer.:-)
"This does NOT differentiate between bulk e-mail and regular e-mail.... For example, if you are a business owner producing widget A, and, while searching the web you find a company that buys A widgets to make B widgets, you proceed to look up their contact information, introduce yourself, and request someone get back to you if they are interested - this whole scenario is now illegal."
I think that you have a point here, but I think that reasonability will kick in -- it's hard to imagine a company that buys what you sell suing you for contacting their purchasing agent, and you could make a good case, I suspect, that by advertising the purchasing agent's email address they've invited salesmen to contact him by email. If you're really worried about the issue, call the company first and ask whether they want information on your products.
Not to mention that no lawyer would be interested in a single $1,000 penalty. The real money will be in class action lawsuits where thousands of users drop a big hammer on some mass spammer, and the money involved will provide an incentive to really dig out who these people actually are and nail them.
"Moreover, the following argument that... Roughly 40 percent of all e-mail traffic in the United States is comprised of unsolicited commercial e-mail advertisements (hereafter spam) and industry experts predict that by the end of 2003 half of all e-mail traffic will be comprised of spam... is stupid. Roughly 90% of my snail mail box is junk mail. Yet I don't see any politicians jumping on bills like these that would outlaw sending bulk or individual "commercial" letters."
Wrong; politicians have been passing laws outlawing bulk telephone calls (which you mentioned earlier). There's now a national "do not call" list, specifically because "spam phone calls" are so intrusive. And bulk automated phone calls have been illegal (most places) for years now.
For physical mail you're right, there's no restriction on what people can send (aside from obviously illegal things, like death threats or explosives) but people making sending physical mail are at least paying for the letter, which generates income for the post office, and tends to discourage the really sleazy come-ons. Email, on the other hand, is virtually free, and thus far more open to abuse. Finally, the volume of physical mail is far lower -- for example, I might get around 5 pieces of physical mail a day, but I get around a hundred emails, so it takes much longer to filter out junk physical mail than junk email.
The linked article's estimate is based on real resources being consumed by spam. $3.7B was for additional server capacity to receive and store spam in addition to valid email. I've seem numbers from some major ISP's, and spam is around 1/2 of their total email, which means buying 2x as many servers, storage, more ops staff to manage systems, added system complexity trying to filter out spam, customer support costs trying to educate users about spam, explain what filters do, etc., in addition to the obvious bandwidth costs. The other $4B is based on people having to spend time deleting spam and/or checking for non-spam that was misidentified by spam filters. Perhaps your time isn't worth anything, but when 1/2 my email is spam, the time it takes to deal with is meaningful. You might call it an annoyance, but I have less tolerance for scammers wasting my time attempting to rip people off.
If you average the results across all of the tests, you'll see that the Dual G5 Mac beat the Dual Xenon PC by an average of 22% overall. Of course, there were some tests where the PC beat the Mac by a bit, and some tests where the Mac beat the PC by quite a bit, so as always it's dangerous to generalize from any benchmark to performance on the applications you use. But it looked like overall the Mac beat the PC by a fairly significant margin. I'm not sure that a 22% performance boost alone is enough justification for a platform switch, but it certainly doesn't hurt.
The dual G5 also beat the dual G4 by around 45%, so for Mac users, it's a clear win.
(though it also beat the Dual G4 by around 45%). Of course, the test results bounced around pretty significantly, so it's not completely unfair to describe it as a tie
Because all of the companies selling stripped down PC systems for $500 are losing money on every unit they sell. It's a terrible business. Apple made a pretty reasonable business decision that they're not going to play the 'lose money for market share' game, and instead actually makes a profit. Dell is the only other profitable computer company, and while they don't release such details, analysts are pretty sure that even the master of low-margin commodity PC's loses money on their low-end systems, but they make up for it on higher-end systems, servers, etc. All of the other PC manufactures simply lose money. So Apple's strategy doesn't look too bad...
That being said, Apple does have some pretty decent low-end systems. You can get an eMac for $799 (list), and an iBook for $999 (list), which are perfectly nice machines. Sure, you could get a somewhat cheaper PC, but they you wouldn't have a computer with the highest customer satisfaction rating in the industry. (http://sanfrancisco.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/ stories/2003/07/07/daily45.html).
Yick. If you dynamically generate SQL statements at runtime, the database can't cache the compiled statements, so it has to get interpreted every time. That is, calling "select * from foo where a=?" 100,000 times with 100,000 parameters is a much better idea than generating 100,000 unique select statements, because you don't force the databast to parse and compile the statement 100,000 times. It also makes it much easier to profile your database performance (you can tell that you issued the query 100,000 times), etc.
Compile-type dynamically generated SQL statements might be a good idea (depends on the applicatin whether you're being too damned clever)...
The business with SQL parameter numbering (i.e. the "queston mark number 7") is a red herring -- that has nothing to do with the calling language, it's how SQL parameter passing is defined. Avoiding it is like avoiding using commas.
Assuming that the cartridge was vented, there's no reason that it should be so hot that it would melt, any more than computer cases themselves are so hot that they'd melt plastic.
The cartridge doesn't need to be airtight -- it could be vented, or like some of the larger video cards now, it could have fans mounted directly on the card (in which case the shell might even keep the card cooler by controlling the airflow).
I can't figure out what application this would make sense for.
For desktop machines, these compact cards are too expensive (compared to dirt cheap PCI cards) so nobody will use this for adding devices to their desktop machines, just they way they don't use PCMCIA cards on desktop machines now.
For laptops, almost everything is built in. Ethernet, modem, wireless, optical drive.
And what isn't built in can be added using CF cards. Sure, very few laptops have CF card slots built in, but none of them have these new PC card slots built in. And CF is becoming pretty standard for adding new capabilities (bluetooth, 890.11, ethernet, etc.) to high-end PDA's. And manufacturers aren't going to replace CF card slots with these much larger cards.
And for more limited uses (RAM cards) there is SD/MMC.
So I think that it's more likely that manufacturers will start putting CF and SD/MMC slots into laptops than that they add these new card slots.
Rather than introduce a new slot for portable devices, why not introduce a decent expansion mechanism for _desktop_ computers? There, consumers have to unscrew cases, plug fragile cards into slots, etc., -- there would be some real benefit in a consumer friendly desktop expansion mechanism. If people could upgrade their video card (for example) by pulling a cartridge out of a slot and snapping in a new one, everyone wins! I don't think it'd cost much (plastic shell, doors and guides in the cases). Ditto for optical drives -- I've never understood by laptops can swap optical drives, etc., but not desktops. Sure, it'd cost a tiny bit more, but think how much easier it would be to sell upgrades to consumers if they didn't have to crawl into an electrified box!
You're certainly right that it costs far more to produce a movie than an album. But since the production costs for the movie are presumably covered by the ticket sales, we should look at just the cost of producing the DVD from the movie. Given that most of the raw material is already created for the movie, there's mainly packaging and marketing. I'd guess that the actual production costs of making a DVD from a movie might be lower than the production costs of making a new album. Then there are marketing costs; given that a DVD of a movie can leverage the marketing from the movie, while the album is a new product, I'd guess that there's more marketing money spent on an album than a DVD (gotta pay ClearChannel for airplay...). Admittedly these are guesses -- if anyone has hard numbers, I'd love to see 'em.
So my guess is that it costs less to produce a DVD than a CD, and less to market it. On the flip side, it costs a little more to manufacture a DVD than a CD.
While I'll agree that the entrenched players are using 911 and service during power outages as tactics, it's still true that the landline and cellular telephone networks are designed to be immensely reliable, while the TCP/IP networks are designed to "usually work". This is one of the reasons that VOIP is so much cheaper; they don't have to make sure that every single component in the system is battery powered, for example, so that it can operate independently of the primary power grid. The telco's are required to provide that level of service by law, along with universal service, in return for their monopolies.
That's not to say that VOIP is bad, of course, but there are a lot of corners cut in data networks that should worry you when you think of scenarios involving people dying in case of system failure.:-)
The other key difference between CD's and DVD's is that for movies DVD's are an after-market, while for music, CD's are the market.
What I mean by this is that after someone spends money making a movie, they make the money back selling tickets in theaters. The DVD sales don't have to cover the production costs of the movie, just generate enough income to be worth the production costs (shooting the extra material, producing the interactive screens, etc.). This is why a movie company can spend $100M producing a movie and sell the DVD for $20 -- they already made money on the movie from movie theater ticket sales.
But when a record company spends money making an album, they only make money back selling CD's. The record companies don't make any money on concerts, T-shirts, fan club memberships, etc. So the only income that covers the cost of making the album is straight CD sales.
"You mean a whole 25-35 dollars per tax payer this year is really gonna put us in the poor house."
Math error. $87B in the latest request divided by 200M taxpayers = $435 per taxpayer. Add $80B for what was already spent, and it's $835 per taxpayer.
Actually, rather than a guess at number of taxpayers, let's look at households -- there are 102M households in the US. That makes for $852 per household in the latest request, and $1,637 per household.
"Why is it that such a smart group of people can't do simple math?"
You tell me. I do agree that space exploration is embarassingly underfunded, though.
"It is a nice vision, but without adequate funding it is only so much posturing from congress, and frankly, I'm quite sick of windbags who have no intention of following through on their flowery rhetoric with concrete action."
You're right that unfunded mandates suck. Luckily that has has nothing to do with this bill, which calls for funding for $250M for the first two years, presumably as an incremental increase over NASA's current budget.
And beyond the funding, I think that it _is_ important for NASA to have a clearly articulated vision and goals. Otherwise it's just another bureaucracy chasing dollars to perpetuate itself, instead of a team with a missionsion. And while that might be OK with a typical department whose "mission" is to do the same thing over and over (get the mail delivered, etc.) NASA's mission is to achieve new things, and without a national concensus on what those new things are, NASA flails around.
Don't blame Title 9, blame the administrators who made the decision that they'd rather cut _all_ gymnastics and volleyball rather than fund both men's and woman's team. Remember, Title 9 doesn't require the schools to fund or not fund any particular sport, just that if they fund a men's team they have to fund a woman's team. I can't believe that the cost of a woman's volleyball was so prohibitively high -- how much can balls, a net, and assigning a coach cost?
"Wouldn't they have been able to challenge this lawsuit with a great deal of ease by pointing out that the RIAA illegally collected information about the online habits of someone under 13? If I'm correct the Child Online Protection Act prohibits collection of information about online behavior for those under 13 without parental consent."
I have a feeling that it can't be illegal to collect any info about the online activities of kids under 13 -- that would make web server logs illegal, which doesn't seem right.
So I looked it up, at http://www.epic.org/free_speech/censorship/copa.ht ml.
It looks like COPA makes it illegal to let kids access porn ("material that is harmful to minors"), and that if you collect registration information in order to enforce this, you "shall not disclose any information collected for the purposes of restricting access to such communications to individuals 17 years of age or older without the prior written or electronic consent".
That being said, the RIAA didn't collect information on the girl's online behavior. They collected information about her shared music collection, which she was actively broadcasting to everyone on the planet. I think that it's pretty hard to argue a right to privacy to information that you're advertising on a global scale.
I agree that there are many values other than the raw cost of development. My point was (somewhat sarcastically, though that doesn't appear to have come across) that since the _only_ actual fact reported was the cost of development, that must be the most important factor. And if raw development cost is the critical factor, they should have optimized for low cost, and chosen a set of technologies for comparison that are the lowest cost.
You can certainly compare PHP/MySQP and.Net (and J2EE), as they're all technologies that can be used to implement web applications. I'd agree that they are significantly different (.Net is immature and only runs on NT, J2EE is very complex and runs everywhere, PHP/MySQL is simple), but you can certainly compare them in terms of the overall cost of the project. You could argue that one or the other is a more appropriate approach for a particular application (I don't envy anyone trying to implement robust transaction processing in PHP/MySQL, for example) but that doesn't mean that they can't be compared...
One thing just occurred to me -- the RIAA got the name of the p2p user by capturing the IP address of the network node and then subpoenaing the ISP to get the name of the customer using that IP address. Wouldn't you expect that a parent would sign a contract with an ISP (especially since 12-year-olds can't sign contracts), not a 12-year-old? So wouldn't the lawsuit be against the parent, not the 12-year-old? I wonder if the real situation is that the parent is getting sued, and the parent is using the "my kid did it" defense. Am I missing something?
That was the last debate -- the RIAA captured the machine's IP address, and subpoenad the ISP to get the real-world name and contact information for the person using that IP address. So unless the 12-year-old is paying for the ISP account, the RIAA suit is probably against the parent who signed the contract with the ISP, and the parent is blaming their kid.
Wait a minute -- you're saying that it's a valid defense if you do something illegal, but don't think it's illegal because you bought something in good faith that said it was legal?! I can have some sympathy for her situation, but I'm pretty sure that "ignorance of the law is no defense." I suppose that she could sue the software company that led her to believe that their service was legal...
It's really.Net vs. J2EE. I'm not sure that.Net is cheaper to develop on than J2EE, but I am sure that there are less expensive ways to engineer software than J2EE. If price is the critical factor (which it must be, since it's the only actual information in the press release) you'd think that they'd compare to PHP/MySQL.
The lack of details makes me suspicions. Did they choose projects based on very expensive application servers and databases, rather than free alternatives, in order to offset the cost of Windows and.Net? Did they choose projects that weren't deployed on a large scale in order to minimize the per-server costs of.Net/NT (which are extremely high)? Depending on the details, the report may really be saying '.Net Server and SQL Server is cheaper than WebLogic and Oracle', which really has nothing to do with Windows or Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
The law penalizes advertisers that use the spammers, specifically because the spammers are usually extremely difficult to locate, while the advertiser must be extremely easy to locate in order for the advertisement to be effective. So even if a spammer forged all headers, and in all ways concealed their identity, ultimately the point of spam is to get someone to buy something from someone. And to buy something from someone you have to be able to contact them. And once they're contacted, they're liable for $1,000 per email up to $1,000,000 per "incident". Of course, the advertiser would then have a million reasons to identify the spammer. :-)
"This does NOT differentiate between bulk e-mail and regular e-mail. ... For example, if you are a business owner producing widget A, and, while searching the web you find a company that buys A widgets to make B widgets, you proceed to look up their contact information, introduce yourself, and request someone get back to you if they are interested - this whole scenario is now illegal."
... Roughly 40 percent of all e-mail traffic in the United States is comprised of unsolicited commercial e-mail advertisements ... is stupid. Roughly 90% of my snail mail box is junk mail. Yet I don't see any politicians jumping on bills like these that would outlaw sending bulk or individual "commercial" letters."
I think that you have a point here, but I think that reasonability will kick in -- it's hard to imagine a company that buys what you sell suing you for contacting their purchasing agent, and you could make a good case, I suspect, that by advertising the purchasing agent's email address they've invited salesmen to contact him by email. If you're really worried about the issue, call the company first and ask whether they want information on your products.
Not to mention that no lawyer would be interested in a single $1,000 penalty. The real money will be in class action lawsuits where thousands of users drop a big hammer on some mass spammer, and the money involved will provide an incentive to really dig out who these people actually are and nail them.
"Moreover, the following argument that
(hereafter spam) and industry experts predict that by the end of 2003
half of all e-mail traffic will be comprised of spam
Wrong; politicians have been passing laws outlawing bulk telephone calls (which you mentioned earlier). There's now a national "do not call" list, specifically because "spam phone calls" are so intrusive. And bulk automated phone calls have been illegal (most places) for years now.
For physical mail you're right, there's no restriction on what people can send (aside from obviously illegal things, like death threats or explosives) but people making sending physical mail are at least paying for the letter, which generates income for the post office, and tends to discourage the really sleazy come-ons. Email, on the other hand, is virtually free, and thus far more open to abuse. Finally, the volume of physical mail is far lower -- for example, I might get around 5 pieces of physical mail a day, but I get around a hundred emails, so it takes much longer to filter out junk physical mail than junk email.
The linked article's estimate is based on real resources being consumed by spam. $3.7B was for additional server capacity to receive and store spam in addition to valid email. I've seem numbers from some major ISP's, and spam is around 1/2 of their total email, which means buying 2x as many servers, storage, more ops staff to manage systems, added system complexity trying to filter out spam, customer support costs trying to educate users about spam, explain what filters do, etc., in addition to the obvious bandwidth costs. The other $4B is based on people having to spend time deleting spam and/or checking for non-spam that was misidentified by spam filters. Perhaps your time isn't worth anything, but when 1/2 my email is spam, the time it takes to deal with is meaningful. You might call it an annoyance, but I have less tolerance for scammers wasting my time attempting to rip people off.
If you average the results across all of the tests, you'll see that the Dual G5 Mac beat the Dual Xenon PC by an average of 22% overall. Of course, there were some tests where the PC beat the Mac by a bit, and some tests where the Mac beat the PC by quite a bit, so as always it's dangerous to generalize from any benchmark to performance on the applications you use. But it looked like overall the Mac beat the PC by a fairly significant margin. I'm not sure that a 22% performance boost alone is enough justification for a platform switch, but it certainly doesn't hurt.
The dual G5 also beat the dual G4 by around 45%, so for Mac users, it's a clear win.
(though it also beat the Dual G4 by around 45%). Of course, the test results bounced around pretty significantly, so it's not completely unfair to describe it as a tie
Because all of the companies selling stripped down PC systems for $500 are losing money on every unit they sell. It's a terrible business. Apple made a pretty reasonable business decision that they're not going to play the 'lose money for market share' game, and instead actually makes a profit. Dell is the only other profitable computer company, and while they don't release such details, analysts are pretty sure that even the master of low-margin commodity PC's loses money on their low-end systems, but they make up for it on higher-end systems, servers, etc. All of the other PC manufactures simply lose money. So Apple's strategy doesn't look too bad...
/ stories/2003/07/07/daily45.html).
That being said, Apple does have some pretty decent low-end systems. You can get an eMac for $799 (list), and an iBook for $999 (list), which are perfectly nice machines. Sure, you could get a somewhat cheaper PC, but they you wouldn't have a computer with the highest customer satisfaction rating in the industry. (http://sanfrancisco.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco
Yick. If you dynamically generate SQL statements at runtime, the database can't cache the compiled statements, so it has to get interpreted every time. That is, calling "select * from foo where a=?" 100,000 times with 100,000 parameters is a much better idea than generating 100,000 unique select statements, because you don't force the databast to parse and compile the statement 100,000 times. It also makes it much easier to profile your database performance (you can tell that you issued the query 100,000 times), etc.
Compile-type dynamically generated SQL statements might be a good idea (depends on the applicatin whether you're being too damned clever)...
The business with SQL parameter numbering (i.e. the "queston mark number 7") is a red herring -- that has nothing to do with the calling language, it's how SQL parameter passing is defined. Avoiding it is like avoiding using commas.
And of course, ActiveX has no security model, and runs only on some versions of Windows. ;-)
Assuming that the cartridge was vented, there's no reason that it should be so hot that it would melt, any more than computer cases themselves are so hot that they'd melt plastic.
The cartridge doesn't need to be airtight -- it could be vented, or like some of the larger video cards now, it could have fans mounted directly on the card (in which case the shell might even keep the card cooler by controlling the airflow).
I agree -- if only the last attempt at this had succeeded.
I can't figure out what application this would make sense for.
For desktop machines, these compact cards are too expensive (compared to dirt cheap PCI cards) so nobody will use this for adding devices to their desktop machines, just they way they don't use PCMCIA cards on desktop machines now.
For laptops, almost everything is built in. Ethernet, modem, wireless, optical drive.
And what isn't built in can be added using CF cards. Sure, very few laptops have CF card slots built in, but none of them have these new PC card slots built in. And CF is becoming pretty standard for adding new capabilities (bluetooth, 890.11, ethernet, etc.) to high-end PDA's. And manufacturers aren't going to replace CF card slots with these much larger cards.
And for more limited uses (RAM cards) there is SD/MMC.
So I think that it's more likely that manufacturers will start putting CF and SD/MMC slots into laptops than that they add these new card slots.
Rather than introduce a new slot for portable devices, why not introduce a decent expansion mechanism for _desktop_ computers? There, consumers have to unscrew cases, plug fragile cards into slots, etc., -- there would be some real benefit in a consumer friendly desktop expansion mechanism. If people could upgrade their video card (for example) by pulling a cartridge out of a slot and snapping in a new one, everyone wins! I don't think it'd cost much (plastic shell, doors and guides in the cases). Ditto for optical drives -- I've never understood by laptops can swap optical drives, etc., but not desktops. Sure, it'd cost a tiny bit more, but think how much easier it would be to sell upgrades to consumers if they didn't have to crawl into an electrified box!
You're certainly right that it costs far more to produce a movie than an album. But since the production costs for the movie are presumably covered by the ticket sales, we should look at just the cost of producing the DVD from the movie. Given that most of the raw material is already created for the movie, there's mainly packaging and marketing. I'd guess that the actual production costs of making a DVD from a movie might be lower than the production costs of making a new album. Then there are marketing costs; given that a DVD of a movie can leverage the marketing from the movie, while the album is a new product, I'd guess that there's more marketing money spent on an album than a DVD (gotta pay ClearChannel for airplay...). Admittedly these are guesses -- if anyone has hard numbers, I'd love to see 'em.
So my guess is that it costs less to produce a DVD than a CD, and less to market it. On the flip side, it costs a little more to manufacture a DVD than a CD.
While I'll agree that the entrenched players are using 911 and service during power outages as tactics, it's still true that the landline and cellular telephone networks are designed to be immensely reliable, while the TCP/IP networks are designed to "usually work". This is one of the reasons that VOIP is so much cheaper; they don't have to make sure that every single component in the system is battery powered, for example, so that it can operate independently of the primary power grid. The telco's are required to provide that level of service by law, along with universal service, in return for their monopolies.
:-)
That's not to say that VOIP is bad, of course, but there are a lot of corners cut in data networks that should worry you when you think of scenarios involving people dying in case of system failure.
The other key difference between CD's and DVD's is that for movies DVD's are an after-market, while for music, CD's are the market.
What I mean by this is that after someone spends money making a movie, they make the money back selling tickets in theaters. The DVD sales don't have to cover the production costs of the movie, just generate enough income to be worth the production costs (shooting the extra material, producing the interactive screens, etc.). This is why a movie company can spend $100M producing a movie and sell the DVD for $20 -- they already made money on the movie from movie theater ticket sales.
But when a record company spends money making an album, they only make money back selling CD's. The record companies don't make any money on concerts, T-shirts, fan club memberships, etc. So the only income that covers the cost of making the album is straight CD sales.
"You mean a whole 25-35 dollars per tax payer this year is really gonna put us in the poor house."
Math error. $87B in the latest request divided by 200M taxpayers = $435 per taxpayer. Add $80B for what was already spent, and it's $835 per taxpayer.
Actually, rather than a guess at number of taxpayers, let's look at households -- there are 102M households in the US. That makes for $852 per household in the latest request, and $1,637 per household.
"Why is it that such a smart group of people can't do simple math?"
You tell me. I do agree that space exploration is embarassingly underfunded, though.
"It is a nice vision, but without adequate funding it is only so much posturing from congress, and frankly, I'm quite sick of windbags who have no intention of following through on their flowery rhetoric with concrete action."
You're right that unfunded mandates suck. Luckily that has has nothing to do with this bill, which calls for funding for $250M for the first two years, presumably as an incremental increase over NASA's current budget.
And beyond the funding, I think that it _is_ important for NASA to have a clearly articulated vision and goals. Otherwise it's just another bureaucracy chasing dollars to perpetuate itself, instead of a team with a missionsion. And while that might be OK with a typical department whose "mission" is to do the same thing over and over (get the mail delivered, etc.) NASA's mission is to achieve new things, and without a national concensus on what those new things are, NASA flails around.
Don't blame Title 9, blame the administrators who made the decision that they'd rather cut _all_ gymnastics and volleyball rather than fund both men's and woman's team. Remember, Title 9 doesn't require the schools to fund or not fund any particular sport, just that if they fund a men's team they have to fund a woman's team. I can't believe that the cost of a woman's volleyball was so prohibitively high -- how much can balls, a net, and assigning a coach cost?
That's almost two Ren's! ("Fourty-seven meeleeon Dollars!")
- LP
"Wouldn't they have been able to challenge this lawsuit with a great deal of ease by pointing out that the RIAA illegally collected information about the online habits of someone under 13? If I'm correct the Child Online Protection Act prohibits collection of information about online behavior for those under 13 without parental consent."
t ml.
I have a feeling that it can't be illegal to collect any info about the online activities of kids under 13 -- that would make web server logs illegal, which doesn't seem right.
So I looked it up, at http://www.epic.org/free_speech/censorship/copa.h
It looks like COPA makes it illegal to let kids access porn ("material that is harmful to minors"), and that if you collect registration information in order to enforce this, you "shall not disclose any information collected for the purposes of restricting access to such communications to individuals 17 years of age or older without the prior written or electronic consent".
That being said, the RIAA didn't collect information on the girl's online behavior. They collected information about her shared music collection, which she was actively broadcasting to everyone on the planet. I think that it's pretty hard to argue a right to privacy to information that you're advertising on a global scale.
I agree that there are many values other than the raw cost of development. My point was (somewhat sarcastically, though that doesn't appear to have come across) that since the _only_ actual fact reported was the cost of development, that must be the most important factor. And if raw development cost is the critical factor, they should have optimized for low cost, and chosen a set of technologies for comparison that are the lowest cost.
You can certainly compare PHP/MySQP and .Net (and J2EE), as they're all technologies that can be used to implement web applications. I'd agree that they are significantly different (.Net is immature and only runs on NT, J2EE is very complex and runs everywhere, PHP/MySQL is simple), but you can certainly compare them in terms of the overall cost of the project. You could argue that one or the other is a more appropriate approach for a particular application (I don't envy anyone trying to implement robust transaction processing in PHP/MySQL, for example) but that doesn't mean that they can't be compared...
One thing just occurred to me -- the RIAA got the name of the p2p user by capturing the IP address of the network node and then subpoenaing the ISP to get the name of the customer using that IP address. Wouldn't you expect that a parent would sign a contract with an ISP (especially since 12-year-olds can't sign contracts), not a 12-year-old? So wouldn't the lawsuit be against the parent, not the 12-year-old? I wonder if the real situation is that the parent is getting sued, and the parent is using the "my kid did it" defense. Am I missing something?
That was the last debate -- the RIAA captured the machine's IP address, and subpoenad the ISP to get the real-world name and contact information for the person using that IP address. So unless the 12-year-old is paying for the ISP account, the RIAA suit is probably against the parent who signed the contract with the ISP, and the parent is blaming their kid.
Wait a minute -- you're saying that it's a valid defense if you do something illegal, but don't think it's illegal because you bought something in good faith that said it was legal?! I can have some sympathy for her situation, but I'm pretty sure that "ignorance of the law is no defense." I suppose that she could sue the software company that led her to believe that their service was legal...
It's really .Net vs. J2EE. I'm not sure that .Net is cheaper to develop on than J2EE, but I am sure that there are less expensive ways to engineer software than J2EE. If price is the critical factor (which it must be, since it's the only actual information in the press release) you'd think that they'd compare to PHP/MySQL.
.Net? Did they choose projects that weren't deployed on a large scale in order to minimize the per-server costs of .Net/NT (which are extremely high)? Depending on the details, the report may really be saying '.Net Server and SQL Server is cheaper than WebLogic and Oracle', which really has nothing to do with Windows or Linux.
The lack of details makes me suspicions. Did they choose projects based on very expensive application servers and databases, rather than free alternatives, in order to offset the cost of Windows and