What I can't work out is why anyone would want to program (as opposed to handling data) in a language that looks anything like XML. XML is designed first and foremost to be written and read by computers. Sure, it is also supposed to be possible to eyeball it, but the sheer verbosity of XML makes trying to work out what is going on in any non-trivial case a major test for (human) memory. I've always thought that one of the hallmarks of a good language is that it lets you do the common things in the shortest possible amount of lines, and lets you see the overall structure without wading through all the detail.
People who really understand a language could write it from scratch if they had to.
Yes, but is this necessarily the fastest way to get the job out the door, or the best way to make code maintainable once the guy who invented the language has fallen under a bus?
I've done a fair bit of programming in BASIC and Lisp, and there's no doubt in my mind that Lisp is the language of the Gods, but, for a lot of web applications, you don't need tail recursion or lexical scoping, you just need something that works, and which has a decent set of libraries to do all the hard work for you. Personally, I find that Perl usually does the job quite nicely: it has a lot of lisp-like features for when you need them, but if all you want is a list of instructions it does that too, and it is blindingly fast for everything except for intensive number crunching. If the OO layer wasn't so thin as to be transparent it would be pretty close to the perfect web language in my book.
The trouble with all this conceptual stuff is that unless you can get a decent spec, or, at the absolute minimum, useful feedback from the end user, all you end up with is a conceptually elegant and/or implementationally efficient useless program rather than an inelegant and/or inefficient useless program.
In my experience, being tied into the wrong programming metaphor, or the wrong object set, or whatever, is far worse than spagetti code. At least with spagetti, all options are equally possible and equally bad, or good. Once you start having to fight your metaphor or object model, you end up with kludges that make Fortran look like a really beautiful thing.
And, again in my experience, the only way to get a decent spec is to write the code at least once, wave it at the user, list all the wrong assumptions, throw all the code away and start again. Which is not something coders like very much. But wasn't it that guru guy from Xerox (Kay?) who said that the best thing for software integrity was frequent fires in the backup store?
Precisely - this is a subjective evaluation, not a objective one.
If you like, but so is your's. Much of the world doesn't reason in terms of calendar time at all. And I have a significant number of customers for whom anything which breaks their email permanently would be considered a godsend:-)
Courts evaluate these things by reference to objective criteria.
Hardly. I would love to see your objective evidence for the statement that 'during the 5 seconds of death there is neither pleasure nor displeasure', for example. The majority of people currently alive would disagree with you on this point.
Attempt to trivialise a serious problem
Here's the heart of my concern. You start from the untested assumption that spam is serious, and then use that as the reference point from which to evaluate everything else. I'm applying the scientific method, assuming a null hypothesis that spam is no more or less serious than any other background nuisance, and asking for evidence that supports the hypothesis that it is uniquely serious, when compared, for example, with joke emails, pop-ups, DoS attacks, misdirected emails and so on. And virtually all the responses I have received have evaded that question.
Now in terms of/. karma levels, it really doesn't matter, your position is going to carry the day every time. The only trouble is that the people who draft legislation sound more like me than you, so, unless the idea is to rant and rave without making any difference to anything in the real world, the anti-spam lobby needs to start making sense to the real world. And getting any of your postings on this theme published in the Washington Post, for example, would set back public opinion on the matter by years. Because the Tampa Mother's Association lobby is more powerful politically than the/. one.
Isn't dropping your prices a fairly normal way to deal with increased competition: supply and demand and all that? A couple of weeks ago we were complaining that MS's margins were too high. Now we're complaining that they are cutting their margins...
Sure, they are doing it selectively, but, if they did it across the board, it would really be bad news : does anyone think that Corel or anyone else could compete with XP Office for $50? That's cheaper than Star Office 6 in a box. And this is exactly what will happen if open source ever starts to dent their desktop market share.
Note in passing that breaking up MS would have made things worse in this respect, as the highly profitable OS and Office departments would not even had to carry the loss-making departments anymore, so they could slash prices even lower and still make a respectable profit.
The postings about Linux for $0 are funny, but miss the point that no OS change is free for a company with existing staff and data. If you take discounted MS products and set them against free Linux products plus the number of man hours needed to reskill your staff, the figures are closer than we might like to admit.
I'll answer the questions, but I don't hold out much hope of you reading the answers any more carefully than my previous postings.
Obscene profits during a recession.
So, for about the fifth time, what would you like them to do about it? They could drop their margins to, say, 10%, but MS Office for $30 would wipe out Corel and every other WP manufacturer in a matter of months. They would increase their market share from 90% to 99%, and still make a profit. Apart from that, what would you like them to do? Just refuse to sell the software to people who want to buy it?
Charging nought to put a competitor out of business.
So we are against free software? Does/. really want to pursue this argument? How many posts have I read in the last month about how free software is going to put MS out of business? Where is the moral difference?
Deviating from previous file formats
This is hardly new or exclusive to Microsoft. Netscape invented the DIY standards game in browsers. The WINE Linux version of WP will not read files produced by the native Linux version, and I gather that Open Office 6 files don't load into Star Office 5.2. So should we boycott all these products?
Can MS program?
The answer is obviously yes: otherwise they wouldn't have produced any programs. Whether they are as good at it as they could be is another question, and rather a subjective one. The problem with Outlook Express is not how it is programmed as much as the functionality it offers: if open source email clients ran scripts from emails they would have the same problem. If MS removed that functionality, their product would at a stroke become more secure (and the companies who use that functionality for legitimate purposes would be mad).
Conversely, does the Open Source world know anything about frame-based DTP? If so, can you point me to one open source product that can hold a candle to any of a dozen or so commercial products for Windows?
How many bugs?
What was that I saw about 200,000 bugs reported so far in Mozilla, including 30,000 or so which were/are likely to corrupt your data in some circumstances? (Just had to break off from this because a client clicked 'print' in Mozilla and killed her X session...)
An MS paid troll?
Not sure what the working definition of a troll is, but I've been in computing for 25 years and have never once owned a Microsoft product. How many/.ers can say that? I currently earn my living running an all-Linux cybercafe and programming Linux servers. I just don't think that irrational hatred of the competition is a particularly good way to increase your market share.
And, as it happens, I've just ordered my first Microsoft site licence, because I'm fed up with trying to explain to my customers why Star Office keeps screwing up their CVs. It's a funny thing, but most of them don't think that not getting a job is a reasonable price to pay to support the crusade against Microsoft.
Always struck me as a wonderful idea. Fifteen years ago I worked at a place where the client came up with a new idea in the morning and we aimed to demo a solution that afternoon in OO Lisp. A lot of fun, and it made having a dialogue with the end users a million times more useful than Bible-thick specs that no-one can get their head round. Maybe programmers don't actually want clients telling them how they want programs to work?
Its application to my question. Sure, in terms of market share, if MS have a monopoly, the only way is down. But, in terms of coverage on/., and, increasingly, in the media, the only way for MS is up. My question is not 'how can they be more successful?' My question is 'what could they do to satisfy their critics?' And the answer appears to be 'nothing'. Now if the option is being rich and unpopular or less rich and just as unpopular, I'd go for the first option.
In practice, a lot of people want a box, a CD and a manual, which is why Sun sell Star Office and
The cost of MS software at charity rates is a very small percentage of many projects
For example, my Dark Side brother is currently installing an 80-seat W2K network for a charity in London. MS offered to sponsor them (ie give them all the software for free), which the charity was very excited about, until my brother pointed out that the total MS software spend was about $3000, ie about 4 of the 80 terminals, before you get the servers, the networking stuff and so on. So the difference between buying the software and getting it free is 1-2% of the total project cost. In other words, MS at charity rates isn't free, but, for a lot of projects, it's close enough to free not to make any difference.
Because it works? In the last week I have discovered a wonderful bug in Star Office 5.2 (to add to the 'hang when trying to write to floppy' one that had me going a few months ago). You load in a.doc file with an image, works fine, prints fine, you make some minor edits and save it as a.doc file, and, hey presto, half the text has gone. Except the only way to discover this is to reopen the file you have just saved, which is not something I tend to do very often.
We're going to move onto Open Office 6 shortly, and maybe that particular problem has been fixed, but this sort of problem is always going to happen when you are trying to reverse engineer someone's proprietary format, and some people want to do their job rather than fight quixotic wars against Microsoft.
If they charge high prices, they are rip-off merchants
If they drop their prices, they are dumping
If they add features, it's built-in obsolescence
If they don't add features, they are don't know how to program
If they announce bugs, they prove their software doesn't work
If they don't announce bugs, they are being secretive
And so on. I'm no great fan of MS, but I do sometimes wonder if there is anything they could do that would please their detractors, short of shutting up shop and giving the proceeds to Richard Stallman.
It's pretty well free for non-profit organisations too, at least in Europe: the price of a charity licence for W2K server in the UK is comparable to that of a boxed Redhat distro
And if MS reduced their profit margins from 85% to, say 10%, as many people have suggested they should in the last couple of weeks, MS Office would be cheaper than a boxed copy of Star Office and Windows XP would cost peanuts. At which point the price argument for Open Source would all but evaporate.
Let's work together with these countries to ensure that Microsoft doesn't become a global monopoly and eventually more powerful than the US government!
As a non-American, I'd be in favour of a third option.
There is no way you can make the objective mathematics add up to make a single murder worse than serial spam by a major spammer.
Of course I can. It simply depends on the value you place on human life, and how you rate the reduction of quality of life caused by spam.
If you take the insurance value of a murder, and divide it by the insurance value of receiving a spam, you get infinity or a divide by zero error. Actuaries are not often accused of being overly subjective.
Your posting assumes that '5 seconds wasted' equals '5 seconds dead', which isn't my personal experience: I still feel very much alive as I click on the delete button, I still have my rights, I am still a father to my children. Maybe the spam reduces my quality of life by a small fraction of one percent for 5 seconds...
Yes, but the common usage of the word has moved on a bit. Just as, although PHP stands for Personal Home Page, it gets used for non personal websites, and not just on home pages. I think my use of CGI to mean 'CGI scripts in languages such as Perl' is pretty common practice.
That being said, your post makes no sense
True, but in that case half the posts on this topic and some of the original article are a bit hazy too. When the posting to which I replied says 'CGI is as dead as Ultrix', because of the wonders of dynamic content, he is either talking rubbish or using CGI in the same way as me.
Referencing? Some dynamic content seems to be virtually impossible to reference effectively. Also, if each page changes once a month on average, your solution still runs the db about 6000 times more often than mine. And if the database interface is public, people can try to break it, whereas it is hard to make a page of static html malfunction.
Anyone ever noticed how dynamic pages are much more likely to get/.ed than static ones? There are uses for PHP/MySQL or whatever, but fast it aint, and a lot of the time it seems to be used because it's A Good Thing rather than because it is actually necessary.
For relatively simple tasks, a standalone CGI script is always going to be faster than a generic DB solution. For really complex tasks, CGI provides far more flexibility. For a lot of jobs in the middle, a DB-driven embedded scripting solution may be just what is needed, but there's still plenty of work for CGI at the edges.
One of my programs writes static pages that you can edit via a web interface. I haven't load tested it yet, but I'd be willing to bet that Apache serving static pages uses far less resources than Apache building PHP/MySQL pages. If BOA will serve static pages faster than Apache, the performance benefits of producing static pages must be even clearer.
Exactly, and it is the end user who is paying him, so let's charge the end user who clicks on links in spams. If the response rate is 1in 400, charge them for, say, the cost of delivering 500 spams. I reckon most people would only have to pay once...
I'd always wondered why a CRT display, most of which is filled with nothing at all, is so heavy. But I'm intrigued as to why recycling monitors can't pay for itself. 4lb of lead and quite a lot of copper must be worth something. OK, recycling the PCBs might not be such a good deal, but isn't it possible to set one off against the other? Does anyone have figures on how much the various bits of a dead monitor are worth?
Viewed objectively and mathematically, there is no reason for murder to be any higher on the list of evils than a major spam operation.
I think your definition of objective is somewhat subjective. What formula are you using to arrive at your evil quotient? Any way I can think of doing the calculation, murder gets a rather higher score. For example, a spam might stop me reading my real mail for x seconds, or bring down my ISP for y hours, whereas, according to all major religions, being dead prevents me from reading mail for a very long time. If you have an objective way of doing the sums that supports your conclusion, I would like to see it.
It's time to get the power of the music back to the artists and the listeners, from profitering bastards!
I'm sure I'm missing something here, but how does exactly taking whatever an artist produces for free without their permission give power back to the artist? In this Brave New World where we all get our entertainment for nothing, who pays the artists to produce the music in the first place? I guess Britney could pay her production costs out of her pocket money, but it's going to be hard to produce films with no budget...
If the phone or pager of a doctor becomes unusable due to this "perfectly legal activity", it won't be long before people are dying.
Fine, let's make it illegal, I'm OK with that. But if the reason for doing so is the one you give, let's ban joke emails, fine people who forward hoax virus warnings, tax people who send email with redundant html attachments...
Your congress(wo)man
Not sure they would pay much attention to a letter from a British citizen living in France. Which of course is one of the problems with attacking the people sending the spams. Patent infringement is illegal in the EU and the USA, but I haven't noticed this having a huge effect in China. I still reckon that fining people who respond to spam would be a lot more effective, though totally unthinkable politically.
Slashdot Mirror
It's the anthem for the new, enlarged European Community.
What I can't work out is why anyone would want to program (as opposed to handling data) in a language that looks anything like XML. XML is designed first and foremost to be written and read by computers. Sure, it is also supposed to be possible to eyeball it, but the sheer verbosity of XML makes trying to work out what is going on in any non-trivial case a major test for (human) memory. I've always thought that one of the hallmarks of a good language is that it lets you do the common things in the shortest possible amount of lines, and lets you see the overall structure without wading through all the detail.
People who really understand a language could write it from scratch if they had to.
Yes, but is this necessarily the fastest way to get the job out the door, or the best way to make code maintainable once the guy who invented the language has fallen under a bus?
I've done a fair bit of programming in BASIC and Lisp, and there's no doubt in my mind that Lisp is the language of the Gods, but, for a lot of web applications, you don't need tail recursion or lexical scoping, you just need something that works, and which has a decent set of libraries to do all the hard work for you. Personally, I find that Perl usually does the job quite nicely: it has a lot of lisp-like features for when you need them, but if all you want is a list of instructions it does that too, and it is blindingly fast for everything except for intensive number crunching. If the OO layer wasn't so thin as to be transparent it would be pretty close to the perfect web language in my book.
The trouble with all this conceptual stuff is that unless you can get a decent spec, or, at the absolute minimum, useful feedback from the end user, all you end up with is a conceptually elegant and/or implementationally efficient useless program rather than an inelegant and/or inefficient useless program.
In my experience, being tied into the wrong programming metaphor, or the wrong object set, or whatever, is far worse than spagetti code. At least with spagetti, all options are equally possible and equally bad, or good. Once you start having to fight your metaphor or object model, you end up with kludges that make Fortran look like a really beautiful thing.
And, again in my experience, the only way to get a decent spec is to write the code at least once, wave it at the user, list all the wrong assumptions, throw all the code away and start again. Which is not something coders like very much. But wasn't it that guru guy from Xerox (Kay?) who said that the best thing for software integrity was frequent fires in the backup store?
Precisely - this is a subjective evaluation, not a objective one.
If you like, but so is your's. Much of the world doesn't reason in terms of calendar time at all. And I have a significant number of customers for whom anything which breaks their email permanently would be considered a godsend :-)
Courts evaluate these things by reference to objective criteria.
Hardly. I would love to see your objective evidence for the statement that 'during the 5 seconds of death there is neither pleasure nor displeasure', for example. The majority of people currently alive would disagree with you on this point.
Attempt to trivialise a serious problem
Here's the heart of my concern. You start from the untested assumption that spam is serious, and then use that as the reference point from which to evaluate everything else. I'm applying the scientific method, assuming a null hypothesis that spam is no more or less serious than any other background nuisance, and asking for evidence that supports the hypothesis that it is uniquely serious, when compared, for example, with joke emails, pop-ups, DoS attacks, misdirected emails and so on. And virtually all the responses I have received have evaded that question.
Now in terms of /. karma levels, it really doesn't matter, your position is going to carry the day every time. The only trouble is that the people who draft legislation sound more like me than you, so, unless the idea is to rant and rave without making any difference to anything in the real world, the anti-spam lobby needs to start making sense to the real world. And getting any of your postings on this theme published in the Washington Post, for example, would set back public opinion on the matter by years. Because the Tampa Mother's Association lobby is more powerful politically than the /. one.
Isn't dropping your prices a fairly normal way to deal with increased competition: supply and demand and all that? A couple of weeks ago we were complaining that MS's margins were too high. Now we're complaining that they are cutting their margins...
Sure, they are doing it selectively, but, if they did it across the board, it would really be bad news : does anyone think that Corel or anyone else could compete with XP Office for $50? That's cheaper than Star Office 6 in a box. And this is exactly what will happen if open source ever starts to dent their desktop market share.
Note in passing that breaking up MS would have made things worse in this respect, as the highly profitable OS and Office departments would not even had to carry the loss-making departments anymore, so they could slash prices even lower and still make a respectable profit.
The postings about Linux for $0 are funny, but miss the point that no OS change is free for a company with existing staff and data. If you take discounted MS products and set them against free Linux products plus the number of man hours needed to reskill your staff, the figures are closer than we might like to admit.
I'll answer the questions, but I don't hold out much hope of you reading the answers any more carefully than my previous postings.
Obscene profits during a recession.
So, for about the fifth time, what would you like them to do about it? They could drop their margins to, say, 10%, but MS Office for $30 would wipe out Corel and every other WP manufacturer in a matter of months. They would increase their market share from 90% to 99%, and still make a profit. Apart from that, what would you like them to do? Just refuse to sell the software to people who want to buy it?
Charging nought to put a competitor out of business.
So we are against free software? Does /. really want to pursue this argument? How many posts have I read in the last month about how free software is going to put MS out of business? Where is the moral difference?
Deviating from previous file formats
This is hardly new or exclusive to Microsoft. Netscape invented the DIY standards game in browsers. The WINE Linux version of WP will not read files produced by the native Linux version, and I gather that Open Office 6 files don't load into Star Office 5.2. So should we boycott all these products?
Can MS program?
The answer is obviously yes: otherwise they wouldn't have produced any programs. Whether they are as good at it as they could be is another question, and rather a subjective one. The problem with Outlook Express is not how it is programmed as much as the functionality it offers: if open source email clients ran scripts from emails they would have the same problem. If MS removed that functionality, their product would at a stroke become more secure (and the companies who use that functionality for legitimate purposes would be mad).
Conversely, does the Open Source world know anything about frame-based DTP? If so, can you point me to one open source product that can hold a candle to any of a dozen or so commercial products for Windows?
How many bugs?
What was that I saw about 200,000 bugs reported so far in Mozilla, including 30,000 or so which were/are likely to corrupt your data in some circumstances? (Just had to break off from this because a client clicked 'print' in Mozilla and killed her X session...)
An MS paid troll?
Not sure what the working definition of a troll is, but I've been in computing for 25 years and have never once owned a Microsoft product. How many /.ers can say that? I currently earn my living running an all-Linux cybercafe and programming Linux servers. I just don't think that irrational hatred of the competition is a particularly good way to increase your market share.
And, as it happens, I've just ordered my first Microsoft site licence, because I'm fed up with trying to explain to my customers why Star Office keeps screwing up their CVs. It's a funny thing, but most of them don't think that not getting a job is a reasonable price to pay to support the crusade against Microsoft.
Always struck me as a wonderful idea. Fifteen years ago I worked at a place where the client came up with a new idea in the morning and we aimed to demo a solution that afternoon in OO Lisp. A lot of fun, and it made having a dialogue with the end users a million times more useful than Bible-thick specs that no-one can get their head round. Maybe programmers don't actually want clients telling them how they want programs to work?
Its application to my question. Sure, in terms of market share, if MS have a monopoly, the only way is down. But, in terms of coverage on /., and, increasingly, in the media, the only way for MS is up. My question is not 'how can they be more successful?' My question is 'what could they do to satisfy their critics?' And the answer appears to be 'nothing'. Now if the option is being rich and unpopular or less rich and just as unpopular, I'd go for the first option.
So in other words you guys can't actually think of any move that Microsoft would make that wouldn't be criticised for one reason or another on /.?
Yes, but
For example, my Dark Side brother is currently installing an 80-seat W2K network for a charity in London. MS offered to sponsor them (ie give them all the software for free), which the charity was very excited about, until my brother pointed out that the total MS software spend was about $3000, ie about 4 of the 80 terminals, before you get the servers, the networking stuff and so on. So the difference between buying the software and getting it free is 1-2% of the total project cost. In other words, MS at charity rates isn't free, but, for a lot of projects, it's close enough to free not to make any difference.
Why would any right-minded person use M$ office?
Because it works? In the last week I have discovered a wonderful bug in Star Office 5.2 (to add to the 'hang when trying to write to floppy' one that had me going a few months ago). You load in a .doc file with an image, works fine, prints fine, you make some minor edits and save it as a .doc file, and, hey presto, half the text has gone. Except the only way to discover this is to reopen the file you have just saved, which is not something I tend to do very often.
We're going to move onto Open Office 6 shortly, and maybe that particular problem has been fixed, but this sort of problem is always going to happen when you are trying to reverse engineer someone's proprietary format, and some people want to do their job rather than fight quixotic wars against Microsoft.
And so on. I'm no great fan of MS, but I do sometimes wonder if there is anything they could do that would please their detractors, short of shutting up shop and giving the proceeds to Richard Stallman.
Windows is practically free over there
It's pretty well free for non-profit organisations too, at least in Europe: the price of a charity licence for W2K server in the UK is comparable to that of a boxed Redhat distro
And if MS reduced their profit margins from 85% to, say 10%, as many people have suggested they should in the last couple of weeks, MS Office would be cheaper than a boxed copy of Star Office and Windows XP would cost peanuts. At which point the price argument for Open Source would all but evaporate.
Let's work together with these countries to ensure that Microsoft doesn't become a global monopoly and eventually more powerful than the US government!
As a non-American, I'd be in favour of a third option.
There is no way you can make the objective mathematics add up to make a single murder worse than serial spam by a major spammer.
Of course I can. It simply depends on the value you place on human life, and how you rate the reduction of quality of life caused by spam.
If you take the insurance value of a murder, and divide it by the insurance value of receiving a spam, you get infinity or a divide by zero error. Actuaries are not often accused of being overly subjective.
Your posting assumes that '5 seconds wasted' equals '5 seconds dead', which isn't my personal experience: I still feel very much alive as I click on the delete button, I still have my rights, I am still a father to my children. Maybe the spam reduces my quality of life by a small fraction of one percent for 5 seconds...
CGI stands for "Common Gateway Interface".
Yes, but the common usage of the word has moved on a bit. Just as, although PHP stands for Personal Home Page, it gets used for non personal websites, and not just on home pages. I think my use of CGI to mean 'CGI scripts in languages such as Perl' is pretty common practice.
That being said, your post makes no sense
True, but in that case half the posts on this topic and some of the original article are a bit hazy too. When the posting to which I replied says 'CGI is as dead as Ultrix', because of the wonders of dynamic content, he is either talking rubbish or using CGI in the same way as me.
Why bother with writing your own HTML to disk?
Referencing? Some dynamic content seems to be virtually impossible to reference effectively. Also, if each page changes once a month on average, your solution still runs the db about 6000 times more often than mine. And if the database interface is public, people can try to break it, whereas it is hard to make a page of static html malfunction.
CGI is as dead as Ultrix.
Anyone ever noticed how dynamic pages are much more likely to get /.ed than static ones? There are uses for PHP/MySQL or whatever, but fast it aint, and a lot of the time it seems to be used because it's A Good Thing rather than because it is actually necessary.
For relatively simple tasks, a standalone CGI script is always going to be faster than a generic DB solution. For really complex tasks, CGI provides far more flexibility. For a lot of jobs in the middle, a DB-driven embedded scripting solution may be just what is needed, but there's still plenty of work for CGI at the edges.
One of my programs writes static pages that you can edit via a web interface. I haven't load tested it yet, but I'd be willing to bet that Apache serving static pages uses far less resources than Apache building PHP/MySQL pages. If BOA will serve static pages faster than Apache, the performance benefits of producing static pages must be even clearer.
Exactly, and it is the end user who is paying him, so let's charge the end user who clicks on links in spams. If the response rate is 1in 400, charge them for, say, the cost of delivering 500 spams. I reckon most people would only have to pay once...
OK, but since the circuit board is not open source, and comes with a BIOS that works, why does anyone care?
I'd always wondered why a CRT display, most of which is filled with nothing at all, is so heavy. But I'm intrigued as to why recycling monitors can't pay for itself. 4lb of lead and quite a lot of copper must be worth something. OK, recycling the PCBs might not be such a good deal, but isn't it possible to set one off against the other? Does anyone have figures on how much the various bits of a dead monitor are worth?
Viewed objectively and mathematically, there is no reason for murder to be any higher on the list of evils than a major spam operation.
I think your definition of objective is somewhat subjective. What formula are you using to arrive at your evil quotient? Any way I can think of doing the calculation, murder gets a rather higher score. For example, a spam might stop me reading my real mail for x seconds, or bring down my ISP for y hours, whereas, according to all major religions, being dead prevents me from reading mail for a very long time. If you have an objective way of doing the sums that supports your conclusion, I would like to see it.
It's time to get the power of the music back to the artists and the listeners, from profitering bastards!
I'm sure I'm missing something here, but how does exactly taking whatever an artist produces for free without their permission give power back to the artist? In this Brave New World where we all get our entertainment for nothing, who pays the artists to produce the music in the first place? I guess Britney could pay her production costs out of her pocket money, but it's going to be hard to produce films with no budget...
If the phone or pager of a doctor becomes unusable due to this "perfectly legal activity", it won't be long before people are dying.
Fine, let's make it illegal, I'm OK with that. But if the reason for doing so is the one you give, let's ban joke emails, fine people who forward hoax virus warnings, tax people who send email with redundant html attachments...
Your congress(wo)man
Not sure they would pay much attention to a letter from a British citizen living in France. Which of course is one of the problems with attacking the people sending the spams. Patent infringement is illegal in the EU and the USA, but I haven't noticed this having a huge effect in China. I still reckon that fining people who respond to spam would be a lot more effective, though totally unthinkable politically.