Volume licensing agreements pretty much spell out that they have the right to conduct an audit. Generally, having pissed off employees calling the BSA (Business Software Alliance) and saying you have pirated software tends to convince judges that there is probable cause for a warrant if there is a refusal to voluntarily do an audit.
There are no forced audits without a judge signing a warrant and law enforcement officers along to serve that warrant.
Poverty for a family of 4 is 14k/year. At 2k/month * 12 he's making 24k so yes, he's above poverty level but not by a heck of a lot. He's poor mouthing a bit but his larger point that you don't have to be rich in order to run a mac is certainly on target.
24k/year is not rich. In fact, I'd call it lower middle class and barely that. I think the Earned Income Tax Credit phases out at 17k/year. That phase out level is where I'd set the limit for working poor and he's just 7k above that.
Since moving applications on the Mac is an entirely different order of difficulty than moving them on the PC, a little explanation is in order.
Macs, in general, just let you move applications around willy nilly. The filesystem is pretty smart about linking up moved components and generally all executable components are in a single folder (often hidden as a special bundle folder which, when double clicked, will execute the contained application) or file. Beyond that, there's this neat thing called an alias which does a very good job of automagically pointing to a file's new location.
PC applications, OTOH, most often depend on this crufty construction called the registry which hard codes absolute paths to executables and their relevant components. If you move anything anywhere, even on the same PC, that application is toast until you edit your registry (not recommended for anybody but experts) to reflect your changes. The PC version of aliases are called shortcuts and are more brittle.
So, yes, PC applications won't transfer right because the software can't figure out what registry keys have to be pulled and transferred with the application files. The registry hives never were organized very well and they've gotten worse with age. This is also why MS is trying to reinvent the registry because it sucks. Then again, the registry was invented to stem the horror of massively proliferating ini files so I don't expect that their next reinvention is likely to work any better than their last one.
Actually pretty much every bit of standard consumer electronics gives out some sort of noise. They just had detection equipment that picked up the standard TV signals.
And yes, this idea of WISP illegalization is sort of paranoid as 802.11x runs in unlicensed bands that have frequency emissions from all sorts of gear including microwave ovens. If you think that people are going to stand for paying a telecom license for their microwave oven then you obviously have way too much time on your hands.
A government that gets that intrusive in gun happy america is quickly going to have bigger problems, like a spate of assassinations. That's what really scares the bejeebers out of the govt. power grabbers that they'll up the number of people who flip and just go after bureaucrats. As the recent sniper case shows, it's not too hard to do and it's a marvel of how politically satisfied people are that it doesn't happen more often.
$18k/year AU = $10k/year US = $833/month or actually a bit cheaper than what I was quoted for my T-1 and that's 1.5Mbits/sec (it sounds like Australia's on the 'E' scale that's used in Europe). The only problem is the bandwidth caps. If you have any sort of competitive environment, it looks like you have an open market niche. What's keeping new entrants out?
It's simple to get around that, just buy business lines. I can get a T-1 line strung ~30 miles from the loop in Chicago to my house for $900. If I price match DSL/Cable's local price of $50 I need 18 subscribers to cover monthly costs. 18 users sharing a T-1 is a very, very sweeet deal. Running normal ISP oversubscription, you should be able to handle 25-40 broadband users and still have decent throughput at all times.
Hardly unrestricted as there are a large number of sites that are reachable from most any country but yours.
A general point, you are in a communist country and the basic rule of all these countries is that the prices paid for just about anything is not the true price. It might be higher, it might be lower, but it is very rarely a market price. PRC communism may be somewhat better than most of the rest of the communist nations in the respect as its economics have moved more towards the fascist model than classical communism but I doubt that your telecom sector is properly priced.
Good luck in getting your system straightened out to something honest and self-sustaining.
I assume that business lines there, as here, are unlimited bandwidth pipes. Why not band together with your neighborhood and make a WISP? The collective business community usually has enough clout to outbid any one abusive business so if residential service is priced too high, you should be able to get a T-1 (E-1?) to a central point and turn a small profit while charging the same money for more (no caps) and better (symmetric, not choked off) bandwidth.
Well, I don't work for directtv DSL but I believe that GTE got rolled up into them at one point. Anyway, these guys don't give a rats ass about servers as long as the usage is reasonable (though they do reserve the right to yank you if you get abusive using a residential service for business), they give you a static IP standard, and no caps. the actual service agreement is here.
Oh, they explicitly support Windows, Mac (including X) and Unix. Unfortunately, they don't serve my new central office (neither does anybody else) so I'm screwed but I'm getting my church wired (as soon as the gateway arrives) so consider this a testimonial from a former and future customer.
I wasn't trying to say they wouldn't also come to the US, but that they wouldn't only come to the US. Some would be absorbed by traditional chinese expat communities around the world, others would try their luck in Canada, Australia, or South Africa, still others would come here. The impulse would be to make money with large numbers selecting the US but not all of them doing so. The effects of their arrival would be variable but let's assume the worst and that most of them would be illegals. Agricultural workers would suffer as mexican illegals were partially displaced by chinese ones, construction would have the same issue, there would be a gambling boom (and yes, this is from firsthand observation) and the local police would have to track a new set of ethnic crime families. In other words, nothing that we haven't seen before in the US.
The difference between the US and Germany is that in the US we make room for poor, hardworking people with just the clothes on their back to come in and integrate into the country. It's structurally set up that way which is a large reason why we don't have fool proof internal ID papers, entire industry sectors subsist on illegal workers, and many of our government segments won't admit to other sections of our government where the illegal aliens are even though they know perfectly well.
Would I trade a decade of inconvenience for the liberation of a quarter of mankind from repression? You bet, in a heartbeat just as I don't regret the liberation of Russia though we now have to deal with the Russian mafiya when we really didn't have to worry about it before.
Great software is all well and good but I care about whether it comes complete with lawyers with a bad attitude attached. If so, no thanks unless I can't get out of it.
Actually, no I'm not glad they're communist. I have a fundamental faith that human ingenuity and hard work when encouraged by a governing system under the rule of law and aimed at human freedom makes a society that's alive, vibrant, and that creates more than it destroys.
Communism is a net black hole, a sink of corruption, human misery, and wasted potential. The few great things it achieves are far outweighed by the price paid, a price which the system spends an inordinate amount of time and effort hiding.
In reality if the criminal ancients who run the PRC all disappeared tomorrow, some would leave but a large number would stay, a situation similar to what really happened to most of E. Europe when the Berlin wall came down. You might get a million or two wave heading out but a lot of those people would head towards places with traditional, longstanding chinese communities because that's where uncle or cousin is already established with a job waiting for them.
Yes, it would be a pain in our ass for 5-10 years but frankly the PRC has been a pain in our ass for 40 years so I'd prefer the solution that led to a net increase in human happiness *and* eventually will end the problem.
I hope they find a better way of doing it because these communists have a horrible, callous disregard for the dignity of human life. Would they nuke theire own? I don't want to find out. We're down wind.
Nope, you have to have a significant part of your population outside of prison and the regime will become less stable the higher their wages go up. Reducing the supply of non-prisoner labor will drive their wages higher. Arbitrary arrest in a poor country constantly on the edge of starvation is not as serious as in a country with a decent wage rate. Once the income rises to a certain point, people won't stand for it anymore and they'll have the resources to work a change.
The real question is where are the relevant income levels and how will the crack up proceed.
No, no, don't get me wrong. I know that the conditions are comparatively much worse in the PRC under pretty much any circumstances. Any system with 225M unemployed (rural + urban) is going to have very poor working conditions for those fortunate to have a job.
The point I was making was that the PLA prisoner staffed factories do have a significant difference to the sweatshops run by ROC entrepreneurs. The sweatshop employees are worried about losing their jobs and falling back into the misery of unemployment, the prisoners in the PLA run system are worried more about beatings and executions than not being able to stay longer. I hope you would agree that it is a significant difference.
The chinese will solve it themselves but first they've got to get over the hump of having 225M unemployed. Once they've got enough sweatshops and the cheap labor runs out, they'll climb up the quality ladder just like everybody else and start spending their wealth fixing the problems they're creating now.
Well, sort of. If the US had the most productive workers in the world (and we don't, West Europe does) we still don't have enough of them to make everything so it pays to trade and it pays to move some industries to places like the PRC. That's the essence of comparative advantage. Essentially, the more efficient country should concentrate on high value added goods and the less efficient producers should concentrate on low value added goods. If you look around, this is actually a pretty good fit to the real world.
There are 225 million chinese unemployed (counting both rural and urban unemployed) in the PRC that would desperately want these jobs. Out of an estimated 800 million strong labor force that works out to about 28% unemployment. The unemployment rate in the US, last I checked, was 5.9% and people are already very nervous about jobs, nobody's hiring, people are taking a lot more abuse from their bosses, etc.
Get real. As long as PRC employment is so high, people are going to be scared to lose what they have. So what kind of companies are going to go to such a country where the politicians are all corrupt, the bureaucracy is mind numbing, and objectively the whole government has no business being stable with multi-year 20%+ unemployment levels and growth petering out? You betcha you're going to see lots of sweat shops. If the world's really lucky we're going avoid seeing the prospect of a chinese civil war complete with nukes tossed around. But we need to be very lucky for that to happen.
There are around 75 million urban unemployed in the PRC. There are about 150 million "surplus rural" workers. That makes about 225 million people who are simply idle. If they can make *enough* sweatshop jobs to take most of these unemployed out of circulation, wages will start to rise but it's going to take a lot more changes in the legal code to make that happen.
It's a slow process to make a capitalist country. Hopefully, the PRC will make it with a minimum launch of nukes along the way.
If you stick enough factories into a place, even the PRC eventually runs out of unemployed and then labor competition will drive prices up just like every other place.
Slashdot Mirror
Volume licensing agreements pretty much spell out that they have the right to conduct an audit. Generally, having pissed off employees calling the BSA (Business Software Alliance) and saying you have pirated software tends to convince judges that there is probable cause for a warrant if there is a refusal to voluntarily do an audit.
There are no forced audits without a judge signing a warrant and law enforcement officers along to serve that warrant.
Congratulations, you are not in Apple's target market of people who want a machine that "just works". Move along now, this machine is not for you.
Even technical users sometimes just want the damn thing to work.
Poverty for a family of 4 is 14k/year. At 2k/month * 12 he's making 24k so yes, he's above poverty level but not by a heck of a lot. He's poor mouthing a bit but his larger point that you don't have to be rich in order to run a mac is certainly on target.
24k/year is not rich. In fact, I'd call it lower middle class and barely that. I think the Earned Income Tax Credit phases out at 17k/year. That phase out level is where I'd set the limit for working poor and he's just 7k above that.
Since moving applications on the Mac is an entirely different order of difficulty than moving them on the PC, a little explanation is in order.
Macs, in general, just let you move applications around willy nilly. The filesystem is pretty smart about linking up moved components and generally all executable components are in a single folder (often hidden as a special bundle folder which, when double clicked, will execute the contained application) or file. Beyond that, there's this neat thing called an alias which does a very good job of automagically pointing to a file's new location.
PC applications, OTOH, most often depend on this crufty construction called the registry which hard codes absolute paths to executables and their relevant components. If you move anything anywhere, even on the same PC, that application is toast until you edit your registry (not recommended for anybody but experts) to reflect your changes. The PC version of aliases are called shortcuts and are more brittle.
So, yes, PC applications won't transfer right because the software can't figure out what registry keys have to be pulled and transferred with the application files. The registry hives never were organized very well and they've gotten worse with age. This is also why MS is trying to reinvent the registry because it sucks. Then again, the registry was invented to stem the horror of massively proliferating ini files so I don't expect that their next reinvention is likely to work any better than their last one.
Even better, if the Fortune 500 companies get the MS EULA interpretations wrong, the CEOs are now personally responsible.
Actually pretty much every bit of standard consumer electronics gives out some sort of noise. They just had detection equipment that picked up the standard TV signals.
And yes, this idea of WISP illegalization is sort of paranoid as 802.11x runs in unlicensed bands that have frequency emissions from all sorts of gear including microwave ovens. If you think that people are going to stand for paying a telecom license for their microwave oven then you obviously have way too much time on your hands.
A government that gets that intrusive in gun happy america is quickly going to have bigger problems, like a spate of assassinations. That's what really scares the bejeebers out of the govt. power grabbers that they'll up the number of people who flip and just go after bureaucrats. As the recent sniper case shows, it's not too hard to do and it's a marvel of how politically satisfied people are that it doesn't happen more often.
$18k/year AU = $10k/year US = $833/month or actually a bit cheaper than what I was quoted for my T-1 and that's 1.5Mbits/sec (it sounds like Australia's on the 'E' scale that's used in Europe). The only problem is the bandwidth caps. If you have any sort of competitive environment, it looks like you have an open market niche. What's keeping new entrants out?
Also talk to an insurance company. There might be some bonding or other insurance that covers the situation.
If you don't own the building many lease contracts don't let you do that. Check your lease before you get the building management pissed off at you.
It's simple to get around that, just buy business lines. I can get a T-1 line strung ~30 miles from the loop in Chicago to my house for $900. If I price match DSL/Cable's local price of $50 I need 18 subscribers to cover monthly costs. 18 users sharing a T-1 is a very, very sweeet deal. Running normal ISP oversubscription, you should be able to handle 25-40 broadband users and still have decent throughput at all times.
Hardly unrestricted as there are a large number of sites that are reachable from most any country but yours.
A general point, you are in a communist country and the basic rule of all these countries is that the prices paid for just about anything is not the true price. It might be higher, it might be lower, but it is very rarely a market price. PRC communism may be somewhat better than most of the rest of the communist nations in the respect as its economics have moved more towards the fascist model than classical communism but I doubt that your telecom sector is properly priced.
Good luck in getting your system straightened out to something honest and self-sustaining.
I assume that business lines there, as here, are unlimited bandwidth pipes. Why not band together with your neighborhood and make a WISP? The collective business community usually has enough clout to outbid any one abusive business so if residential service is priced too high, you should be able to get a T-1 (E-1?) to a central point and turn a small profit while charging the same money for more (no caps) and better (symmetric, not choked off) bandwidth.
Well, I don't work for directtv DSL but I believe that GTE got rolled up into them at one point. Anyway, these guys don't give a rats ass about servers as long as the usage is reasonable (though they do reserve the right to yank you if you get abusive using a residential service for business), they give you a static IP standard, and no caps. the actual service agreement is here.
Oh, they explicitly support Windows, Mac (including X) and Unix. Unfortunately, they don't serve my new central office (neither does anybody else) so I'm screwed but I'm getting my church wired (as soon as the gateway arrives) so consider this a testimonial from a former and future customer.
YMMV
I wasn't trying to say they wouldn't also come to the US, but that they wouldn't only come to the US. Some would be absorbed by traditional chinese expat communities around the world, others would try their luck in Canada, Australia, or South Africa, still others would come here. The impulse would be to make money with large numbers selecting the US but not all of them doing so. The effects of their arrival would be variable but let's assume the worst and that most of them would be illegals. Agricultural workers would suffer as mexican illegals were partially displaced by chinese ones, construction would have the same issue, there would be a gambling boom (and yes, this is from firsthand observation) and the local police would have to track a new set of ethnic crime families. In other words, nothing that we haven't seen before in the US.
The difference between the US and Germany is that in the US we make room for poor, hardworking people with just the clothes on their back to come in and integrate into the country. It's structurally set up that way which is a large reason why we don't have fool proof internal ID papers, entire industry sectors subsist on illegal workers, and many of our government segments won't admit to other sections of our government where the illegal aliens are even though they know perfectly well.
Would I trade a decade of inconvenience for the liberation of a quarter of mankind from repression? You bet, in a heartbeat just as I don't regret the liberation of Russia though we now have to deal with the Russian mafiya when we really didn't have to worry about it before.
Great software is all well and good but I care about whether it comes complete with lawyers with a bad attitude attached. If so, no thanks unless I can't get out of it.
Actually, no I'm not glad they're communist. I have a fundamental faith that human ingenuity and hard work when encouraged by a governing system under the rule of law and aimed at human freedom makes a society that's alive, vibrant, and that creates more than it destroys.
Communism is a net black hole, a sink of corruption, human misery, and wasted potential. The few great things it achieves are far outweighed by the price paid, a price which the system spends an inordinate amount of time and effort hiding.
In reality if the criminal ancients who run the PRC all disappeared tomorrow, some would leave but a large number would stay, a situation similar to what really happened to most of E. Europe when the Berlin wall came down. You might get a million or two wave heading out but a lot of those people would head towards places with traditional, longstanding chinese communities because that's where uncle or cousin is already established with a job waiting for them.
Yes, it would be a pain in our ass for 5-10 years but frankly the PRC has been a pain in our ass for 40 years so I'd prefer the solution that led to a net increase in human happiness *and* eventually will end the problem.
I hope they find a better way of doing it because these communists have a horrible, callous disregard for the dignity of human life. Would they nuke theire own? I don't want to find out. We're down wind.
Out of the 7 countries beating us, 5 are in W. Europe including the top of the list. I think that this is close enough to true for Slashdot.
Nope, you have to have a significant part of your population outside of prison and the regime will become less stable the higher their wages go up. Reducing the supply of non-prisoner labor will drive their wages higher. Arbitrary arrest in a poor country constantly on the edge of starvation is not as serious as in a country with a decent wage rate. Once the income rises to a certain point, people won't stand for it anymore and they'll have the resources to work a change.
The real question is where are the relevant income levels and how will the crack up proceed.
No, no, don't get me wrong. I know that the conditions are comparatively much worse in the PRC under pretty much any circumstances. Any system with 225M unemployed (rural + urban) is going to have very poor working conditions for those fortunate to have a job.
The point I was making was that the PLA prisoner staffed factories do have a significant difference to the sweatshops run by ROC entrepreneurs. The sweatshop employees are worried about losing their jobs and falling back into the misery of unemployment, the prisoners in the PLA run system are worried more about beatings and executions than not being able to stay longer. I hope you would agree that it is a significant difference.
The chinese will solve it themselves but first they've got to get over the hump of having 225M unemployed. Once they've got enough sweatshops and the cheap labor runs out, they'll climb up the quality ladder just like everybody else and start spending their wealth fixing the problems they're creating now.
Well, sort of. If the US had the most productive workers in the world (and we don't, West Europe does) we still don't have enough of them to make everything so it pays to trade and it pays to move some industries to places like the PRC. That's the essence of comparative advantage. Essentially, the more efficient country should concentrate on high value added goods and the less efficient producers should concentrate on low value added goods. If you look around, this is actually a pretty good fit to the real world.
There are 225 million chinese unemployed (counting both rural and urban unemployed) in the PRC that would desperately want these jobs. Out of an estimated 800 million strong labor force that works out to about 28% unemployment. The unemployment rate in the US, last I checked, was 5.9% and people are already very nervous about jobs, nobody's hiring, people are taking a lot more abuse from their bosses, etc.
Get real. As long as PRC employment is so high, people are going to be scared to lose what they have. So what kind of companies are going to go to such a country where the politicians are all corrupt, the bureaucracy is mind numbing, and objectively the whole government has no business being stable with multi-year 20%+ unemployment levels and growth petering out? You betcha you're going to see lots of sweat shops. If the world's really lucky we're going avoid seeing the prospect of a chinese civil war complete with nukes tossed around. But we need to be very lucky for that to happen.
There are around 75 million urban unemployed in the PRC. There are about 150 million "surplus rural" workers. That makes about 225 million people who are simply idle. If they can make *enough* sweatshop jobs to take most of these unemployed out of circulation, wages will start to rise but it's going to take a lot more changes in the legal code to make that happen.
It's a slow process to make a capitalist country. Hopefully, the PRC will make it with a minimum launch of nukes along the way.
If you stick enough factories into a place, even the PRC eventually runs out of unemployed and then labor competition will drive prices up just like every other place.