An old boss of mine (from when I used to work on Aviation Parkway) is running technology meetings every couple months over on Perimiter Park. Drop me an email and I'll let you know when the next one is set for and how to get there.
It's nice being able to work downtown now since I don't have to do the Lynn Road Rat Race or the I-40 Crawl. Then again...now I do the Falls of the Neuse 500;)
Anyhow...time for a shower and off to work. See my site for an email address.
Check this map to see our really wacked beltline. Notice the small "triangle" of freeway at the left side of the city between Raleigh and Cary. The uppor portion is the Wade Ave. Extension, which lets people going between north Raleigh and I-40 make the transition without going to the southwest corner of the beltline.
Now, if you look at the interchange marker right above the words "Piney Points" and to the left of "Caraleigh", you will see where our beltline meets itself at a 90 degree angle. At this point, if you are going southwest on the beltline you literally have to take a right hand turn onto a one-lane clover-leaf to get back onto the interstate. If you don't, you find yourself passing through Apex:) If you are on the southern portion of the beltline going west, you have the advantage of avoiding the clover-leaf design, but you still have a one-lane switch, or you find yourself headed north on I-40 until you reach the Wade Ave. Extension, where you head back west.
I've been here almost 2 years, and it took me a good 3 months to get used to that.
but there are no dots and precious few signs. And as the poster from New York pointed out, dots and signs or no, it's still a really stupid idea to do thinks like that.
What I want to see him do next is come re-stripe North Carolina's highways. For those who don't know it, NC has this rather odd policy of redirecting the right lane off onto *almost* every exit and adding a new lane somewhere else to compensate. It's really stupid, for a few reasons. First off is that if you were cruising along in the slow lane and didn't want to exit, guess what...you get to go anyway, unless you want to be a traffic hazzard. Second, is the inconsistency. If every lane went off, maybe you'd get used to it, screwy as it is. Last, about every place I've ever been hashes off the exit lane, so it's obvious that it's going away.
Then again, I'm sure something is really wacked at NCDOT. Else how do you explain the fact that the 440 beltway around Raleigh intersects with itself. Someone at NCDOT has a good supplier of (1) moonshine or (2) crack.
Real men use the command shell and man() or google;)
Seriously, most of the hard-core computer folks I know either open their copy of the ORA book on the subject, steal their neighbors copy and flip it open, or use some form of online docs w/o printing said docs off. The only reason I've ever known anyone to print anything resembling a doc is when someone I knew had assembled binder full of pages on tech specs for a project.
It's just a lot easier to sit at the screen arrowing up and down on the doc than it is to print it, reach over to the printer, pull it out, shuffle through it....and then eventually have to take it out with the trash. I've seen comments about paperless offices vis a vis paperless restrooms, but the fact is that for reference there really isn't a reason to print the online doc.
I definitely don't remember it:)....of course...that's the period when tapes were the big thing and on the way out...and I was kid in school...so such things were the least of my concerns (avoiding my homework, on the other hand...)
msnbc starts off with a quote claiming that free download services have been cutting into music sales for years. I just don't buy that. Consider:
Music download services have only been around for (at most) a few years (that I am aware of). Long before the introduction of the mp3, people used this funky gadget called an audio tape to exchange music. I don't recall hearing them yell that tapes were going to bankrupt them (although it's possible I was too young to remember such a time).
And yesterday, AP (that's the Assosciated Press) sent a story across the wires saying that Jupiter Media Metrix had hard data that music services actually boosted music sales. I don't have the numbers or a link handy, but they indicated that people with a CD writer who downloaded music were more likely to buy than people without one (among other stats). The other thing the article mentioned is that Napster has become the industry's straw man.
It's no shock to me that customers prefer to download, evaluate, and buy rather than subscribe and rent. I just wish that the music industry megacorporations would drop the FUD and do something productive.
Then again....anyone notice that earthlink started running commercials about how you could download and share music faster on their broadband service and now AOL is making a similar claim about its broadband service? Hmmmmm....
Is that very often, science in and of itself is a religion. Consider:
Science and religion have preset rules. Religion refers to these as your creed/catechism/etc. Science calls them basic laws. For example, a religious person will say "God is all powerful." This implies that there is a being God who can do anything he pleases (depending on the religion). A physicist will say "The derivative of the expression describes the velocity of the object at time T." This implies things like velocity, trajectory, time, and the idea that such things may be quantified.
Religion and science build on the rules (laws) that they have established. Sometimes these exist as thou-shalt-nots (e.g., blaspheme, levitate, etc). This extends to things like "God can cause floods, famines, etc." and "If object 1 is moving in such a manner and object 2 is moving in a different manner, then the collision of objects 1 and 2 will be like..."
Religions usually admit to a degree of faith being required to operate (mind, I'm not addressing things that claim to be religions but may not be). Science disclaims faith, demanding that things be proven. And this is where we have the rub.
Proof of something works often for math and physics. It sometimes works in CompSci. You can't, however, prove some things that science alleges. There is a big difference between a correlation of data and absolute certainty. For example, people are digging up hominid-type bones all over the place. They even suggest similarities between different finds such that they conjecture that there is an evolutionary chain. What they miss is that they have no proof of this. They take what they refer to as Darwin's theory of evolution as the Gospel truth, forgetting theories are very different from laws, as any good first level science class should teach.
As an example: If I see a series of numbers, say, [1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13,...] and am asked to pick the next number, I might theorize (guess) that the next number might be be 20 (delta(2,3)=1, delta(3,5)=2, delta(5,8)=3, delta(8,13)=5, => increase by next prime number which is 7).
That's a bit contrived, and certainly not the obvious answer if you recognize the series, but the point stands: If I see a piece of the whole picture, I can attempt to describe it. This is making a theory. I can attempt to apply that theory to the world and see how things fit. However, just because it fits some of the time does not mean it is correct. In this case, the theory that my series is based on adding a prime to the last number in the series to get the next number is clearly wrong. I've used a Fibonacci sequence.
Back to my point: Science, and to some extent, religion, try to describe the world we live in. Science concerns itself primarily with what can be quantified, while religion deals with the unseeable. Religions usually speak from the "God told us, therefore" perspective. This is fine for religion, so long as what God says does not translate to inhuman behavior (a la the Inquisition or modern Muslim extremists). Science is heard through the channels of "peer review." I'm not going to speak on the big bang theory one way or the other as to its validity, but I will say this: Just because a theory makes it through the peer review process does not make it true.
My objection to cute little rings (some of which seem to be mini-symphonies) is that I don't want to know when someone's phone went off. This is why I keep mine on vibrate unless I'm at a movie, in which case I turn it off. This latter behavior is because I want to enjoy the movie rather than as a courtesy to other movie-goers, but the principle still holds. Unless you're sitting *right* beside me or I have my phone sitting on a resonant surface (e.g., desk, conference table,...), you have no idea that I just vibrated (well, unless you have super hearing).
I *get* the use of having one-to-a-customer rings, or even the idea of randomly assigning a default ring to a phone in the factory (much as they do IR codes for car locks). I just disapprove on general principle of anything at all that draws attention to the fact that one is using a cell phone or pager. The principle is that my business is my business and yours is yours and I jolly well don't want to advertise mine or be advised of yours. For what all that was worth;)
Of course, if you stuck with vibrate, you'd know the call was for you without (1) everyone else knowing it too or (2) advertising that you've got your own ring. Which, of course, goes back to the "I'm important enough for everyone to notice" point you made. I carry two cells on my belt and (every couple months) a pager. One cell is personal. The rest of the gear is work. It's all on vibrate. Mind you, sometimes I have the "which one is it" routine that everyone who is playing "Ode to Joy" on their cell has in a restaraunt, but what the hey...I know it's me, and nobody else does.:)
What it boils down to is "if you can't beat them, join them." HP and Compaq got tired of having their crappy knock-off proprietary PCs competing for shelf space at Worst Buy, Office Crepot, and so on, so they decided to join forces and monopolize the crappy PC market. I suspect that acquisition of Packard-Smell would be next if it hadn't already debased itself below Compaq. Maybe they'll try to get Gateway's PC business next.
**SIGH**
The thing that kills me about all this is
As AOL-Time-Warner-Turner-etc have proven, mega-mergers are not a good thing for your business. The best way to run a business is to eliminate inefficiencies. Mega-mergers tend to magnify these problems
When Compaq acquired DEC, DEC stock went south, in a hurry. Last time I took a finance class, the professor emphasized that a good merger usually resulted in the purchased company's stock going **UP**. What this tells me (nothing new, of course) is that Compaq is a company to avoid.
Fiorina (or however you spell her name) seems to have missed where HP's core business is. It isn't in selling second-rate PCs to office store chains for resale. HP would have done itself **and** Compaq a favor by dropping that business line altogether if things were looking grim. In fact, HP has a much stronger bread-and-butter business selling mundane things like printers, calculators, and oscilliscopes.
As for Mr. Hewlett...who knows. He certainly lost the lawsuit, but had also said he was considering his options. HP also didn't give him a chance to get his seat back, so when his term is up, he's out. I guess I'll sit back and watch things play out, but I for one think this merger was a foolish idea.
I begin to suspect that people who are afraid of cell phones, nuclear power. and so on, are the same people that answered the recent study saying that they believe in the paranormal and alien visitation.:)
Would you really want someone jamming *your* important calls? I wouldn't, and turnabout is definitely fair play. Besides which, jamming someone's phone is a DoS. Most people get rather upset over that sort of thing...
If you don't like cell phones, then go find somewhere that doesn't have them.
The point is valid. Actually the example of browsers really is a better one in some respects since it reinforces the idea that things should be standardized and when they aren't because someone [hint:Microsoft] decides to do things their own way, things don't work well.
If IE is such an integral component to the OS, why are there Mac and Solaris versions? I guarantee that those versions aren't essential to the OS they run on:)
"I'm not trying to be evasive," Stuart E. Madnick, a computer science professor at MIT, said at one point. "I'm just trying to be precise." (from the linked article).
Similarly,
Stuart Madnick, a computer science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, backed up Microsoft's position that features like the Internet Explorer Web browser and its media player are not discrete programs. They are made up of many separate files that are dependent on each other, he said. (from Nando Times)
I'm guessing whoever did the basic research (AP is credited on the Nando article, didn't see an attribution on the CNN one) didn't do their homework, or else Madnick is claiming to be a CS prof. If the former is true, then it is a lesson to be careful accepting what journalists say. If the latter, it's entirely possible that Madnick is perjuring himself by asserting credentials he doesn't posses.
It should be, but Microsoft and Netscape broke the standards. I think a better example would be hardware systems...e.g., I can interchange most standard networking gear all day long and things will still work. Thank heaven Microsoft hasn't yet broken most of the hardware standards...My M$ keyboard works just fine with Linux (well, except for those dumb browser buttons hardwired onto the board)
I agree with your assesment of the tech industry. It was overpriced; it has dropped like a stone. I don't really think that's the point here.
The point is that management (as usual) is padding their wallets and at the same time burning the line employees. Moreover, the company signed contracts with each of these employees promising a certain amount of money for a certain amount of work. For them to cut salaries, then, is breach of contract.
At the same time, I'm reminded both of what happened at my old company (net32 (also known as net16 after the 50% cut in workforce)) and other companies: too many chiefs, not enough indians. From a parasitic point of view: if you (the brass) kill the host (the workers), you go down too.
I agree that there needs to be some kind of equalization with idiot executives who burn companies. I've had a CEO and CFO run a company into the ground and it wasn't pretty...but it didn't begin to look like the Enron mess. Unfortunately, most of the time these guys walk off with a load of stock options (many cashed in), plus severance and bonus pay, plus, often, ongoing company perks or director's positions.
It would be nice if there was a way to settle the accounts with them, but it just doesn't happen. The Enron fat cats walked with their ill-gotten gains and then re-invested those gains in their personal homes. Guess what? They get to keep all that money because there are laws on the books that say you can't get money out of somebody's home (even if it is an unseemly mansion...it's not like these guys are in danger of losing a trailer or 2 bedroom apartment). The net effect is that these folks got away with robbery.
And I hope North Carolina doesn't follow suit. However, please note that this law applies to police--not to the thugs at the Business Software Alliance. They can still sue your butt in court if they think you've pirated software, but my reading is that they can't use these laws to waltz into your home/office/cave/bunker without your knowledge or permission.
Of course, the whole point of the "audit" is that it is a fishing expedition designed to see just how much they can extort out of you for any violations, real or imagined. The whole IANAL thing applies here, but I don't see what they can do if they ask for an audit and you tell them to go away. Sure they can keep pestering you, but I don't see that they would have any right to do so. Indeed, I would be surprised if you couldn't get a restraining order against them and be done with it.
Wiser people with deeper insights are welcome to enlighten me on the subject.
Are they somehow going to stop all the other southeast Asian, African, and South American countries from spamming while they do this? If so, it might actually lighten our load. If not...I fail to see anything unusual here
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An old boss of mine (from when I used to work on Aviation Parkway) is running technology meetings every couple months over on Perimiter Park. Drop me an email and I'll let you know when the next one is set for and how to get there.
;)
It's nice being able to work downtown now since I don't have to do the Lynn Road Rat Race or the I-40 Crawl. Then again...now I do the Falls of the Neuse 500
Anyhow...time for a shower and off to work. See my site for an email address.
Check this map to see our really wacked beltline. Notice the small "triangle" of freeway at the left side of the city between Raleigh and Cary. The uppor portion is the Wade Ave. Extension, which lets people going between north Raleigh and I-40 make the transition without going to the southwest corner of the beltline.
:) If you are on the southern portion of the beltline going west, you have the advantage of avoiding the clover-leaf design, but you still have a one-lane switch, or you find yourself headed north on I-40 until you reach the Wade Ave. Extension, where you head back west.
Now, if you look at the interchange marker right above the words "Piney Points" and to the left of "Caraleigh", you will see where our beltline meets itself at a 90 degree angle. At this point, if you are going southwest on the beltline you literally have to take a right hand turn onto a one-lane clover-leaf to get back onto the interstate. If you don't, you find yourself passing through Apex
I've been here almost 2 years, and it took me a good 3 months to get used to that.
but there are no dots and precious few signs. And as the poster from New York pointed out, dots and signs or no, it's still a really stupid idea to do thinks like that.
What I want to see him do next is come re-stripe North Carolina's highways. For those who don't know it, NC has this rather odd policy of redirecting the right lane off onto *almost* every exit and adding a new lane somewhere else to compensate. It's really stupid, for a few reasons. First off is that if you were cruising along in the slow lane and didn't want to exit, guess what...you get to go anyway, unless you want to be a traffic hazzard. Second, is the inconsistency. If every lane went off, maybe you'd get used to it, screwy as it is. Last, about every place I've ever been hashes off the exit lane, so it's obvious that it's going away.
Then again, I'm sure something is really wacked at NCDOT. Else how do you explain the fact that the 440 beltway around Raleigh intersects with itself . Someone at NCDOT has a good supplier of (1) moonshine or (2) crack.
Real men use the command shell and man() or google ;)
Seriously, most of the hard-core computer folks I know either open their copy of the ORA book on the subject, steal their neighbors copy and flip it open, or use some form of online docs w/o printing said docs off. The only reason I've ever known anyone to print anything resembling a doc is when someone I knew had assembled binder full of pages on tech specs for a project.
It's just a lot easier to sit at the screen arrowing up and down on the doc than it is to print it, reach over to the printer, pull it out, shuffle through it....and then eventually have to take it out with the trash. I've seen comments about paperless offices vis a vis paperless restrooms, but the fact is that for reference there really isn't a reason to print the online doc.
We're an insidious virus infecting the unsuspecting legions of corporate proprietary software slaves. Mwuahahahahahaha!
Seriously...it all goes back to memes. The open source meme > proprietary software meme. I wonder what kind of meme would displace open source...?
does kind of sound like Microsoft. They have this nasty tendency to appear to be cooperative while behind the scenes doing something dastardly.
I definitely don't remember it :) ....of course...that's the period when tapes were the big thing and on the way out...and I was kid in school...so such things were the least of my concerns (avoiding my homework, on the other hand...)
msnbc starts off with a quote claiming that free download services have been cutting into music sales for years. I just don't buy that. Consider:
Music download services have only been around for (at most) a few years (that I am aware of). Long before the introduction of the mp3, people used this funky gadget called an audio tape to exchange music. I don't recall hearing them yell that tapes were going to bankrupt them (although it's possible I was too young to remember such a time).
And yesterday, AP (that's the Assosciated Press) sent a story across the wires saying that Jupiter Media Metrix had hard data that music services actually boosted music sales. I don't have the numbers or a link handy, but they indicated that people with a CD writer who downloaded music were more likely to buy than people without one (among other stats). The other thing the article mentioned is that Napster has become the industry's straw man.
It's no shock to me that customers prefer to download, evaluate, and buy rather than subscribe and rent. I just wish that the music industry megacorporations would drop the FUD and do something productive.
Then again....anyone notice that earthlink started running commercials about how you could download and share music faster on their broadband service and now AOL is making a similar claim about its broadband service? Hmmmmm....
- Science and religion have preset rules. Religion refers to these as your creed/catechism/etc. Science calls them basic laws. For example, a religious person will say "God is all powerful." This implies that there is a being God who can do anything he pleases (depending on the religion). A physicist will say "The derivative of the expression describes the velocity of the object at time T." This implies things like velocity, trajectory, time, and the idea that such things may be quantified.
- Religion and science build on the rules (laws) that they have established. Sometimes these exist as thou-shalt-nots (e.g., blaspheme, levitate, etc). This extends to things like "God can cause floods, famines, etc." and "If object 1 is moving in such a manner and object 2 is moving in a different manner, then the collision of objects 1 and 2 will be like
..."
- Religions usually admit to a degree of faith being required to operate (mind, I'm not addressing things that claim to be religions but may not be). Science disclaims faith, demanding that things be proven. And this is where we have the rub.
Proof of something works often for math and physics. It sometimes works in CompSci. You can't, however, prove some things that science alleges. There is a big difference between a correlation of data and absolute certainty. For example, people are digging up hominid-type bones all over the place. They even suggest similarities between different finds such that they conjecture that there is an evolutionary chain. What they miss is that they have no proof of this. They take what they refer to as Darwin's theory of evolution as the Gospel truth, forgetting theories are very different from laws, as any good first level science class should teach.As an example: If I see a series of numbers, say, [1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13,
That's a bit contrived, and certainly not the obvious answer if you recognize the series, but the point stands: If I see a piece of the whole picture, I can attempt to describe it. This is making a theory. I can attempt to apply that theory to the world and see how things fit. However, just because it fits some of the time does not mean it is correct. In this case, the theory that my series is based on adding a prime to the last number in the series to get the next number is clearly wrong. I've used a Fibonacci sequence.
Back to my point: Science, and to some extent, religion, try to describe the world we live in. Science concerns itself primarily with what can be quantified, while religion deals with the unseeable. Religions usually speak from the "God told us, therefore" perspective. This is fine for religion, so long as what God says does not translate to inhuman behavior (a la the Inquisition or modern Muslim extremists). Science is heard through the channels of "peer review." I'm not going to speak on the big bang theory one way or the other as to its validity, but I will say this: Just because a theory makes it through the peer review process does not make it true.
My objection to cute little rings (some of which seem to be mini-symphonies) is that I don't want to know when someone's phone went off. This is why I keep mine on vibrate unless I'm at a movie, in which case I turn it off. This latter behavior is because I want to enjoy the movie rather than as a courtesy to other movie-goers, but the principle still holds. Unless you're sitting *right* beside me or I have my phone sitting on a resonant surface (e.g., desk, conference table, ...), you have no idea that I just vibrated (well, unless you have super hearing).
;)
I *get* the use of having one-to-a-customer rings, or even the idea of randomly assigning a default ring to a phone in the factory (much as they do IR codes for car locks). I just disapprove on general principle of anything at all that draws attention to the fact that one is using a cell phone or pager. The principle is that my business is my business and yours is yours and I jolly well don't want to advertise mine or be advised of yours. For what all that was worth
Of course, if you stuck with vibrate, you'd know the call was for you without (1) everyone else knowing it too or (2) advertising that you've got your own ring. Which, of course, goes back to the "I'm important enough for everyone to notice" point you made. I carry two cells on my belt and (every couple months) a pager. One cell is personal. The rest of the gear is work. It's all on vibrate. Mind you, sometimes I have the "which one is it" routine that everyone who is playing "Ode to Joy" on their cell has in a restaraunt, but what the hey...I know it's me, and nobody else does. :)
**SIGH**
The thing that kills me about all this is
- As AOL-Time-Warner-Turner-etc have proven, mega-mergers are not a good thing for your business. The best way to run a business is to eliminate inefficiencies. Mega-mergers tend to magnify these problems
- When Compaq acquired DEC, DEC stock went south, in a hurry. Last time I took a finance class, the professor emphasized that a good merger usually resulted in the purchased company's stock going **UP**. What this tells me (nothing new, of course) is that Compaq is a company to avoid.
- Fiorina (or however you spell her name) seems to have missed where HP's core business is. It isn't in selling second-rate PCs to office store chains for resale. HP would have done itself **and** Compaq a favor by dropping that business line altogether if things were looking grim. In fact, HP has a much stronger bread-and-butter business selling mundane things like printers, calculators, and oscilliscopes.
As for Mr. Hewlett...who knows. He certainly lost the lawsuit, but had also said he was considering his options. HP also didn't give him a chance to get his seat back, so when his term is up, he's out. I guess I'll sit back and watch things play out, but I for one think this merger was a foolish idea.I begin to suspect that people who are afraid of cell phones, nuclear power. and so on, are the same people that answered the recent study saying that they believe in the paranormal and alien visitation. :)
Would you really want someone jamming *your* important calls? I wouldn't, and turnabout is definitely fair play. Besides which, jamming someone's phone is a DoS. Most people get rather upset over that sort of thing...
If you don't like cell phones, then go find somewhere that doesn't have them.
The point is valid. Actually the example of browsers really is a better one in some respects since it reinforces the idea that things should be standardized and when they aren't because someone [hint:Microsoft] decides to do things their own way, things don't work well.
If IE is such an integral component to the OS, why are there Mac and Solaris versions? I guarantee that those versions aren't essential to the OS they run on :)
So much for journalistic integrity...
"I'm not trying to be evasive," Stuart E. Madnick, a computer science professor at MIT, said at one point. "I'm just trying to be precise." (from the linked article).
Similarly,
Stuart Madnick, a computer science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, backed up Microsoft's position that features like the Internet Explorer Web browser and its media player are not discrete programs. They are made up of many separate files that are dependent on each other, he said. (from Nando Times)
I'm guessing whoever did the basic research (AP is credited on the Nando article, didn't see an attribution on the CNN one) didn't do their homework, or else Madnick is claiming to be a CS prof. If the former is true, then it is a lesson to be careful accepting what journalists say. If the latter, it's entirely possible that Madnick is perjuring himself by asserting credentials he doesn't posses.
It should be, but Microsoft and Netscape broke the standards. I think a better example would be hardware systems...e.g., I can interchange most standard networking gear all day long and things will still work. Thank heaven Microsoft hasn't yet broken most of the hardware standards...My M$ keyboard works just fine with Linux (well, except for those dumb browser buttons hardwired onto the board)
I agree with your assesment of the tech industry. It was overpriced; it has dropped like a stone. I don't really think that's the point here.
The point is that management (as usual) is padding their wallets and at the same time burning the line employees. Moreover, the company signed contracts with each of these employees promising a certain amount of money for a certain amount of work. For them to cut salaries, then, is breach of contract.
At the same time, I'm reminded both of what happened at my old company (net32 (also known as net16 after the 50% cut in workforce)) and other companies: too many chiefs, not enough indians. From a parasitic point of view: if you (the brass) kill the host (the workers), you go down too.
I agree that there needs to be some kind of equalization with idiot executives who burn companies. I've had a CEO and CFO run a company into the ground and it wasn't pretty...but it didn't begin to look like the Enron mess. Unfortunately, most of the time these guys walk off with a load of stock options (many cashed in), plus severance and bonus pay, plus, often, ongoing company perks or director's positions.
It would be nice if there was a way to settle the accounts with them, but it just doesn't happen. The Enron fat cats walked with their ill-gotten gains and then re-invested those gains in their personal homes. Guess what? They get to keep all that money because there are laws on the books that say you can't get money out of somebody's home (even if it is an unseemly mansion...it's not like these guys are in danger of losing a trailer or 2 bedroom apartment). The net effect is that these folks got away with robbery.
If Larry Ellison is the anti-Christ, what does that make Bill Gates? Satan?
And I hope North Carolina doesn't follow suit. However, please note that this law applies to police--not to the thugs at the Business Software Alliance. They can still sue your butt in court if they think you've pirated software, but my reading is that they can't use these laws to waltz into your home/office/cave/bunker without your knowledge or permission.
Of course, the whole point of the "audit" is that it is a fishing expedition designed to see just how much they can extort out of you for any violations, real or imagined. The whole IANAL thing applies here, but I don't see what they can do if they ask for an audit and you tell them to go away. Sure they can keep pestering you, but I don't see that they would have any right to do so. Indeed, I would be surprised if you couldn't get a restraining order against them and be done with it.
Wiser people with deeper insights are welcome to enlighten me on the subject.
how the heck does that work !?
Are they somehow going to stop all the other southeast Asian, African, and South American countries from spamming while they do this? If so, it might actually lighten our load. If not...I fail to see anything unusual here