Skip to main content

$18,048,000 Bill for China

Apparently Microsoft is being accused of abuse in China because it is cracking down on illegal copies of its software. [1]

One excerpt from the article sums up the mentality in China:

More than 80% of the 60,000 Internet users participating in an online survey conducted by Tencent, one of the largest Internet service portals in China, protested the campaign. They complained that it was the high price of a legitimate copy of XP that had forced them to turn to counterfeits. A genuine copy of XP Pro is priced at $376 (2,578 yuan) in the Chinese market.

So if you don't like the price of candy at the local grocery store, you should just steal it. Why should you pay their fair market price when you could just take it and then claim that they forced you to steal it.

China is the single largest offender of global information espionage and currency manipulation. On all of the computer systems that I monitor daily, the vast majority of elicit hacker activity originates from IP addresses in China. Never once have I ever received any response from any complaint that I have filed at a Chinese ISP.

Since China is a communist regime, Microsoft has a legitimate complaint against the government. China has allowed its people to illegally acquire Microsoft's products without any reprocussions, therefore China is subsidizing the cost of said software for its citizens. In short, China owes Microsoft the $376 per copy of illegally installed software, which comes out to $18,048,000 (48,000 users x $376).

A Chinese attorney is quoted in the article asking for $1 Billion in fines for Microsoft. To that, I say, okay. After China pays Microsoft $105,280,000,000 for lost revenue to software piracy. That's assuming 20% of the country are using computers that are running Windows illegally. Even if only 80% of those 20% are illegal, then the fine owed to Microsoft would be $84,224,000,000. I'd be happy to pay $1 Billion to make $84 Billion.

[1] http://scitech.blogs.cnn.com/ "Microsoft Hacking Computer in China"

Popular posts from this blog

Clustered Foolishness

I had morning coffee with a well respected friend of mine recently. Aside from chatting about the usual wifery and family, we touched on the subject of clustered indices and SQL Server performance. A common misconception in the software industry is that a clustered index will make your database queries faster. In fact, most cases will demonstrate the polar opposite of this assumption. The reason for this misconception is a misunderstanding of how the clustered index works in any database server. A clustered index is a node clustering of records that share a common index value. When you decide on an index strategy for your data, you must consider the range of data to be indexed. Remember back to your data structures classes and what you were taught about hashtable optimizations. A hashtable, which is another way of saying a database index, is just a table of N values that organizes a set of M records in quickly accessible lists that are of order L, where L is significantly less than M. ...
Read more

Deadly Information

Remember back to 2006 when a young girl killed herself [1] , [4] after being tricked and harassed by a faux boy she found on the Web using MySpace. The trial against the faux boy, an adult woman (Lori Drew), did not result in prosecution for the death of Megan, much to the dismay of many.  Yet, today we read about another trial where someone is being accused of second degree murder because they may have mentioned something slanderous about another person who was later killed by a hit man [2] . In this case, though, the person on trial is a former FBI agent who was working deep cover to infiltrate organized crime. In both cases, someone released information to third parties that resulted in the death of another person.  Neither defendant in either of these cases actually committed the act of murder, though. In the case of the FBI agent, though, the murder charge is being taken seriously. Yet, in the MySpace slander case, the murder charge was not taken seriously. How are t...
Read more

Faster Climate Change

CNN reports that a WWF study has found that global climate change is happening faster than predicted in 2007 and that there will not be any arctic ice by 2013, or 2040. [1] Then it goes on to say that global sea level will increase by 1.08 meters by the end of the century, which is 2100, 92 years from now. Quite honestly, nobody really cares what is going to happen to the planet in 98 years. Why? Because in 98 years we (as humans) will either: (1) Obliterate ourselves because God told us to do it. (2) Eat eachother because there will no longer be any land available to grow crops and sustain living quarters for our 50 billion people. (3) Suffocate because our planet will no longer smell nice thanks to 50 billion people producing lots of solid waste in our oceans. (4) Leave the planet because there will no longer be enough fresh water to sustain our lives. Wait a minute. Consider (4) for a moment. Where can we get an abundance of fresh water TODAY? Anyone? Yeah, the arctic! It's goin...
Read more