28.8K MODEM! Waiting to load on a 28.8K MODEM, you say! Bloody hell, you had it easy. We would have loved to have the luxury of waiting, or even having a real modem.

When I was a kid, we had to get up at 1 o clock in the morning, run 7 miles into town and back for no reason at all, and then get down on all fours and push a big wheel around like donkeys all day in order to generate electricity to do our 'web surfing' in the evening. When I say 'web surfing', of course, I mean that our 1 bit per day telegraph receiver would deliver a single bit, yes or no, and if it was yes, our dad would whip us with a cat o' nine tails until we went unconscious, and if it was no, we would get no gruel for the day and have to work in the fields overnight instead of sleeping.

With apologies to to those who really had it hard...

It's just intended to make it a bit more difficult, in order to discourage people who would be willing to write a 4-line script that uses Curl but are too lazy to do much more.

When making the case to the boss that they do need to purchase the software and have licenses and proof, the best strategy is to appeal to his self-interest and his desire to cover his own ass.

Explain that if just one disgruntled former employee wants to take revenge against the company, (s)he can make an anonymous report to the BSA and that the fines can be extremely severe.

No sane manager will want to be potentially held responsible by his superiors for millions of dollars in fines and attorney's fees, based on what probably amounts to at most tens of thousands of dollars.