Been there and done that. Or rather, haven't done that, because it was drilled into me that it was impossible. I have the utmost respect for the engineers who walk around everywhere with a pad of paper and a pencil for security concerns, but couldn't see myself doing it forever, so I now work somewhere where data security means not dropping coffee on your keyboard.
How much do you trust your customers to adequately describe what their needs are? And how much do you trust that description to not change for the duration they are your customers?
Let me tell you my experience sending email from Japan:
1) I have been the silent party of a conference call between a professor at a major American university and the tech he was "#$%#&$ing out because said professor did not get the five-figure speaking fee we wanted to pay him because our repeated attempts to contact him went unanswered (the techs, to save themselves a little hassle, had blacklisted *.jp)
2) I have been asked "Why don't you ever write?" by a favorite auntie, who is exactly the lady at those tech support humor web sites make fun of. I do write, once a week like clockwork. Her ISP decided on her behalf that it needed to be/dev/null'ed.
3) I have a 99 year old great grandmother who, bless her heart, has started to use the computer. She is doing exceptionally well for 99, but if you ask her four days out of five she'll tell you "No, of course not, don't know anybody living abroad. I haven't been back to Ireland since I came over in 1916 and all my family there is dead". Then if you go on to prod her about her great grandsons she'll take your ears off bragging about those fine young men who went off and got educated and are now living in Korea or China or somesuch place where the folks are very friendly and they drink excellent tea although of course not the sort that they made in County Cork.
4) I get a copy of my local newspaper (for the neighborhood I grew up in) delivered to me once a month by my mother. A favorite teacher of mine from grade school just retired. One Google search later I had his school's office email address and sent them a letter of congratulation to forward on to him. I've gotten no response -- it probably got eaten. Asked yesterday whether he needed to speak to anyone abroad or not, this veteran of the Chicago Public Schools would have said "Nope, can't say that I do".
5) Three companies have lost my business because they can't handle having a customer abroad (seeming inability to handle emails played a part in all three cancellations, not entirely sure it was the only issue though). One (my bank) has gained it for life because they went the extra mile, including having a $10 an hour telephone operator having a three-day long spat with their IT department before I could get whitelisted. (Oddly, the IT department had clearly spent a lot of development resources on making their web forms, etc international-aware... and then/dev/null'ed all email from the customers using the special forms)
Combine biotech with IBM's nanotech and you can brand each of them with a carbon structure on their cell walls. Which is great, because if anyone ever happens to take a gander at one with an electron microscope they'll see an ad for you! Remember, the key to improving brand presence is ubiquity.
That requiers having teachers who can trouble-shoot all three architectures. I love public school teachers with a passion -- half of my family does it and I've taught myself. But do you realize what the average level of computer expertise is? I can introduce you to that lady all the tech support sites make fun of for using scissors to "reformat" a 5.25" disk into a 3.5" one. Most of my colleagues had post-it notes on their monitors for the button sequence to run MS Word ("Start (bottom left) -> Programs -> MS Office -> MS Word"). Schools are one of the worst places for a mixed operating environment (they're also one of the worst places to learn anything about computers). Stick to reading, writing, and arithmatic, learn the computers somewhere else.
... I wouldn't DRM or time limit these rentals at all. Don't even call them rentals. Call it a subscription service, just like your magazine subscription -- when you unsubscribe you keep all the magazines you own, but I'm sure you won't because next month we have newer, more fun content coming down the pipe, at least some of which will be worth the fee. Subscriptions are just ways to aggregate micro-purchases -- its not worth your time deciding whether you would pay $.25 to read a given newspaper article, so you assume you'll find about four valuable a day and pay $7 a week for your subscription (or whatever). MS says its not worth your time figuring out whether you'll like the individual smelly old stuff but they'll give you a whole buffet of it and if you find three games worth $5 in a month then you should be there next month.
Who cares if four year old games are pirated to heck and back? They already have been, four years ago. And they're worth ZERO to the IP holders right now, because the only sales happening are happening in the secondary market where you won't see a penny. The subscription service is a way to resuscitate those rights to some degree. Another would be a download service like iTunes for games -- our entire back catalog (of, say, games older than two years -- until two years keep releasing Greatest Hits SKUs), $5 per game, no support and no warranty. And then just let the Long Tail go to work for you.
You don't strictly speaking need to DRM anything. Just release episode #1 on bittorrent and episodes 2-26 on DVD only. You assume that no one would be happy with just consuming the first episode of your series and therefore it doesn't cost you anything to release it for free (they'll still buy DVD #1 to get episodes 2,3, and 4).
Try pulling an ace out of your sleeve in Vegas and saying "Whoa, games are only games, people" when you're bodily ejected from the casino. World of Warcraft grosses more than probably 80% of the casinos in this country. There are items in Lineage II worth more money than the maximum hand at many places -- we're talking hundreds of dollars. When there is that much money on the line, the game isn't a game anymore, and the company, the government, and the players have a vested interest in making sure everyone plays by the rules. Can you imagine someone saying "Hah, you forgot to search my sleeve! Now give me my money, I stole it fair and square!"?
RTFA. The colonel who signed the email doesn't exist. The cadets followed email instructions which were given the color of authority by inclusion of the word "colonel", which anybody with a third-grade reading level can write in an email, and a West Point email address (which anybody can forge, trivially). Its 2005, and this is an excellent object lesson to our future military leaders that procedures to avoid spoofing weren't put in their operating manuals just to up the page count.
Answer: The EULA says that you're not actually buying the property, you're buying the right to transfer a limited right to use the property. Sony retains actual title to the property and thus if it becomes devalued they're the only ones with standing to sue. Who knows if it will actually work or not if it ever got challenged in court.
Somewhat off-topic: Kidnapping for money has vanished from the US, actually. The FBI is just too good at catching people who do it. Almost all kidnapping currently is sexually motivated and results in murder of the victim within 24 hours. But I agree that most millionaires in the US are not conspicuous about their consumption -- according to WSJ and Washington Post articles I've read they're notoriously tightwads.
Incidentally, many millionaires *do* have 80k yearly incomes. Check out the magic of compound interest: lets say you're 30 years old when you finally hit 80k worth of income (maybe you have a moderately successful small business you've been building for a couple of years, maybe you've got your own law practice, maybe you're just working long hours for Microsoft). Assuming for the next 30 years you take $15,000 of that salary and just put it in a CD at 5%, you'll be a millionaire when you retire.
This ignores two even easier ways to hit millionairedom: a) have a house which appreciates substantially in value or b) dual-income family (the key is, again, living below your means -- if you're obsessed with keeping up with the Joneses and buying a new plasma screen every year you've got a tough row to hoe).
Meanwhile, the Martians are thinking: "Damn, I wish someone had invented a technique for turning water into something other than an instantly lethal poison."
Oh, Signs, you so had me going until that last bit...
World Socialist News probably didn't mention that most of America's millionaires aren't rich, just comfortable -- they own their own house in a good neighborhood and have a retirement nest egg (honestly, if you have two professional incomes coming in its hard not to hit a million in assets sooner or later). That doesn't compute with "And now we can empty Suzy's college fund to blow $200,000 on a weeklong vacation for one in space! Whee!"
avoiding getting their asses kicked for being seen with books when they walked home.
And the educational system is responsible for this how, exactly? Take it up with the folks who've decided that they're going to be failures and darn well aren't going to be showed up by successes who happen to look like them.
Ah, "acting white". I had a friend in grade school. His father was a doctor and he lived in a house bigger than any I could ever have imagined. He played classical piano (and very, very well, I might add) and got lessons because his parents thought it was the proper thing to do regardless of the cost. I went to the same tutor as a charity case and we paid her some months in pound cake. Went to the same public magnet school, got the same books, had the same teachers. The only thing I had going for me versus my friend was that I just got generically picked on, he got the "What you doing, fool, everyone knows only crackers read and shit" every day of his life.
Sometimes I wonder what happen to him. He's probably pretty successful, I'm guessing. I've got no doubts about Mr. Reading and Shit. He's either on the streets, in prison, or dead.
Not from the States? The two largest minority groups are blacks at 12% and Hispanics at 13%, so the right ballpark is something like 70% for white folks. Remember, Hispanics are technically tracked separately from the races so thats not necessarily additive (gah, switch to a colorblind system already -- why should I have to learn how the old apartheid-esque system works...).
The trouble is, the marginal cost per email is still zero. Filtering solves spam for YOU personally (I deal with approximately one a week in English that makes it through SpamAssassin and Thunderbird's bayesian filters, and about one a day in Japanese because their filtering tech rolls over and dies on East Asian languages), but even if only one of a million mails results in a sale that doesn't matter. It most especially doesn't matter because the legitimate players in the industry have long since stopped spamming and whats left are the scam artists and affiliate pyramid schemes who just rent out bot networks to do their dirty work.
Slashdot Mirror
Thats not offtopic, thats a reference to a bad sci-fi series. What could be more on-topic at Slashdot?
Been there and done that. Or rather, haven't done that, because it was drilled into me that it was impossible. I have the utmost respect for the engineers who walk around everywhere with a pad of paper and a pencil for security concerns, but couldn't see myself doing it forever, so I now work somewhere where data security means not dropping coffee on your keyboard.
You've got it backwards (public key encrypts, private key decrypts) but are otherwise correct.
Jaded cynicism with a strong infusion of common sense.
That program threatened a coveted corporate market with "competition" by pirated versions of its own product.
Yahoo BB, too, if you're in Japan. The service you want is BBPhone.
Let me tell you my experience sending email from Japan:
1) I have been the silent party of a conference call between a professor at a major American university and the tech he was "#$%#&$ing out because said professor did not get the five-figure speaking fee we wanted to pay him because our repeated attempts to contact him went unanswered (the techs, to save themselves a little hassle, had blacklisted *.jp)
2) I have been asked "Why don't you ever write?" by a favorite auntie, who is exactly the lady at those tech support humor web sites make fun of. I do write, once a week like clockwork. Her ISP decided on her behalf that it needed to be /dev/null'ed.
3) I have a 99 year old great grandmother who, bless her heart, has started to use the computer. She is doing exceptionally well for 99, but if you ask her four days out of five she'll tell you "No, of course not, don't know anybody living abroad. I haven't been back to Ireland since I came over in 1916 and all my family there is dead". Then if you go on to prod her about her great grandsons she'll take your ears off bragging about those fine young men who went off and got educated and are now living in Korea or China or somesuch place where the folks are very friendly and they drink excellent tea although of course not the sort that they made in County Cork.
4) I get a copy of my local newspaper (for the neighborhood I grew up in) delivered to me once a month by my mother. A favorite teacher of mine from grade school just retired. One Google search later I had his school's office email address and sent them a letter of congratulation to forward on to him. I've gotten no response -- it probably got eaten. Asked yesterday whether he needed to speak to anyone abroad or not, this veteran of the Chicago Public Schools would have said "Nope, can't say that I do".
5) Three companies have lost my business because they can't handle having a customer abroad (seeming inability to handle emails played a part in all three cancellations, not entirely sure it was the only issue though). One (my bank) has gained it for life because they went the extra mile, including having a $10 an hour telephone operator having a three-day long spat with their IT department before I could get whitelisted. (Oddly, the IT department had clearly spent a lot of development resources on making their web forms, etc international-aware... and then /dev/null'ed all email from the customers using the special forms)
Lets see, where to begin:
CONDEMNED
excessive
area (!)
rains
bulldozed
I think that about covers it.
Oh, crud, that annoying Ferengi kid was Federation faction and Picard linked! We're fuxxored!
Combine biotech with IBM's nanotech and you can brand each of them with a carbon structure on their cell walls. Which is great, because if anyone ever happens to take a gander at one with an electron microscope they'll see an ad for you! Remember, the key to improving brand presence is ubiquity.
Its a calculator. No audio output.
That requiers having teachers who can trouble-shoot all three architectures. I love public school teachers with a passion -- half of my family does it and I've taught myself. But do you realize what the average level of computer expertise is? I can introduce you to that lady all the tech support sites make fun of for using scissors to "reformat" a 5.25" disk into a 3.5" one. Most of my colleagues had post-it notes on their monitors for the button sequence to run MS Word ("Start (bottom left) -> Programs -> MS Office -> MS Word"). Schools are one of the worst places for a mixed operating environment (they're also one of the worst places to learn anything about computers). Stick to reading, writing, and arithmatic, learn the computers somewhere else.
Who cares if four year old games are pirated to heck and back? They already have been, four years ago. And they're worth ZERO to the IP holders right now, because the only sales happening are happening in the secondary market where you won't see a penny. The subscription service is a way to resuscitate those rights to some degree. Another would be a download service like iTunes for games -- our entire back catalog (of, say, games older than two years -- until two years keep releasing Greatest Hits SKUs), $5 per game, no support and no warranty. And then just let the Long Tail go to work for you.
You don't strictly speaking need to DRM anything. Just release episode #1 on bittorrent and episodes 2-26 on DVD only. You assume that no one would be happy with just consuming the first episode of your series and therefore it doesn't cost you anything to release it for free (they'll still buy DVD #1 to get episodes 2,3, and 4).
Try pulling an ace out of your sleeve in Vegas and saying "Whoa, games are only games, people" when you're bodily ejected from the casino. World of Warcraft grosses more than probably 80% of the casinos in this country. There are items in Lineage II worth more money than the maximum hand at many places -- we're talking hundreds of dollars. When there is that much money on the line, the game isn't a game anymore, and the company, the government, and the players have a vested interest in making sure everyone plays by the rules. Can you imagine someone saying "Hah, you forgot to search my sleeve! Now give me my money, I stole it fair and square!"?
RTFA. The colonel who signed the email doesn't exist. The cadets followed email instructions which were given the color of authority by inclusion of the word "colonel", which anybody with a third-grade reading level can write in an email, and a West Point email address (which anybody can forge, trivially). Its 2005, and this is an excellent object lesson to our future military leaders that procedures to avoid spoofing weren't put in their operating manuals just to up the page count.
Booting Linux on a Penguin?
I think you should start using a tinfoil condom.
Answer: The EULA says that you're not actually buying the property, you're buying the right to transfer a limited right to use the property. Sony retains actual title to the property and thus if it becomes devalued they're the only ones with standing to sue. Who knows if it will actually work or not if it ever got challenged in court.
Incidentally, many millionaires *do* have 80k yearly incomes. Check out the magic of compound interest: lets say you're 30 years old when you finally hit 80k worth of income (maybe you have a moderately successful small business you've been building for a couple of years, maybe you've got your own law practice, maybe you're just working long hours for Microsoft). Assuming for the next 30 years you take $15,000 of that salary and just put it in a CD at 5%, you'll be a millionaire when you retire.
This ignores two even easier ways to hit millionairedom: a) have a house which appreciates substantially in value or b) dual-income family (the key is, again, living below your means -- if you're obsessed with keeping up with the Joneses and buying a new plasma screen every year you've got a tough row to hoe).
Oh, Signs, you so had me going until that last bit...
World Socialist News probably didn't mention that most of America's millionaires aren't rich, just comfortable -- they own their own house in a good neighborhood and have a retirement nest egg (honestly, if you have two professional incomes coming in its hard not to hit a million in assets sooner or later). That doesn't compute with "And now we can empty Suzy's college fund to blow $200,000 on a weeklong vacation for one in space! Whee!"
And the educational system is responsible for this how, exactly? Take it up with the folks who've decided that they're going to be failures and darn well aren't going to be showed up by successes who happen to look like them.
Ah, "acting white". I had a friend in grade school. His father was a doctor and he lived in a house bigger than any I could ever have imagined. He played classical piano (and very, very well, I might add) and got lessons because his parents thought it was the proper thing to do regardless of the cost. I went to the same tutor as a charity case and we paid her some months in pound cake. Went to the same public magnet school, got the same books, had the same teachers. The only thing I had going for me versus my friend was that I just got generically picked on, he got the "What you doing, fool, everyone knows only crackers read and shit" every day of his life.
Sometimes I wonder what happen to him. He's probably pretty successful, I'm guessing. I've got no doubts about Mr. Reading and Shit. He's either on the streets, in prison, or dead.
Anyhow, you can see the breakdown here. http://www.census.gov/prod/2001pubs/cenbr01-1.pdf
The trouble is, the marginal cost per email is still zero. Filtering solves spam for YOU personally (I deal with approximately one a week in English that makes it through SpamAssassin and Thunderbird's bayesian filters, and about one a day in Japanese because their filtering tech rolls over and dies on East Asian languages), but even if only one of a million mails results in a sale that doesn't matter. It most especially doesn't matter because the legitimate players in the industry have long since stopped spamming and whats left are the scam artists and affiliate pyramid schemes who just rent out bot networks to do their dirty work.