> When you demand that your people bow and obey, and imprison people like A1 WW, this goes against promoting and nurturing innovation
This is a common misconception, especially by people who have never lived in China.
Thinking political censorship means people are docile all spheres of life.
Chinese people are actually much more prone to rant and fight over everyday injustices: shopkeeper ripped you off, denied entrance somewhere, etc. etc. They just have to be careful not to publicly blame any politicians for the issue or try to organize some group activity to protest it.
Why do you think the government cracks down so hard? Because they're scared: massive and violent people rebellions have erupted throughout Chinese history.
Many Chinese people are also quite creative and innovative when it comes to making money and getting ahead. Some home cooks make deals with restaurants to let their patrons sample their homemade spices with their meals and to buy jars of it if they like it.
Others have started groups on Wechat where members pay to get advice on X topic (http://europe.chinadaily.com.cn/epaper/2015-11/13/content_22...). There are tons more examples like this. In fact, I'd argue it can be easier to get your idea started in China because regulations are lax and it's much easier to network to get what you need.
Also, just to point out, in the West, the majority of people aren't exactly "rebelling against the status quo" and showing "opposition to the norm" because they can march in a protest or sign a petition.
To make it extremely clear if it wasn't already obvious, I'm Chinese and I've lived both on the mainland and in South East Asia.
> This is a common misconception, especially by people who have never lived in China. They just have to be careful not to publicly blame any politicians for the issue or try to organize some group activity to protest it.
You've contradicted yourself pretty quickly; you haven't disputed my main point: people on the mainland on a whole are not willing to rebel and dissent against people and ideas that are above them like the authorities or even their own parents - this translates to other parts of industry and major schools of thought. For example, one of the reasons the Internet has a decentralized architecture is because its designers didn't want to give the US government centralized control over it. Bickering with your peers over trivial things doesn't count, willing to question your boss, teacher, or someone higher in the food chain is what matters.
That said I'm not saying that things can't or will never change. I'm just pointing out the major obstacles to innovation on the mainland.
> Also, just to point out, in the West, the majority of people aren't exactly "rebelling against the status quo" and showing "opposition to the norm"
Not everyone dissents, but there's a large enough portion of the population that does to push innovation and progress.
> because they can march in a protest or sign a petition.
It's easy to make fun of it, but yeah this shows how ingrained rebellion and dissent is in our culture and accepted, which is one of the main foundations of innovation.
"But the people who were actually building this system, they weren't really thinking about Russian attacks. They were kind of rebellious anti-authoritarian types — they wanted power to the people. They called it 'computing power to the people.' And so they created a system in which every node on the Internet has the ability to store, to forward, to originate information. ... This decentralized system made it hard for the Russians to blow it up, but it also made it hard for the government or corporations to control the Internet. ..."
Free speech is not part of Darpa's motivations for inventing the predecessor of internet.
Note that Internet is driver from some evolved tech off Darpa's research.
Again, internet was not designed to advance any political goal, but to withstand nukes. And the internet now days is different from Internet when it's born. The difference is probably more prominent than between a monkey and a human being.
BTW not sure a statement from a media expert can be a proof of Internet's design and implementation goal. I never saw Viny Cerf's similar statement. He did mention Internet is made open in the recent gcp event.
You're right. Freespeech wasn't DARPA's motiviation. However it was the motivation of at least one of the engineers of ARPANET.
"My bias was always to build decentralization into the net. That way it would be hard for one group to gain control. I didn’t trust large central organizations. It was just in my nature to distrust them." -- Robert (Bob) Taylor
DARPA may be the main source of funding, but without the caliber of the team that implemented it; it probably would have either failed or faded into obscurity. A lot of people who live on the edge, tend to have a very strong independent spirit that tends to be at odds with figures of authority.
FIDOnet's temporary connections over POTS copper is arguably more resistant to censorship of a populace.
FIDOnet is arguably the precedent to the Internet, certainly Net culture derives more primally from the BBS scene than any IP transported culture.
Broadband connects an IP addy to a blameable citizen.
This produces a fear of sharing a connection ( and thus liability ) - this is concurrent with the demise of public WiFi.
Wynn Wagner III (Opus BBS) reports a support request from a doctor in Vietnam,[1] who states the (Vietnamese) internet is censored but the phones are not.
For similar but different reasons Tom Jennings reports FIDOnet support requests from .ru domains.[2]
The internets current distribution model seems unlikely to survive massive infrastructure attack, major connection bottlenecks are too narrow now.
Radio HAMS remain the likely communication network of first resort after any large scale devastation.
Facebook is not particuarly more than a very large BBS, (with the addition of Jeremy Bentham's panopticon[3]).
"Though actual observation may be discontinuous, fear of observation is continuous. And, this constant fear of observation produces self-censorship, which, according to Winston, is a “habit that becomes instinct”. Consequently, the panopticon’s monopoly on the body gradually becomes a monopoly on the mind." [4]
> What can this teach us about SaaS pricing pages?
> Even the most successful SaaS companies in the world don’t conform to the ‘best practices’ laid out by conversion specialists.
Not sure I agree with this conclusion. Obviously you should test to see what works for your audience but imo, the whole point of comparing how each company does X is to extract the most common patterns people can use as solid starting points.
The article would have been a lot of more useful if it listed at the end the most common elements SaaS pricing plans share like 63% offer a free trial. It's a waste of time to try to design from scratch instead of referencing what most of your peers are doing.
Also, just because some SaaS companies don't conform to the best practices, it doesn't mean that their way necessarily converts better. Maybe they would convert more if they did certain best practices.
I think someone else mentioned this in another post about this. Thought it was a great idea so I'll repeat it here:
To prevent fraudsters from using you to authenticate their stolen credit cards, set it up so that every purchase automatically redirects to a 'order successful' page. After seeing that a few their credit card numbers all seem to work on your site, the fraudster will realize they can't use your site to test and move on. In the back-end, turn on manual approval of each purchase and let through the ones you deem legitimate.
Should a legitimate customer mistype their credit card info, send them a follow up email with a link to the order page briefly explaining to them the situation and asking them to enter their details again.
(If there's some issue with this method I haven't thought of, let me know.)
M = Full match
P = Partial match
C = Match, but account is closed
L = Match, but card is lost or stolen
E = Invalid card number
X = No record or security alert
N = No match
IMO, you can display an error page for some types of issues without helping scammers. However, for physical goods it's a good idea to wait 24+ hours to display C or L codes to users. That way it's not useful for CC scammers, and you have minimal impact on users. Partial matches or other stages that fail your security checks are up to you.
Additionally if a customer is a repeated customer you may want to "whitelist" them, assuming they ever need to update their info (card expiration). Just a small tweak so they get feedback right away if they keep coming back.
Actually, you can just do a Luhn check on the credit card and if it fails show an error message.
Scammer cards will pass the Luhn check, so it won't be helpful for them validating cards. But it will catch many customer typos, thus giving them immediate feedback.
Best reply, but... How often is a typo made (1:1000?), how much time for support staff is needed and how many lost orders due to a ~24 hour delay in some orders being placed. Also, easy to flood the system with bad orders that need to be manually sorted, like a fake order DDoS.
If a typo is made 1:1000 times Candy Japan would have had.. 2? At this small scale it's probably worth it - the loss of a customer isn't as big a problem as loss of physical goods.
Not to mention that you can verify the Luhn checksum on CC numbers and immediately catch ~90% of all typos (and 100% of single-digit typos). Don't even need a server call.
Would a simple delay in confirmation be enough to dissuade them? e.g. 10 mins? an hour? There's probably some critical threshold where it's not worth it for the criminal/s.
Since the candy can't be dispatched instantly anyway, you could arrange it to not affect delivery times.
Though of course, delayed confirmation would also put off genuine customers. So you could faux-confirm it instantly, and follow-up later if there's a problem. i.e. same as parent, but fully automated.
That doesn't seem like a big enough hurdle. Card testing is already automated with bots, and this method can be easily defeated with a simple tweak (e.g. use a catch-all address and then automate the link clicking).
I know you wrote that it's just "out-running you, not the bear," but you probably won't be outrunning others for very long.
Edit: I have no problem with measures that could help protect against fraud even just a little, but this one also introduces friction for legitimate customers, so it needs to be sufficiently effective to be worth it.
Some low hanging fruit: orders where the billing address is an exact match and it also matches the shipping address are probably the most likely to be legit.
usually, sure - this case is interesting b/c the fraudsters don't care about receiving the actual product
this is a really big field - most large companies that have to process tons of transactions will implement a big data approach - put together as much demographic and behavioral info about customer as possible and analyze risk. this is really impossible for small vendors
AVS which checks the billing address only really works in US. It's pretty much useless in any other countries in the world (it's partially supported by some banks in Canada and UK but that's it)
Definitely agree with this. I'm surprised so many companies still bother to produce content in the form of crappy articles on beat the horse to death topics.
It feels like having a blog is a must-have to be a legit company these days so a lot of companies hire someone to churn out $30 articles just to have one.
I definitely think companies need to reimagine content. First by moving away from the incredibly boring blog format.
>>> First by moving away from the incredibly boring blog format.
There is nothing wrong with the blog format per se. The problem is, as you correctly identified, crappy articles.
What your examples have in common is that they provide value to the user. That's the key no matter what's the medium you are using to do so. There's nothing wrong with the blog format that prevents you from providing value.
But blogs do tend towards presentism, by virtue of how they present their information... and those in the know are well aware of how easy it is to set up a blog, making the medium a little contemptible compared to a well-done "roll-your-own" webpage.
One company whose content I really admire is HelpScout.net
They do incredible stuff, especially with their design and presentation. The content itself isn't as compelling as, say, Priceonomics, but it is still very, very good.
I believe they occupy different, but slightly overlapping niches in the chain of causation. Theranos' claim to fame is a method of blood testing that requires drawing of significantly smaller amounts compared to traditional/ contemporary methods of blood testing. The claim is that Theranos' method can produce satisfactory blood test results with smaller vials of blood. Google's patent however is specifically on the means of drawing. Therefore, a medical care provider could reasonably combine Google+Theranos' methods, unless of course Theranos' method has a strictly incompatible means of drawing blood. Hopefully someone more versed can shed more light on this
Maybe I'm missing something but I always thought renting designer clothes has a limited market.
People who attend many special events a year where they need a new outfit for each one typically have the disposable income to outright buy their clothes or have companies borrow them clothes for the publicity.
The average person who goes to a few special events a year? You can buy a nice outfit for just a little more than what they're renting a designer dress for. And you get the keep it forever and wear it some time later.
The only time I've rented a dress was for prom and that was because it didn't make sense to buy a dress I was going to outgrow in a few years.
This isn't actually true. A new Vegas dress for a lot of my friends would cost as much as the rest of their whole trip to Vegas. Furthermore, women 18-30 have tons of weddings, bachelorette parties, work functions, holiday events, birthday parties, brunches, and weekend bars to visit, but almost all of those cost less per person than some of these new dresses.
Unless you have the right connections, go to the right schools, have the right French names, it's very difficult to get a good job. Even more so if you come from banlieues. With no job prospects and isolation from mainstream society, some Muslim youths retreat to religion and out of those, some discover and/or led to radical ideologies.
If you read the article, you'll see that there are some Muslims who are trying to rescue these youths. I feel this could be part of an actually solution. Since Muslim youth won't trust outsiders at all, the government can provide Muslim community leaders some resources to intervene in the lives of youths that are going down the wrong paths from crime to radicalization.
Also, they can consider setting up programs for parents to identify the signs of radicalization and educate them about how to intervene and de-escalate. Apparently, a father of one of the Paris attackers even went all the way to Syria to persuade his son to come home. Even after offering him a plan where he didn't have to go to prison but could resettle in Algeria and try to rebuild his life, the son refused. After a certain point in the radicalization process, there seems to be a point of no return.
Clearly, just bombing ISIS is not going to work when the majority of these terrorists lived in Europe.
First off, men also compete against other men. Men also compete against women. Basically, humans compete against each other.
Now about her theory:
>That’s the third theory of female competitiveness that I’d like to propose: We aren’t competing with other women, ultimately, but with ourselves — with how we think of ourselves. For many of us, we look at other women and see, instead, a version of ourselves that is better, prettier, smarter, something more. We don’t see the other woman at all.
The article already starts off weak because it doesn't define and separate productive competitiveness from unhealthy competitiveness.
But assuming she's addressing the unhealthy "competitiveness".
Girls don't so much compete against other girls as compare themselves with other girls. When we perceive themselves as inferior in some way, some express our displeasure in unhealthy behaviors (gossiping, overcompensating, etc.) and negative emotions.
Most of it stems from poor self-esteem, poor self-image and a scarcity mindset (if there exists someone smarter, prettier than me, it threatens my chances of getting what I want). I don't imagine this to be specific to one gender though, I'm positive guys go through the same issues.
Describe in simple terms a major product feature that either or both:
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b) makes you the most different from your closest competitor
Examples:
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https://mailchimp.com/: Easiest to use email marketing platform
https://www.pipedrive.com/: Drag and drop interface CRM - view all deals by type at a glance
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http://www.artofemails.com/ - Proven prewritten sales email templates