Autorenewed for ....my convenience???

I recently purchased a subscription to a some what popular dating site that will remain nameless in this post. ;) I could begin a discourse on the various dating sites online but that isn't the focus of this post. This post is about a particular aspect of their subscription service that I've noticed in other web sites that offer services on a subscription basis. Namely, the "auto renew" option that many offer after the term of your purchase are complete. Almost everyone automatically renews the subscription once the payment term is complete "for your convenience" ...this always pissed me off. It pissed me off because anyone who is aware of what is going on knows that "your convenience" is the furthest thing from the site owners mind in providing this autorenew feature. It works something like this. People tend to behave very impulsively online, they shoot from one site to the next, often you find yourself surfing for hours and at any given minute not quite knowing how you got to a particular website. Along with this comes a tendency to buy things that maybe you would not even come across had you not been bouncing around doing your random surfing. Coming across sites that offer subscription services , be it for dating or some other service and tempted to sign up just to test the service is something I've wanted to do many times...but always that auto renew "convenience" waits to bite you at the end of the month ...when you've completely forgotten about the site. This is what the site owners really want, by requiring that you explicitly cancel the act of automatically paying them on a recurring basis they ensure that if you forget you pay them anyway. Usually, they tie this with "no refund" statements in their terms of use which conveniently I am sure , gets them thousands of dollars of over month subscriptions from people that failed to "cancel" at the end of the month. Such a practice itself does have some benefit I am sure to some people but I've noticed that every implementation of "auto renew" I've come across doesn't have the delivery of a friendly email say to warn you that your term is about to expire and then autorenew, that's the least they could do if they are about to extract some money from your credit card right???

Recently I've implemented the payment processing for services that I offer on the collaboration web site I am about launch, I have no auto renew option on the site. Instead I let the term of the plans expire, the next time the User logs in they will be redirected to the terms page to purchase an extension to their existing account (no need to recreate a new one) ...this solves the problem that forcing payments from those user that may not want to resubscribe for additional terms, it also gives those that do the option of extending their plan the next time they come in to use the service. It turns out that omitting the option makes my payment processing logic easier as well, I don't have to store renew information with a payment processor (most third party processors offer this service) and that reduces the necessary communications between my servers and the payment processor that could cause some pathology during the payment and confirmation process. At the same time, and most importantly to me, I don't have to subtly lie to my customers , telling them that autorenew is for their convenience when really it would be mostly for mine. (to fish money out their pockets while they sleep)

the attributes of web 3.0...

As the US economy continues to suffer the doldrums of stagnant investment in many industries, belt tightening budgets in many of the largest cities and continuous rounds of lay offs at some of the oldest of corporations, it is little comfort to those suffering through economic problems that what is happening now, has happened before. True, the severity of the downturn might have been different but the common factors of people and businesses being forced to do more with less is the theme of the times. Like environmental shocks to an ecosystem, stresses to the economic system lead to people hunkering down to last the storm, but it is instructive to realize that during the storm, all that idle time in the shelter affords people the ability to solve previous or existing problems. Likewise, economic downturns enable enterprising individuals and corporations the ability to make bold decisions with regard to marketing , sales or product focus that can lead to incredible gains as the economic ...

How many cofactors for inducing expression of every cell type?

Another revolution in iPSC technology announced: "Also known as iPS cells, these cells can become virtually any cell type in the human body -- just like embryonic stem cells. Then last year, Gladstone Senior Investigator Sheng Ding, PhD, announced that he had used a combination of small molecules and genetic factors to transform skin cells directly into neural stem cells. Today, Dr. Huang takes a new tack by using one genetic factor -- Sox2 -- to directly reprogram one cell type into another without reverting to the pluripotent state." -- So the method invented by Yamanaka is now refined to rely only 1 cofactor and b) directly generate the target cell type from the source cell type (skin to neuron) without the stem like intermediate stage. It also mentions that oncogenic triggering was eliminated in their testing. Now comparative methods can be used to discover other types...the question is..is Sox2 critical for all types? It may be that skin to neuron relies on Sox2 ...

AgilEntity Architecture: Action Oriented Workflow

Permissions, fine grained versus management headache The usual method for determining which users can perform a given function on a given object in a managed system, employs providing those Users with specific access rights via the use of permissions. Often these permissions are also able to be granted to collections called Groups, to which Users are added. The combination of Permissions and Groups provides the ability to provide as atomic a dissemination of rights across the User space as possible. However, this granularity comes at the price of reduced efficiency for managing the created permissions and more importantly the Groups that collect Users designated to perform sets of actions. Essentially the Groups serve as access control lists in many systems, which for the variable and often changing environment of business applications means a need to constantly update the ACL’s (groups) in order to add or remove individuals based on their ability to perform cert...

sent2null space

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