As someone with a family member suffering from moderate Crohn's disease and frequently needs to utilize public restrooms this has obvious appeal. While I cringe at the thought of them paying every time a bathroom is needed out in public, the safety net would be great. It also would allow people who are very sick with Crohn's to venture out of their comfort area.
One thing to consider, in the US many states have instituted "Ally's Law" where businesses are legally required to allow people who need immediate restroom access, assuming it doesn't put the business or person in harm's way.
Good stuff, I particularly like #6. As marketer, knowing some programming has come in handy when working with technical folks who occasionally come down with a case of tunnel vision.
I would also add:
- Agency Management - Whether its calling your agency on BS or knowing how to use firebug to quickly diagnose a site problem, it definitely has saved me. (Recently I called a disgruntled web designer out about not using font-face and he has been much easier to get along with since)
- A focused approach - Since I have started to learn programming I noticed that I apply programming principles to (rather mundane) tasks that take up a lot of time but often go overlooked. For example, when programming and creating variable names I make them as specific as possible, so if someone else was working on my code they would know exactly what it is. A simple concept to most people on HN but its something often overlooked by non-programmers. Open up an excel file from marketing person and you will often be left scratching your head.
As for tools for learning to code, recently I have seen lots of places talk about codecademy, but most leave out CodeSchool.com. Definitely recommended - it's been a been a huge help for me and gotten me to the point where I am ready to take it to the next level (hopefully @ Hungry Academy).
My brother's college roommate is banned --> brother gets banned as a result of a false-positive dupe account --> when brother gets home and logs into amazon I get banned.
I was on the phone for hours trying to fix this, nothing ever happened.
Google and eBay get a bit of flack for poor customer service availability and seller relations and they have improved as of late. Hopefully amazon can change for the better too.
That's what I was thinking reading these replies. Amazon must be checking if you log in from the same IP as another seller, but how is that reliable in determining if it's a dupe? Why even allow users to log in from different computers if the only way they check for duplicate seller accounts is if someone else logs in from the same machine?
It seems like the author logged in to his seller account from a public wireless network (coffee shop, office) where another, previously-banned seller account had logged in from at one time, and Amazon assumed both accounts were from the same guy. Maybe they sold the same type of products.
I'm sure they get a lot of sellers who get their account closed and just try to make a new one, but I'd rather have Amazon not catch the sellers who are dumb enough to create an account from the same IP than catch them and get legitimate sellers banned in the process.
I don't take notice of my IP address much, so I can't say if they assigned a static IP address in my case. If they're filtering on IP addresses, I imagine that they get a lot of false positives.
If they are filtering on IP and you're not paying for a static IP address, then Cox's DHCP server could have given you a new IP address that matched someone else who had been banned. Not out of the ballpark of possibilities when IP is used for selection / banning.
Would you have accessed it outside of your home at any point? It could be possible that Amazon keeps a record of where you log in, you shared an IP with a previously banned account at some point, and then you listed an item the other seller had listed.
I'm sure there's a simpler explanation, though. That seems fairly complex.
No, probably not. Console games average price is $50 USD, what is an average tablet app cost -- $3.99? Even if they were selling millions of first party apps, it wouldn't recoup the amount of money they lost on the tablet + app development.
I'm not sure what HP's app market looks like. Do they take 30%?
Also if they can't directly monetize their hardware, this might be a strategy that Amazon (or Google if they ever make an in-house tablet) should look at since they both have large web platforms to extract life-time value of hardware owners.
One thing to consider, in the US many states have instituted "Ally's Law" where businesses are legally required to allow people who need immediate restroom access, assuming it doesn't put the business or person in harm's way.