E14n

You need control of the hardware to insure security. Think about what you could do if you run the credit card verification software in a debugger.

Cash usage is mostly because people feel they are more likely to get cheated by the banks then be robbed (which is probably a pretty fair assessment of risk ;).

I remember in the past making a $6,000 bank transfers by going to the convenience store ATM taking out money and going to the bank ATM. I don't know anywhere else in the world where I would feel safe doing that.

There is also a lot of electronic money usage. Many people carry hundreds of dollars on their rail cards.

Credit cards are considered risky in Japan. My understanding is that chargebacks are not enshrined in law so its not guaranteed and whether it is or not most people presume they will have to pay if their credit card is fraudulently charged.

Convenience store payments are also popular because they are low risk and convenient.

Anything that allows the free flow of information is good for copyright infringement, but when you are contorting Laws in absurd perverse ways its better to have a fat ugly obnoxious guy on the receiving end.

Showing enough information for your users to sensibly understand what they should do is important, but thats not what the article was about[1], it was about the application developer wanting to pass-the-buck when there application failed because of a Heroku error.

This is really lame because, you chose to host on Heroku not your customers, so it is your fault. You can play pass-the-buck but as far as your customers are concerned it is your fault.

1. "..Quit blaming all of us"

I guess it is a different culture. In the teams I have experience with, people referred because they wanted to work with good people.

I don't know what the culture is like at Miso but I would take

"After you lost our data and caused our entire company to scramble for 3 days, I am hesitant."

as

"How do I justify to the rest of the team paying you an exorbitant bonus for team building after you trashed a production system that cost the team 3 days of work, then quit."

Not that this changes the fact that they should have paid.

This benefit scheme appears to be designed to encourage team building. The cost of replacing a good employee is greater then the benefit gained from introducing a new hire. I guess they don't want to reward someone for team building when they are actually a net loss in this area. I think they should have read this[1] and thought about this a bit more.

1. http://blog.fogcreek.com/why-do-we-pay-sales-commissions/