For me Google was better from day 1. With AltaVista you could spend 30 minutes crafting the perfect query and the result you needed was still buried on page 5, while Google just seemed to know what you wanted. You're right about the attempts of AltaVista, Yahoo, and other to be "portals" rather than simple search engines hurt them badly, but Google was simply better at search as well.
Your recollection of Google's early functionality is incorrect. Automatic AND, "-" for NOT, and phrase searches were in place at the start of 1999. https://web.archive.org/web/19...
Commodore never used the PC acronym in its marketing or branding.
Yes, they did.
For their IBM PC clones,
for the C128 in some markets, and
for the Amiga. Your theory that "PC" referred exclusively to IBM PC compatibles is not true. It did eventually come to mean that, but in the 1980's it simply meant "personal computer".
I disagree with you, also a simple Google search would allow you to learn that you can obtain this behaviour by prefixing the obligatory words with '+'.
Not anymore. Google now returns results which don't always have all the obligatory words in the page, though it does tell you if some are missing.
Maybe there's a niche for small payloads like this, but in all honesty, I expect you could fly several such payloads on one bigger rocket, or just hitchhike on the spare capacity on a big satellite launch. Still, worth a shot. Just don't pretend to be playing in the big leagues.
Where did they claim to be playing in the big leagues? And yes, there is a niche for microsatellite launch services. Your unnecessarily grumpy comments are largely correct, but you've missed the whole point of the operation, which is cost. Virgin's LauncherOne is aiming for $10m per launch, these guys are claiming half that price.
The problem is idiots who don't realize the internet is not a toy. Trolls do it for the lulz and don't realize that no, they're actually creating a very permanent record of their activities.
Troll all you want, but realize that your five minutes of fun is recorded and you may find yourself as the top news story worldwide. If you want to offend, go for it knowing it WILL haunt you forever. This isn't a bathroom wall in some gas station - it's a gigantic unforgetting bathroom wall that the world sees.
It's not always so black and white though. See, for example, the Justine Sacco case. She made a satirical joke and it was misinterpreted.
Then there's this story on This American Life: act one specifically. It highlights how the ire of a community can be directed unjustly.
Then the assholes shouldn't have said anything in the first place. We're not talking about a couple of screwed up kids thinking that they're funny. The people doing this were adults. There is no fucking excuse for this.
Like many others in this discussion you've reduced it to a black and white situation: they did something wrong, therefore they deserve everything that might possibly come in terms of consequences. That's an extraordinarily harsh attitude to take to mistakes made by teenagers.
If someone came onto your lawn and started yelling about how they were going to rape your daughter, they're not going to get a little slap on the wrist. They'd get arrested, thrown in jail, and possibly be put on a sex offender list.
This example supports my point: the justice system deals with this sort of thing in right way, with a measured, proportionate, just response. Sex offender lists do amount to public shaming (and they are somewhat controversial for that reason) but even you are not sure that would be appropriate in the above scenario. Yet that's exactly what you're advocating in online cases. Also note that if they are on your lawn the threat is rather more immediate and credible than bullying online. That makes a difference. Finally, I suspect you've overestimated what the justice system's response to a single incident of that nature would be.
In the general case, the problem with your position is that it assumes that this sort of response is always justified and correct. But at best this is mob justice and the mob will get it wrong at times. The Justine Sacco case is a good example. She made a joke that was misinterpreted. The consequences far outweighed the "crime".
So the harm done is directly proportional ONLY to the persons own actions.
The problem is that the response is not proportional because everyone who hears about this and is offended on behalf of the victim can take their little piece of revenge. There is nothing to keep this public shaming reasonable or just.
So since that might happen one in 500 million times of ACTUAL trolling - so we should do nothing at all about real trolls that we can actually combat. Even though it can be disproved...
The good of the many and all that. We should not back down from preventing common crime because of a hypothetical.
Are you really claiming that the only options are "do nothing" and "destroy the perpetrators lives"? That's ridiculous. We have created a justice system in our society to punish wrongdoers in a measured, proportionate way, and also to give the accused the opportunity to defend themselves. We abandoned public shaming decades ago because it is not measured, proportionate punishment. So why are you so keen to go back to public shaming? Why don't you think the justice system can work in these cases?
He could have contacted the bully's schools/employers directly, as he apparently did with the other 7 college athletes he mentioned. He could still have publicised the resulting consequences as a warning without exposing these assholes to the inevitable internet pile-on that is occurring now. He's obviously made a judgement that those 7 deserve a second chance and the 4 he outed do not. But while I have little sympathy for these dickheads, and I completely understand his motivation, I don't like this eye-for-an-eye response. There is no proportionality when something like this goes viral. Should these guys have their lives ruined over this? Should they be subjected to the same bullying magnified through the lens of a million internet users out for "justice"? I think not. If one of these idiots kills himself over the response Curt will have effectively sentenced him to death. We shouldn't be comfortable with that outcome as a society.
Both the "inevitability" and "good-faith" exceptions might apply in this case. But in the end the defence didn't or couldn't use parallel construction to get the laptop evidence omitted so it's irrelevant.
Titanic and Avatar had better visuals than Serenity, to be sure, and Titanic had some good performances. I thought Avatar was a bucket of problems and flaws with some pretty colors, but really there's few of it's many, mnay flaws that I'm blame on a director.
That's hardly surprising. Titanic had 5 times the budget of Serenity and Avatar's was even larger. I was at least as impressed with the visuals in The Avengers as I was with Titanic and Firefly was extremely impressive visually for a TV show of that period.
It's quite hard to separate Cameron's direction of Avatar from his other roles of writer, editor, and producer. When a scene didn't work was it badly directed? Or badly edited? Or just poorly written? It's hard to tell. A perfectly well written scene can be ruined with poor direction and even if well written and directed it can be butchered by poor editing. In the end it doesn't actually matter because ultimately the bad result was the product of the same man's creative failure. As you say Cameron wouldn't simply direct a Star Wars movie. Whedon would probably not stick to directing either but I have rather more confidence in his ability to produce something good.
Commercial airliners have no business overflying warzones
"Warzones" as defined by who? The FAA didn't include this area in the area they warned US carriers to avoid in April. Should the airlines monitor the media for reports of SAM installation sightings?
Too much of a coincidence for a plane to crash in a war zone where a fighter was shot down just the other day and a transport aircraft An-26 was shot down by a missile at 25,000ft couple of days ago. And by the way, why would a commercial airliner fly through such an airspace anyway?
No U.S. carrier has been allowed to fly over certain parts of Ukraine since the end of April, due to an FAA order.
Yet TradeMe still exists and people use direct bank transfers than any other payment method on the site. If your claim (that business this way is not practical) was true then people would not use direct bank transfers. But they do. Ipso facto your claim can't be true.
My claim was and still is that using cash eliminates many of the scams - your claim was that scamming was too infrequent to matter. I provided evidence that it was frequent enough that the marketplace warned you against handing over money via bank transfers (other than their own special bank transfer that still had no guarantees). Please read those links I posted - they actually specifically warn against bank transfers.
I did read those links and they did not warn against bank transfers except overseas (and overseas transfers are quite different anyway - I can't simply entering an overseas bank account number in online banking to initiate a transfer as I can with domestic accounts). In fact both links are primarily concerned with phishing, not the sort of fraud we've been talking about. Obviously that is because the scamming you've been claiming is such an issue is not actually significant - it is phishing that catches people. My bank also warns me against phishing, yet they don't warn me against using direct transfers. What does that tell you?
If your claim is as minor as you're now saying, my response is "so what?" You might as well say that you can't be scammed in a transaction if you don't enter into private transactions at all. It's true, but it's irrelevant. Of course I concede that cash is less vulnerable to certain types of fraud than other payment methods. But the theoretically higher incidence of scamming with direct bank transfers is still so low that it doesn't matter. The fact remains that if scamming was as widespread as you make out then people would not use TradeMe or similar markets. Those markets exist, and are massive, ergo scamming is not the problem you think it is.
But the system still works. You haven't provided any evidence that it doesn't. You haven't even provided evidence that the incidence of fraud is higher with direct bank transfers.
I don't need to provide evidence that it doesn't work because I never made the claim that it does not work. I claimed that untrusted transactions are best with payment and possession taking place at the same time, hence cash works best for this. The sites you pointed me to warn specifically about doing bank transfers.
Cash doesn't work best for this because it is only practical for transactions in a limited geographic area. How far are you prepared to travel to gain this protection you rate so highly for a $20 transaction? $100? $1000?
Again, those links you provided do not warn against direct bank transfers. Did you actually read them?
You're saying "it can't possibly work, because scams". I'm telling you it does actually work here.
You're claiming "It works, because there are no scams", and I'm telling you, right now and right here, there are scams in all the classifieds. You're relying on the fact that people are honest; I'm comfortable being skeptical. You're asking me to trust "because it doesn't happen", and I'm saying that over here it's a daily occurrence. I actually don't know how to make it any clearer - if you're buying something off of craigslist, or whichever classifieds, the damn site itself warns you to be skeptical! Even the marketplace itself is telling you that there are scammers out there!
No, you're misrepresenting my position. I never claimed there were no scams. I said it was not a significant problem in practice. Perhaps that is due to a difference in the cultures of our countries. But the fact remains that the system works here. When you claim that a system that is in widespread use doesn't work, that's not skepticism. It's simply denial.
From the trademe site, they warn about this specifically: http://www.trademe.co.nz/trust...
So, they themselves think that if you hand over money you could lose it. Let me emphasise that for you: Trademe themselves think that you should use any protection you can when paying money and you should not rely on trust!
So the trust issue is not an insignificant problem, but it is one that is painlessly solved by using cash.
Yet TradeMe still exists and people use direct bank transfers than any other payment method on the site. If your claim (that business this way is not practical) was true then people would not use direct bank transfers. But they do. Ipso facto your claim can't be true.
Again, the system is widely used here. So the onus is on you to back up your claim that it can't possibly work with evidence.
But the system still works. You haven't provided any evidence that it doesn't. You haven't even provided evidence that the incidence of fraud is higher with direct bank transfers.
You're saying "it can't possibly work, because scams". I'm telling you it does actually work here.
You're claiming "It works, because there are no scams", and I'm telling you, right now and right here, there are scams in all the classifieds. You're relying on the fact that people are honest; I'm comfortable being skeptical. You're asking me to trust "because it doesn't happen", and I'm saying that over here it's a daily occurrence. I actually don't know how to make it any clearer - if you're buying something off of craigslist, or whichever classifieds, the damn site itself warns you to be skeptical! Even the marketplace itself is telling you that there are scammers out there!
No, you're misrepresenting my position. I never claimed there were no scams. I said it was not a significant problem in practice. Perhaps that is due to a difference in the cultures of our countries. But the fact remains that the system works here. When you claim that a system that is in widespread use doesn't work, that's not skepticism. It's simply denial. Again, I am not talking theoretically - if you believe I'm wrong you can track down the crime statistics for New Zealand and prove that there is significant fraud on TradeMe. But you'd be wasting your time because there isn't. There are isolated cases, but not to the point where it's seen as riskier than any other private transaction, and certainly not to the point where the system doesn't work.
Again, the system is widely used here. So the onus is on you to back up your claim that it can't possibly work with evidence.
Someone dealing in cash can just as easily be robbed by the seller.
True, but if you're going to mug someone, why post on the classifieds first? You're just as likely to be mugged leaving a bank after all.
Your position is that direct bank transfers aren't safe essentially because the seller is not so easy catch if they decide to commit a crime. This is exactly the same as the difference between mugging someone in a public place ("leaving a bank") and luring them to some place private before mugging them.
And then you have scams arising where you pay your money and the "seller" vanishes. The only safe way to deal with a potential scam when trading through the classifieds is to hand over payment and take possession of the item
at the same time. Not possible if one party has to wait to verify payment.
You're arguing hypotheticals against reality.
What are you talking about? What's not a reality?
You're saying "it can't possibly work, because scams". I'm telling you it does actually work here. The concerns you have raised are simply not a significant problem in actual fact. The system I've described is not some theoretical idea, it is how actual business is actually conducted in the country I live in. Not sure how I can say this any more plainly.
It's simply not a problem here. If it were it could be solved simply by requiring sufficient proof of identity to post the classified in the first place. A marketplace which gets a reputation for allowing sellers to get away with fraud is not going to last long.
Once again it comes down to trust - you trust that the marketplace has identified the scammer. What if you're the first person to respond to the ad? Regardless, you're still asking two parties who are unknown to each other to trust each other with no real evidence that the trust is warranted. My point still stands in this reality - transactions need to be completed when there is a lack of trust. Cash works for this. Waiting doesn't (hence the reason bitcoin is still less traded than actual toy money).
Someone dealing in cash can just as easily be robbed by the seller.
And then you have scams arising where you pay your money and the "seller" vanishes. The only safe way to deal with a potential scam when trading through the classifieds is to hand over payment and take possession of the item
at the same time. Not possible if one party has to wait to verify payment.
You're arguing hypotheticals against reality. It's simply not a problem here. If it were it could be solved simply by requiring sufficient proof of identity to post the classified in the first place. A marketplace which gets a reputation for allowing sellers to get away with fraud is not going to last long.
Actually very little. If your bank lets someone else fraudulently withdrawal from your account they are on the hook for the money. The main problem is if they get the account number wrong and the typo corresponds to a real account (which would require two digits wrong). In that case it can be difficult to get your money back from the unintended recipient (if they've already taken it out of the account). So not much risk for the seller.
And then there's the personal sale angle. I'm not going to take paypal or have the ability to process credit cards for a yard sale or some crap that I'm selling through the classifieds or craigslist. Given how I'm mainly just trying to recoup something in the process of a sale, adding more hoops or steps will just result in my not bothering to sell junk anymore.
In this country direct bank transactions are used for a lot of this. It's not quite as easy as taking cash when you hand over the item but it's not much harder: give them your bank account number when they agree to the sale and then check that the money is there before handing over the item. If you're going to bank the money anyway it's actually easier. Obviously it's not practical for yard sales but it works pretty well for classifieds and online sales.
You use it at work but nobody gets excited to use Java at home.
I use it at home. It's not appropriate for everything but I find Java + Eclipse to be a very pleasant and productive environment so it's often the option I prefer.
Slashdot Mirror
The actual news part of Fox News is usually factual. The pundits often lie, and Bill O'Reilly is far from the worse offender.
For me Google was better from day 1. With AltaVista you could spend 30 minutes crafting the perfect query and the result you needed was still buried on page 5, while Google just seemed to know what you wanted. You're right about the attempts of AltaVista, Yahoo, and other to be "portals" rather than simple search engines hurt them badly, but Google was simply better at search as well. Your recollection of Google's early functionality is incorrect. Automatic AND, "-" for NOT, and phrase searches were in place at the start of 1999. https://web.archive.org/web/19...
Commodore never used the PC acronym in its marketing or branding.
Yes, they did. For their IBM PC clones, for the C128 in some markets, and for the Amiga. Your theory that "PC" referred exclusively to IBM PC compatibles is not true. It did eventually come to mean that, but in the 1980's it simply meant "personal computer".
I disagree with you, also a simple Google search would allow you to learn that you can obtain this behaviour by prefixing the obligatory words with '+'.
Not anymore. Google now returns results which don't always have all the obligatory words in the page, though it does tell you if some are missing.
Maybe there's a niche for small payloads like this, but in all honesty, I expect you could fly several such payloads on one bigger rocket, or just hitchhike on the spare capacity on a big satellite launch. Still, worth a shot. Just don't pretend to be playing in the big leagues.
Where did they claim to be playing in the big leagues? And yes, there is a niche for microsatellite launch services. Your unnecessarily grumpy comments are largely correct, but you've missed the whole point of the operation, which is cost. Virgin's LauncherOne is aiming for $10m per launch, these guys are claiming half that price.
I suspect the Numberphile videos about shuffling inspired this article.
Was going to say much the same thing. Whoever wrote that needs to get some perspective.
The problem is idiots who don't realize the internet is not a toy. Trolls do it for the lulz and don't realize that no, they're actually creating a very permanent record of their activities.
Troll all you want, but realize that your five minutes of fun is recorded and you may find yourself as the top news story worldwide. If you want to offend, go for it knowing it WILL haunt you forever. This isn't a bathroom wall in some gas station - it's a gigantic unforgetting bathroom wall that the world sees.
It's not always so black and white though. See, for example, the Justine Sacco case. She made a satirical joke and it was misinterpreted. Then there's this story on This American Life: act one specifically. It highlights how the ire of a community can be directed unjustly.
Then the assholes shouldn't have said anything in the first place. We're not talking about a couple of screwed up kids thinking that they're funny. The people doing this were adults. There is no fucking excuse for this.
Like many others in this discussion you've reduced it to a black and white situation: they did something wrong, therefore they deserve everything that might possibly come in terms of consequences. That's an extraordinarily harsh attitude to take to mistakes made by teenagers.
If someone came onto your lawn and started yelling about how they were going to rape your daughter, they're not going to get a little slap on the wrist. They'd get arrested, thrown in jail, and possibly be put on a sex offender list.
This example supports my point: the justice system deals with this sort of thing in right way, with a measured, proportionate, just response. Sex offender lists do amount to public shaming (and they are somewhat controversial for that reason) but even you are not sure that would be appropriate in the above scenario. Yet that's exactly what you're advocating in online cases. Also note that if they are on your lawn the threat is rather more immediate and credible than bullying online. That makes a difference. Finally, I suspect you've overestimated what the justice system's response to a single incident of that nature would be.
In the general case, the problem with your position is that it assumes that this sort of response is always justified and correct. But at best this is mob justice and the mob will get it wrong at times. The Justine Sacco case is a good example. She made a joke that was misinterpreted. The consequences far outweighed the "crime".
So the harm done is directly proportional ONLY to the persons own actions.
The problem is that the response is not proportional because everyone who hears about this and is offended on behalf of the victim can take their little piece of revenge. There is nothing to keep this public shaming reasonable or just.
So since that might happen one in 500 million times of ACTUAL trolling - so we should do nothing at all about real trolls that we can actually combat. Even though it can be disproved...
The good of the many and all that. We should not back down from preventing common crime because of a hypothetical.
Are you really claiming that the only options are "do nothing" and "destroy the perpetrators lives"? That's ridiculous. We have created a justice system in our society to punish wrongdoers in a measured, proportionate way, and also to give the accused the opportunity to defend themselves. We abandoned public shaming decades ago because it is not measured, proportionate punishment. So why are you so keen to go back to public shaming? Why don't you think the justice system can work in these cases?
He could have contacted the bully's schools/employers directly, as he apparently did with the other 7 college athletes he mentioned. He could still have publicised the resulting consequences as a warning without exposing these assholes to the inevitable internet pile-on that is occurring now. He's obviously made a judgement that those 7 deserve a second chance and the 4 he outed do not. But while I have little sympathy for these dickheads, and I completely understand his motivation, I don't like this eye-for-an-eye response. There is no proportionality when something like this goes viral. Should these guys have their lives ruined over this? Should they be subjected to the same bullying magnified through the lens of a million internet users out for "justice"? I think not. If one of these idiots kills himself over the response Curt will have effectively sentenced him to death. We shouldn't be comfortable with that outcome as a society.
Both the "inevitability" and "good-faith" exceptions might apply in this case. But in the end the defence didn't or couldn't use parallel construction to get the laptop evidence omitted so it's irrelevant.
I have an old laptop with 4GB but it's running Windows XP 32 bit so I can only use 3GB. Have I also been lied to?
Titanic and Avatar had better visuals than Serenity, to be sure, and Titanic had some good performances. I thought Avatar was a bucket of problems and flaws with some pretty colors, but really there's few of it's many, mnay flaws that I'm blame on a director.
That's hardly surprising. Titanic had 5 times the budget of Serenity and Avatar's was even larger. I was at least as impressed with the visuals in The Avengers as I was with Titanic and Firefly was extremely impressive visually for a TV show of that period.
It's quite hard to separate Cameron's direction of Avatar from his other roles of writer, editor, and producer. When a scene didn't work was it badly directed? Or badly edited? Or just poorly written? It's hard to tell. A perfectly well written scene can be ruined with poor direction and even if well written and directed it can be butchered by poor editing. In the end it doesn't actually matter because ultimately the bad result was the product of the same man's creative failure. As you say Cameron wouldn't simply direct a Star Wars movie. Whedon would probably not stick to directing either but I have rather more confidence in his ability to produce something good.
I assume you've ruled out academia?
Commercial airliners have no business overflying warzones
"Warzones" as defined by who? The FAA didn't include this area in the area they warned US carriers to avoid in April. Should the airlines monitor the media for reports of SAM installation sightings?
Too much of a coincidence for a plane to crash in a war zone where a fighter was shot down just the other day and a transport aircraft An-26 was shot down by a missile at 25,000ft couple of days ago. And by the way, why would a commercial airliner fly through such an airspace anyway?
No U.S. carrier has been allowed to fly over certain parts of Ukraine since the end of April, due to an FAA order.
Certain parts, apparently not including the area this plane was flying over.
Yet TradeMe still exists and people use direct bank transfers than any other payment method on the site. If your claim (that business this way is not practical) was true then people would not use direct bank transfers. But they do. Ipso facto your claim can't be true.
My claim was and still is that using cash eliminates many of the scams - your claim was that scamming was too infrequent to matter. I provided evidence that it was frequent enough that the marketplace warned you against handing over money via bank transfers (other than their own special bank transfer that still had no guarantees). Please read those links I posted - they actually specifically warn against bank transfers.
I did read those links and they did not warn against bank transfers except overseas (and overseas transfers are quite different anyway - I can't simply entering an overseas bank account number in online banking to initiate a transfer as I can with domestic accounts). In fact both links are primarily concerned with phishing, not the sort of fraud we've been talking about. Obviously that is because the scamming you've been claiming is such an issue is not actually significant - it is phishing that catches people. My bank also warns me against phishing, yet they don't warn me against using direct transfers. What does that tell you?
If your claim is as minor as you're now saying, my response is "so what?" You might as well say that you can't be scammed in a transaction if you don't enter into private transactions at all. It's true, but it's irrelevant. Of course I concede that cash is less vulnerable to certain types of fraud than other payment methods. But the theoretically higher incidence of scamming with direct bank transfers is still so low that it doesn't matter. The fact remains that if scamming was as widespread as you make out then people would not use TradeMe or similar markets. Those markets exist, and are massive, ergo scamming is not the problem you think it is.
But the system still works. You haven't provided any evidence that it doesn't. You haven't even provided evidence that the incidence of fraud is higher with direct bank transfers.
I don't need to provide evidence that it doesn't work because I never made the claim that it does not work. I claimed that untrusted transactions are best with payment and possession taking place at the same time, hence cash works best for this. The sites you pointed me to warn specifically about doing bank transfers.
Cash doesn't work best for this because it is only practical for transactions in a limited geographic area. How far are you prepared to travel to gain this protection you rate so highly for a $20 transaction? $100? $1000?
Again, those links you provided do not warn against direct bank transfers. Did you actually read them?
You're saying "it can't possibly work, because scams". I'm telling you it does actually work here.
You're claiming "It works, because there are no scams", and I'm telling you, right now and right here, there are scams in all the classifieds. You're relying on the fact that people are honest; I'm comfortable being skeptical. You're asking me to trust "because it doesn't happen", and I'm saying that over here it's a daily occurrence. I actually don't know how to make it any clearer - if you're buying something off of craigslist, or whichever classifieds, the damn site itself warns you to be skeptical! Even the marketplace itself is telling you that there are scammers out there!
No, you're misrepresenting my position. I never claimed there were no scams. I said it was not a significant problem in practice. Perhaps that is due to a difference in the cultures of our countries. But the fact remains that the system works here. When you claim that a system that is in widespread use doesn't work, that's not skepticism. It's simply denial.
From the trademe site, they warn about this specifically: http://www.trademe.co.nz/trust... So, they themselves think that if you hand over money you could lose it. Let me emphasise that for you: Trademe themselves think that you should use any protection you can when paying money and you should not rely on trust!
So the trust issue is not an insignificant problem, but it is one that is painlessly solved by using cash.
Yet TradeMe still exists and people use direct bank transfers than any other payment method on the site. If your claim (that business this way is not practical) was true then people would not use direct bank transfers. But they do. Ipso facto your claim can't be true.
Again, the system is widely used here. So the onus is on you to back up your claim that it can't possibly work with evidence.
I refer you to the trademe trust and safety blog (yes, it really is called that): http://www.trademe.co.nz/trust...
But the system still works. You haven't provided any evidence that it doesn't. You haven't even provided evidence that the incidence of fraud is higher with direct bank transfers.
You're saying "it can't possibly work, because scams". I'm telling you it does actually work here.
You're claiming "It works, because there are no scams", and I'm telling you, right now and right here, there are scams in all the classifieds. You're relying on the fact that people are honest; I'm comfortable being skeptical. You're asking me to trust "because it doesn't happen", and I'm saying that over here it's a daily occurrence. I actually don't know how to make it any clearer - if you're buying something off of craigslist, or whichever classifieds, the damn site itself warns you to be skeptical! Even the marketplace itself is telling you that there are scammers out there!
No, you're misrepresenting my position. I never claimed there were no scams. I said it was not a significant problem in practice. Perhaps that is due to a difference in the cultures of our countries. But the fact remains that the system works here. When you claim that a system that is in widespread use doesn't work, that's not skepticism. It's simply denial. Again, I am not talking theoretically - if you believe I'm wrong you can track down the crime statistics for New Zealand and prove that there is significant fraud on TradeMe. But you'd be wasting your time because there isn't. There are isolated cases, but not to the point where it's seen as riskier than any other private transaction, and certainly not to the point where the system doesn't work.
Again, the system is widely used here. So the onus is on you to back up your claim that it can't possibly work with evidence.
Someone dealing in cash can just as easily be robbed by the seller.
True, but if you're going to mug someone, why post on the classifieds first? You're just as likely to be mugged leaving a bank after all.
Your position is that direct bank transfers aren't safe essentially because the seller is not so easy catch if they decide to commit a crime. This is exactly the same as the difference between mugging someone in a public place ("leaving a bank") and luring them to some place private before mugging them.
And then you have scams arising where you pay your money and the "seller" vanishes. The only safe way to deal with a potential scam when trading through the classifieds is to hand over payment and take possession of the item at the same time. Not possible if one party has to wait to verify payment.
You're arguing hypotheticals against reality.
What are you talking about? What's not a reality?
You're saying "it can't possibly work, because scams". I'm telling you it does actually work here. The concerns you have raised are simply not a significant problem in actual fact. The system I've described is not some theoretical idea, it is how actual business is actually conducted in the country I live in. Not sure how I can say this any more plainly.
It's simply not a problem here. If it were it could be solved simply by requiring sufficient proof of identity to post the classified in the first place. A marketplace which gets a reputation for allowing sellers to get away with fraud is not going to last long.
Once again it comes down to trust - you trust that the marketplace has identified the scammer. What if you're the first person to respond to the ad? Regardless, you're still asking two parties who are unknown to each other to trust each other with no real evidence that the trust is warranted. My point still stands in this reality - transactions need to be completed when there is a lack of trust. Cash works for this. Waiting doesn't (hence the reason bitcoin is still less traded than actual toy money).
Someone dealing in cash can just as easily be robbed by the seller.
And then you have scams arising where you pay your money and the "seller" vanishes. The only safe way to deal with a potential scam when trading through the classifieds is to hand over payment and take possession of the item at the same time. Not possible if one party has to wait to verify payment.
You're arguing hypotheticals against reality. It's simply not a problem here. If it were it could be solved simply by requiring sufficient proof of identity to post the classified in the first place. A marketplace which gets a reputation for allowing sellers to get away with fraud is not going to last long.
What could possibly go wrong?
Actually very little. If your bank lets someone else fraudulently withdrawal from your account they are on the hook for the money. The main problem is if they get the account number wrong and the typo corresponds to a real account (which would require two digits wrong). In that case it can be difficult to get your money back from the unintended recipient (if they've already taken it out of the account). So not much risk for the seller.
And then there's the personal sale angle. I'm not going to take paypal or have the ability to process credit cards for a yard sale or some crap that I'm selling through the classifieds or craigslist. Given how I'm mainly just trying to recoup something in the process of a sale, adding more hoops or steps will just result in my not bothering to sell junk anymore.
In this country direct bank transactions are used for a lot of this. It's not quite as easy as taking cash when you hand over the item but it's not much harder: give them your bank account number when they agree to the sale and then check that the money is there before handing over the item. If you're going to bank the money anyway it's actually easier. Obviously it's not practical for yard sales but it works pretty well for classifieds and online sales.
You use it at work but nobody gets excited to use Java at home.
I use it at home. It's not appropriate for everything but I find Java + Eclipse to be a very pleasant and productive environment so it's often the option I prefer.