Amazon is best place to buy used electronics IMO. I used to sell smartphones on Amazon and eBay. Amazon typically has better condition products and guarantees everything themselves at least 30 days, regardless of who you buy it from.
They don't allow selling blocked or less than good condition phones at all. You can usually get your money back from ebay from a deal like that if you fuck with ebay support for long enought though.
Here's why: SFJulie1's comment came off as rambling and somewhat incoherent, if not a little childish and rude. In the past few hours one other account has popped up here ( https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Ronaldo777 ) posting equally trollish comments in this same specific thread...
Just to give you an idea where SFJulie1 is coming from:
I think the point isn't that companies should decide what you can buy, that makes no sense...
I think the point is more that just because people seem to prefer a product at first glance/first use doesn't mean that that's the product they will prefer in the long run.
Something like the pepsi challenge ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepsi_Challenge ), if people are given a sample of pepsi and a sample of coke and not told which is which, they generally prefer pepsi if they just take one sip because of the extra sweetness, but if they drink a whole can of each then coke (the less sweet beverage) is usually preferred.
Uh, right, the "Ashtar Command Community" says stonehenge was built from the ground up in 1954, totally credible. Stonehenge is not fascinating anymore at all.
10 seconds on google shows photos and pictures of stonehenge long before 1954 and reveals the monuments were restored several times including once in 1958. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonehenge
Right, there's only like a million of these already in existence in every language and I have yet to find one that is comprehensive enough that I don't just fall back to regular sql queries sooner or later.
And if you think about it, any library that was powerful enough for me to not write SQL anymore would basically have to rewrite the complete SQL spec using awkward hacks in a language that is totally unsuited for it.
And if you're writing an application of any complexity or size using an SQL database you need the full capacities of SQL. There are a lot of little features or quirks of SQL that these languges seem to overlook that you need to make your app perform.
Now I usually just write a couple functions like this:
query("SELECT one, two FROM mytable",
["WHERE weight > %f AND name = '%s'", weight, name]);
That gives me SQL-injection protection, lets me save subqueries as strings and re-use them, and caching to if I need it.
And as a plus, I don't have continuously look up/relearn each little feature of SQL in this little language, or if I write it this way is it actually going to compile into the SQL I want? It's pretty much inevitable that you're going to need to know/control the SQL that's being written sooner or later (usually sooner), so save yourself the extra headache and just go SQL from the start.
That's pretty ridiculous. The body sizes and visual similarities between students are not as close as you make it sound, I could easily see this set of drawings coming from one of my classes in seventh grade.
Why not go with the much simpler and much more likely explanation that the before and after pictures and descriptions all have similar content because the teacher held discussions before the students drew the pictures, and these discussions were lead in a certain direction.
I think this kind of thing is like a light on the horizon for web designers. It lets us know that some of the things we wish we could do now are at least going to be feasible someday...
>> The reason they pushed for it? Basically, private banks were printing too many banknotes and causing bouts of inflation.
Good to know we don't have to worry about that anymore...
IANAEconomist, but I think what the banks were doing then couldn't really be considered free-market either, since they were engaging in a type of fraud by telling people they're notes were backed by so much real gold, when that wasn't the case at all.
But then how regulating that sort of fraud fits in with free market vs regulation might be getting a little deeper into the issue than I really want to go right know so take that with a grain of salt :)
>> If I showed up to your store with a lump of gold for trade, we would have to go find someone we both trusted to figure out how pure it was. That takes time and money. That inhibits commerce from taking place.
It's the same with paper. If I show up to your store with a note and tell you it's worth x amount, a third party who we both trust has to back up that that note is indeed worth that value.
You're solution, which isn't really a solution at all, is to just have the government take the place of that third party. This is replacing a free market with a coercive monopoly, and carries with it the same repercussions as any other type of anti-free-market regulation.
Now we both still agree to treat my note or gold as having x value because it is endorsed by a third party, but now we choose this third party not out of trust, but because there really isn't much of a choice.
So now that there aren't any competing currencies, innovations like the ones you mentioned will happen much slower, and since maintaining our trust is no longer needed, the criteria for ensuring that a certain paper note or gold piece actually has it's claimed value will be much less strict.
Now the currency-regulator can do things like print too many paper bills, devaluing bills individually, while putting the value of the newly printed bills right into their pocket--and without repercussion.
And I think that's only the tip of the iceberg. Regulating currency is no different than regulating telephone lines or corn.
You said "You can't have a free market if you don't have a viable marketplace to begin with", but government regulated currency isn't a viable marketplace at all, and you really can't build a free market on top of an unfree one anyways.
People would come to a deeper and more complete understanding of a subject by reading a document whose actual intent is to bring them to a more complete and deep understanding of that subject.
When I was in junior high school I wrote a fully functioning perl on the TI-80 graphing calculator. It was about 200 lines of code, and it (almost) worked right the first time.
Actually, they are known for making it pretty hard on advertisers. They're rules for what ads are acceptable are pretty strict, to the point where showing almost anything other than just a plain description of your product/service can be interpreted to break the rules.
Most ads that you submit get rejected on sight, but if you post the same exacting thing at another type of day it gets through.
Mainly their ad platform is surviving because the sheer volume of impressions they can serve is hard to ignore. Other than that, they damn sure aren't making it easy for advertisers to give them money.