im a big fan of paypal.. i know people occasionally have trouble with it, but they seem to be the best deal for small payments, and i've had nothing but good experiences with them.

-mouser (December 20, 2009, 03:05 PM)

Agreed. For small amounts, or even the occasional larger transaction, PayPal has always worked well enough for me. The apparent incompetence of the "representative" layer for problem-solving is an eye-opener, though. Definitely Kafka-esque, but then so are many experiences when dealing with bureaucracies.

While most of my review searches are for a limited range of products, I have noticed how many "review" sites are typically composed of wording from the manufacturer/press release. If I see the same brief description on the search page, I usually just pass those by. Over time, there are sites I've found that actually review the products I'm interested in, so I tend to return there for information.

In actual practice, while "depth-charging" some of the sales linking sites is intriguing, I suspect it's just a fantasy. Search engines follow Google's model because it generates revenue. They're not likely to let anything interfere with that, imo.

 ;)

It's not just big corporations and the government we have to worry about. A rubber duck can steal your identity on facebook.

-app103 (December 11, 2009, 03:11 AM)

I'm not a Facebooker or any of the social network users, but the ducky experiment is just plain surprising. How can presumably rational individuals give so much of themselves away? It makes me think the concept of personal privacy has been eroded beyond repair, even though I truly hope not.