Ethics vs Economics

[tithonium]

I've been wanting a Sony Clie PEG-UX50 for quite a long time now. Sony still sells them for $600. They've been going for $250-$300 on ebay.

I found one that's got 1.25 days left and still hasn't broken $100, which is unusual.

I'm considering sniping it.

I consider sniping to be... rude, at best. Not sure if I'd go so far as to say unethical, but really, it's an unreasonable behaviour in my opinion. But, if I want to get one of these things at anything resembling an acceptable price (no /way/ I'm paying over $200, and I'd like to stay under $150), it's what I'm going to have to do. It's like soft money or any of a number of other things: I may think it's wrong, but if I want to win I have to play by the same rules everybody else does.

So, anybody have suggestions?
If it's a website, I'm concerned with trust (I don't want them stealing my password, you know?).
If it's software, what's it run on and how reliable is it?

Comments

[xopherg.livejournal.com]

There was an open source package called 'jbidwatch'. havent looked at it recently.

[tithonium.livejournal.com]

Yeah, there's a very nice version of it for OSX, which I've been playing with today. Unfortunately, it requires sedna to be online and the program to be running at the time the auction ends. which sorta defeats the purpoe. Could run it on a desktop, of course.

[xopherg.livejournal.com]

its java, though, so you could run it on a linux box.