Yes, Jones is freaking out, and it certainly seems excessive to me. (I've been selling and buying on eBay for several years.) If you go on eBay as a seller, one of the risks you take on is the possibility of negative feedback from people, whether merited or not. It's just part of the whole thing. If you think your business will go belly up from one negative feedback, you shouldn't be selling on eBay!

But there's another thing to consider. Did Read attempt to contact Jones, to get either a replacement or refund, BEFORE he left the feedback? Part of the rules is that the buyer should exhaust his options before leaving a negative, because there may be mitigating circumstances, and a negative will damage a seller's reputation, of course. If Read just went ahead and left feedback without trying to get the situation resolved, then the seller is in fact justified in being seriously pissed off. The majority of sellers will give refunds or replacements if contacted, and if they don't, they'll have that fact listed in the auction itself, as you can format the auctions to list any information you wish to provide. (The availability of refunds or replacements is one of those key issues you must let your buyers know about.)

Have we got another Farhad on our hands? A guy who thinks that his particular way of using computers is the only one that makes sense, and anything he doesn't need is "ridiculous"?

News flash, Cyrus: Not everyone uses the internet for blogging and messing around. Many, MANY businesses use Gmail for their correspondence, and if you think the "Canned Responses" feature is silly, then it's either been years or never that you've worked in an office.

Imagine (if you can) that you work in Human Resources in some really big corporation. Do you want to be the one to send out the responses to the flood of resumes you'll get in response to an employment ad? Or say you're a marketing flunky. You want to spend hours on sending out responses to some flyer or offer or survey or whatever?

If you've half a brain, your response will be HELL NO. So this feature is not only convenient, it's cost-effective as well. If you have to send out five or six hundred emails, all of them the same, in batches of five or ten or twenty a day, that feature will save hundreds of dollars in time spent for your company. That fact alone renders your sneering epithet ridiculous in its turn.

Next time, try on the other guy's shoes for a change.

Why hasn't she been fired yet? I'm amazed that either McCain or the RNC is fine with this woman running around contradicting what the CANDIDATE says whenever she feels like it. The opinions I've been hearing about her essentially running not for VP in 2008 but for President 2012 make more and more sense. I don't think Palin gives a damn about McCain being elected. I think she's been set there by the RNC because they know McCain will lose, and want to position this religion-addled, ignorant, disdainful hypocrite as their choice for the next election.

The gods help us all. We haven't dodged this bullet yet.

It's only those who target "innocent" Americans who are terrorists. See, that way she and her cohorts get to decide who's "innocent" and who's not.

So what would they call clinic bombers? Wait, let me think...I know!

Freedom fighters. Of course. Hasn't that been the right-wing codename for "terrorists we like" for the last thirty years or so?

My head is all desky now.

Why didn't Williams (or anyone else) bring up Timothy McVeigh? Everyone in America seems to have conveniently forgotten about him. Talk about a terrorist! A born-again loony who decided to target the government of the United States, and who actually DID blow up a federal building.

And yet few people seem to remember this guy when talking about domestic terrorism. I can understand Palin having a blank spot about him. She's one of those malicious Assembly of God whackos, so she'd be loath to admit another fundie nut could be called a terrorist. (AoG is a dangerous organization, especially for those kids Palin pretends to care so much about.) But what about the media who question her? Why aren't they mentioning his name?

I'd melt in a little happy puddle if I could see Miss Know-It-All Shrieking Cow From Alaska (Pravda's nickname for her) squirming desperately when forced to confront the fact that one of the most famous domestic terrorists of the last fifty years held the same religious beliefs she does.