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.
If the phone arrived with a blocked IMEI number - I would agree with you and gotten my money back. However, several months had passed before the IMEI number was blacklisted.
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.
I know we're talking about python, but personally I advise against raw SQL because there is no type protection of any kind. In, e.g. C# I can use Linq to ensure I build a query that type checks and makes sense, even across joins.
It seems from others' replies that it's not optional. It certainly isn't in English. I put it in not to correct but to explain my interpretation of what was written to better frame my question.
