>A big problem with casual selling on ebay is you don't know what you don't know until you've already been screwed.
Most of the big online sites (Paypal is the worst offender, but the others aren't much better) favor buyers over sellers. Amazon certainly works that way, and, as a result, I'm mostly use Craigslist to sell computers and cameras/lenses. I don't sell all that much stuff, though I do it for family members, but I'm familiar enough to have an opinion.
Craigslist has its own dangers, but those can be mitigated through meeting in public or in police station lobbies.
And, depending on the field, one good way to get inexpensive reading material is to pick Latest.Edition - 1. For many courses, the incremental changes are small and the field doesn't advance fast enough to make the new book worth way more than the old book.
I'm submitting this because of its similarity to Paul Graham's essay "See Randomness," http://paulgraham.com/randomness.html, and I think they came to the same conclusions independently of each other.
It's really a mixed bag as to who is to blame. On the one had the committee coming up with this should have done some research (and asked themselves "why hasn't rms done any convocations before?"). I've known organizations entertaining the idea of rms as a keynote, and it almost immediately gets shot down by anyone how has actually watched him speak.
Yeah. It seems like ordering squid at a restaurant: if you order squid or someone orders it for you, you shouldn't complain that you don't like seafood. And you can't really blame the squid.
I wonder if the test is closer to one writers face: you're probably a decent writer if people value your work enough to read it. Likewise, whatever else one can say of programmers, you might be a reasonably decent one if someone else values your work enough to use it. "Reading" and "using" in this case might be similar.