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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;-jeffB, post: 1382651, member: 27832&quot;]Sorry, krispy, but you could hardly be more wrong on this.</p><p><br /></p><p>First of all, the only way ANY bid (manual or automated) wins on eBay is by being higher than all others, or <i>by being as high as all others</i> and placed earlier. If I place a bid of $100 when an auction first opens, and someone else snipes in the last second at $100, I&#039;ll get the item. (Of course, if someone else snipes at $101 or more, both I and the first sniper lose.) I&#039;m sure you understand this, but the way you phrased your statement seems to imply that snipers can somehow win without outbidding all others.</p><p><br /></p><p>Second, the issue of machines being faster than humans isn&#039;t really relevant here. The Internet in general, and eBay&#039;s servers in particular, don&#039;t provide guaranteed response times (&quot;latency&quot;). A computer could easily schedule a snipe <i>request</i> to an accuracy of milliseconds, but it can&#039;t guarantee when that request will arrive at eBay&#039;s servers, and it can&#039;t guarantee how quickly a particular server will respond. In practice, this uncertainty can easily add up to multiple seconds, well within the range of human reaction time.</p><p><br /></p><p>Third, you&#039;re simply at odds with the rest of the world when you claim that sniping refers only to automated activity. I&#039;ve been on eBay, both buying and selling, since 1998, and people have been using the term &quot;snipe&quot; for at least that long. The <a href="http://groups.google.com/group/rec.antiques/tree/browse_frm/thread/e7b601828d97f242/b71c0a194cdb78e7?rnum=1&amp;q=ebay+snipe&amp;_done=%2Fgroup%2Frec.antiques%2Fbrowse_frm%2Fthread%2Fe7b601828d97f242%2Fb96c71358ae5ce91%3Fq%3Debay%2Bsnipe%26#doc_b96c71358ae5ce91" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://groups.google.com/group/rec.antiques/tree/browse_frm/thread/e7b601828d97f242/b71c0a194cdb78e7?rnum=1&amp;q=ebay+snipe&amp;_done=%2Fgroup%2Frec.antiques%2Fbrowse_frm%2Fthread%2Fe7b601828d97f242%2Fb96c71358ae5ce91%3Fq%3Debay%2Bsnipe%26#doc_b96c71358ae5ce91" rel="nofollow">earliest reference I can find</a> via Google&#039;s search of Usenet archives is from August 1997. By 1998, people were already offering &quot;sniping tools&quot; -- but most people were still <i>sniping manually</i>.</p><p><br /></p><p>In principle, this is all a matter of opinion, as you said in an earlier post. In practice, though, &quot;sniping means bidding with an automated tool&quot; is simply wrong.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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