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Message:: [QUOTE="-jeffB, post: 1382986, member: 27832"]I hit the "Place bid" button with maybe a minute to go. eBay pops up a dialog box where I type in my amount, and then hit the "Place bid" button. eBay pops up another dialog, displaying my bid amount, with a "Confirm bid" button -- and a countdown timer showing how many seconds are left. I watch until only a second or two is left, and then I hit "Confirm bid". If I'm lucky -- if nobody along the routing chain between me and eBay drops a packet that then needs to be retransmitted -- my request arrives within a fraction of a second, and BANG, I have sniped. eBay may show the time of my bid as two seconds before auction end, or one second before, or even zero seconds before, depending on network latency and server load. If I'm unlucky, my system has to retransmit one of those packets, or the server is a little too heavily loaded, and the request doesn't get processed until after the auction has closed. The thing is, it doesn't matter whether "my end" is me sitting at a Web browser, me running a desktop sniping tool, or some sniping facility running on a server somewhere else in the country. In every case, the longer you wait to launch that request, the more likely it is that you'll miss your window. The sniping service I use defaults to bidding six seconds before auction end. I've set it to five seconds, and had it work. I've set it to four seconds, and found to my dismay that it didn't bid, instead reporting "there might not be enough time to bid safely". (I keep meaning to contact them about that -- if they aren't willing to place a bid with a smaller interval, it would be really peachy to tell me when I try to set up the snipe, not after the auction ends.) The snipes it does place usually show up six seconds before auction close, but sometimes closer, because of the uncertainties I described above. This is not high-frequency trading! This is not a game of milliseconds. This is people and programs using Web interfaces to send requests on a timescale of seconds. And, as you claim to understand, it doesn't matter who gets there first -- unless two bidders enter the exact same amount, which isn't that common, because many bidders enter an odd amount to make it less likely. All that matters is that there isn't enough time for a human to see the higher bid, think "they must know something I don't" or "maybe I do want this enough to spend an extra five bucks", and raise his bid in turn. We "wish to call" it sniping because that's what "sniping" means in this context, and has meant for going on fifteen years. You can be Humpty Dumpty if you want, insisting that a word means just what you choose it to mean. But if you want to be seen as a champion of correct usage, you'll want to start by showing some evidence that your definition is correct. I've already posted evidence that it's not. If you can present compelling evidence that it is, I'll certainly change my tune.[/QUOTE]

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