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Zaman founded Skiplagged.com last year as a side project and runs the site alone. It uses a strategy known as "hidden city" to allow a user to book a ticket with a layover in the flyer's actual destination, and the user just skips the last leg of the trip.Read this article for analysis on the lawsuit.
He said there is nothing illegal about the strategy and noted that it has been around for a long time. He says he doesn't think it is "ethical for big corporations to suppress this knowledge that is publicly accessible" to consumers. The site does not generate any profit.
United Airlines and Orbitz claim "unfair competition."
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Zaman explained that "travelers do not break the law when they miss all of their flights so why would it be illegal to miss one leg of a flight?"
On the whole, the lawsuit really is ridiculous. Suing this guy for showing accurate information about flight prices seems tremendously questionable. However, the situation is complicated somewhat by Zaman's promises to both companies. No matter what, it's well known that airlines play really obnoxious fare-pricing games, and Zaman was trying to shed some light on it with a simple side project. And, really, if your entire business can supposedly be undermined by a 22-year-old kid in his spare time accurately showing the prices of various flights, perhaps the real problem is with your business model, and not with the kid.
The number of American troops killed in Afghanistan and Iraq between 2001 and 2012 was 6,488. The number of American women who were murdered by current or ex male partners during that time was 11,766. That's nearly double the amount of casualties lost during war.
Women are much more likely to be victims of intimate partner violence with 85 percent of domestic abuse victims being women and 15 percent men. Too many women have been held captive by domestic violence -- whether through physical abuse, financial abuse, emotional abuse or a combination of all three.
We are inundated with news stories about domestic violence, from athletes beating their significant others in public elevators or in their own homes to celebrities publicly abusing their girlfriends. This problem is not one that will go away quickly or quietly.
Domestic violence is not a singular incident, it's an insidious problem deeply rooted in our culture -- and these numbers prove that.
But it is important to us to realize that what happened 13,000 years ago was just the one of many extinction events. If this unbelievably violent cataclysm - in which almost all life on Earth was destroyed - came as a global empire was seeking domination over others, we may need to ask the question: does our living planet, its companions in the solar system, and its parent sun, manifest some sort of consciousness and do they, between them, have the resources to deal with humanity - or any other species - whenever things get 'too hot', so to say? Was Atlantis such an example? Did other destroyed and buried civilizations whose names were completely forgotten for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, become victims of their own hubris in like manner?Cyclic cataclysms have wiped out the Earth before. Human beings are likely to be the next species to become extinct.
The Golden Age, Psychopathy and the Sixth Extinction
Comment: It's almost funny that these pitiful excuses for human beings just can't contain their over-the-top insanity. Not only are they callously inhuman enough to steal and live on other people's land, they systematically torture the people they have displaced, and then are stupid enough to attack US diplomats. But then, that idiom about biting the hand that feeds isn't in their bible.