The difference between "bail" and "ransom"

Two hikers who have been held in Iran for 26 months for the crime of straying into Iranian lands from Iraq have been released after payment of $1 million ($500,000 each). The world press have been reporting this as payment of "bail."

In the United States, "bail" is the term for surety money paid to the courts: such payment is a promise that the person will not leave a particular jurisdiction before a trial. Should the defendant violate the grounds of the bail bond, it is considered forfeit, and the defendant is tracked down and re-incarcerated.

Moneys were paid for the release of the two American hikers with the clear understanding that they would then depart Iran, travel to Oman, and eventually return to their own country. Those moneys were not "bail." Other terms apply, but the one that fits best is "ransom."

Laura Trevelyn of the BBC noted:

The release is as carefully choreographed as their colleague Sarah Shourd's a year ago. Once again Iran's president makes a magnanimous gesture shortly before appearing at the UN.

It was not a magnanimous gesture. It was a sale of human beings.

When enough is enough

My account on Facebook dates from the early days, when the social networking site was available only to those with .edu email accounts - students, faculty, and staff at colleges and universities were the ones with original access. I got that account in order to show students what specialized social networks looked like (in contrast to their preferred MySpace accounts).

Facebook didn't really begin to interest me much until the site opened to the "riffraff": the rest of the world. Most of the early adopters were...well, early adopters. They were technically comfortable folks who joined Facebook for fun. As more and more folks in my circle of friends and acquaintances joined, I found myself increasing my time at the site.

On several occasions, Facebook has rolled out changes that have annoyed me: changes to the privacy policy (and the sharp-eyed net community pwned Facebook pretty quickly on those), changes to the layout, changes to privacy settings, changes that would allow the service to use my name to hawk advertiser products unless I opted out (of course I did).

This morning, I got online to discover that Facebook had once more changed the interface, making it clunky, nearly useless, difficult to navigate, and so on...but with what I saw as a fairly clear agenda: gather more cross-referenced information about users in order to better sell itself to advertisers. In fact, given the timing of the roll-out (the day after Google+ went public and out of beta), it would surprise me not at all to find Facebook's timing was a deliberate attempt to push higher traffic (even if it was mostly messages from cheesed-off users) so that they could then show advertisers that Facebook was a much more impressive social networking site than Google+. (And, of course, the increased traffic would "prove" that Google+ going public had not hurt Facebook...au contraire.)

My reaction to the site changes, coupled with my continuing annoyance at Facebook's decision not to provide warning, did not abate all day. Yes, I agree with the people who noted that we were all complaining about a free site that no one was forcing us to be part of. But this time (unlike the last 5 times of annoyance), there was an alternative.

So I'm opting out of Facebook and shifting my focus to Google+. The G+ interface is familiar to those of us who have been beta-testing it for months, and it really doesn't take forever to learn how to use it. I like the "circle" concept; my posting is private (to people in my circles) to avoid dealing with idiots and uncaught spammers. My "circles" are people I like and enjoy.

No game announcements, no constant barrage of notifications that this person has changed his/her profile or friended someone, and no horrifically complicated set of personal settings (whose defaults, on Facebook, are set to allow one the least amount of privacy). The interface is streamlined and economical. Eventually, Google will probably try to monetize the site, but for now, the blessed relief from the growing marketing focus on Facebook...is palpable.

The only thing I'll really miss besides the people is the whole birthday notification thing. It was sweet, on Tuesday, to get birthday greetings from 100+ people. :-)

The Facebook account will stay active for a bit...perhaps I shall recant. But, in the meantime, you'll find me here and on G+. (Yes, there's also a Twitter account...no, it doesn't get used much.)

Happy surfing!