The thing I hate the most about PayPal is how their "viral marketing" succeeded so well that anyone who can't or won't use them is put at a serious disadvantage because so many sites on the Net use PayPal as their only means of payment, including various online auctions, sites seeking donations, and affiliate programs.
My one gripe with the Lindows company is that they insist on continually referring to themselves as "Lindows.com"... I thought Dot-Com-Ism was considered passé these days after the big tech stock collapse. I always thought naming a company anything.com was stupid -- hey, idiots, your Web site is at blahblah.com, but calling your company that sounds really idiotic! You might as well name your company "PO Box 123456" after your postal address... So why don't they call themselves and their operating system simply Lindows, and leave the dot-com for when their Internet address is specifically being referred to.
It is rather weird that a noncommercial site about Unix used the.com address, while a commercial user got the.org one, where it ought to logically have been the other way around...
W3C is at w3.org, not w3c.com (which seems to be an ISP in India). Given that they're a noncommercial organization, this makes sense. Their validator is at validator.w3.org. And what's a "redirect tag"? There's no such tag in HTML; do you mean a META tag with a redirection attribute, or an HTTP header specifying a redirection location, or what?
His assertion that his site is "emphatically noncommercial" would resonate better with me if he used an address that didn't end in.com... a.org or.info address would better express the site's nature.
What AOL has to consider is its 34million users turning round and saying "the latest version of AOL is broke", if it's not rendering IE specific content correctly.
Well, from my own standpoint of hating both Microsoft and AOL, but occasionally finding them both to be useful if only to check-and-balance the other and keep either of them from becoming a permanent monopoly, that's a win no matter which way it goes. If AOLers blame AOL for failing to render some sites correctly, maybe some of them will decide finally to drop that sucky service and get a real ISP. If, on the other hand, they blame the webmasters, that will push a few of them to start considering standards compliance a little more. (While most sites work fine for me in Mozilla now, a few still don't; I just tried RCA's site and found the menus overlayed into a horrible mess and the input forms don't work correctly, because of all the jumbled HTML and JavaScript with incorrect syntax.)
Where do you get the idea that 99% of the people want to open links in new windows? I almost never do. Sometimes I want to open links in a new *tab* (in Mozilla), which I find more convenient than windows, but there's no way for site developers to specify that, so I'm happy to do it myself with a right click option when desired. Slashdot is one of the sites where I often open links in new tabs, because the pages are so large and slow to load and often lose my place in them when I go back. But in most other sites I prefer normal navigation in a single window with the back button. I certainly don't want new windows forced on me because some marketing type wants to keep me on their site.
You don't have that option... as a user, I can leave your site if I want to, by turning off my computer if necessary. And if you make it inordinately difficult for me to leave your site when I want to, by doing your best to disable my normal browser functions, then my likely choice will be not to go back to your site again, and you'll lose my business.
But when I put a website online, people all over the world can access it. Does that mean that in your view I should be forced to comply with the laws of every country in the world, including countries restricting political speech, countries prohibiting women from being seen without veils, or countries with any number of other laws I don't even know about?
No, they're actually not taking payments for.museum domains yet until the experimental phase is over, and at that point, the domains will be delegated just like in any other TLD, allowing any sort of DNS records to be used.
This is getting really tiresome, that every time Katz writes an article, an ungodly degree of the commentary is solely devoted to bashing Katz, discussing how to filter him, or bashing the people who are bashing him. (And now I'm contributing to that myself...:)) Somebody perhaps needs to get a life. And can't anyone try to actually discuss the topic of the article, instead of the author???
And why should the rest of the world be obligated to help these companies keep their precious "branding", including setting up the naming system of the Internet in a way that suits "brand-holders" rather than Internet users as a whole, many of whom have noncommercial uses that might benefit from increased namespace?
Because he's apparently just as much of a dumbass as all the corporate types he's fighting... neither he nor they seem to have a clue about the proper use of the DNS namespace. I say he's cybersquatting, not on the corporations he puts up "sucks" sites about, but on all other potential critics who might want those "sucks" domains! (But if it's a noncommercial critic, they ought to use.org domains, anyway...) --Dan
You're full of shit. What grounds can the university possibly have for civil or criminal charges against a student for politically disagreeable speech???? Maybe it's true that they own everything that was posted to the university servers, so they could possibly be legally (though not morally) justified in shutting down the site, but how are they justified in bringing any sort of charges against the kid? They're a state university, so the First Amendment does apply to actions they take. About the only sensible part of your post is your advice for him to get a lawyer, but not for the purpose of grovelling; it should be for suing the university, which might make him a millionaire from the punitive damages that could result. --Dan
"AOL has too much to lose if their software isn't pre-installed, it was their key to success in the first place. And Microsoft has too much to lose if AOL moves over to a Netscape-based
client. "
But those who want to see an open-standards-based, platform-independent Internet have much to gain if this deal permanently falls through. If AOL starts using Mozilla as its browser, that instantly creates a large user base for a non-Microsoft browser, reversing the strong trend towards Microsoft hegemony in that area. Meanwhile, if Microsoft stops bundling AOL in its operating system, fewer of the newbies will automatically sign up with them and fail to ever discover that AOL != The Internet. So AOL's and Microsoft's losses are gains for fans of a non-proprietary Internet.
There's also aim.org, which belongs to Accuracy In Media. There's also the American Indian Movement, but I don't know if they have a website. However, these things aren't related to instant messaging, so I don't think even the biased panels of the ICANN process would take away domains used in these contexts. --Dan
Images in this article show up as broken when you view it in Netscape 4.x, due to the author's use of invalid URLs with spaces in them. See my article about stuff that doesn't work in Netscape. --Dan
It seems to be that way with practically every program, especially multimedia viewers/players... every one of them you install automatically sets itself as the default viewer for every format under the sun, even ones it doesn't support very well! --Dan
I think the good stuff of the Internet, the things that attracted you to it, are still there. They're just buried under heaps of marketing crap, but if you get past the junk, there are still lots of great things there. --Dan
Actually, first-come, first-served seems to me like the most reasonable way to deal with situations where two or more people have a reasonable right to a name, such as multiple companies named "Nissan" or "Apple" or whatever.
I'm not a radical on this -- I don't think "first come, first served" should be the only rule or that it should hold in every possible case -- I don't object to the existence of a dispute policy allowing transfer or cancellation of an abusively registered domain, though I think many of the actual decisions in the UDRP have been flawed. However, I do feel that in most cases, in which more than one person has a resonable, good-faith use for a name, the one who gets it first should be allowed to keep it.
I just noticed that ripe.org, one of the names that's supposedly restricted from new registration under these exclusions, has just been registered, apparently by an individual in Florida, with a registration date of only a few days ago. See the CheckDomain record. So they don't seem to actually be enforcing these restrictions yet. (And ripe is a particularly silly name to be the subject of a pre-emptive restriction, given that it's a common English word.) --Dan
Slashdot Mirror
My own anti-Paypal site is at paypal.haters.info .
The thing I hate the most about PayPal is how their "viral marketing" succeeded so well that anyone who can't or won't use them is put at a serious disadvantage because so many sites on the Net use PayPal as their only means of payment, including various online auctions, sites seeking donations, and affiliate programs.
My one gripe with the Lindows company is that they insist on continually referring to themselves as "Lindows.com"... I thought Dot-Com-Ism was considered passé these days after the big tech stock collapse. I always thought naming a company anything .com was stupid -- hey, idiots, your Web site is at blahblah.com, but calling your company that sounds really idiotic! You might as well name your company "PO Box 123456" after your postal address... So why don't they call themselves and their operating system simply Lindows, and leave the dot-com for when their Internet address is specifically being referred to.
It is rather weird that a noncommercial site about Unix used the .com address, while a commercial user got the .org one, where it ought to logically have been the other way around...
HavenCo is, certainly, but isn't "Sealand Government" a purportedly separate entity?
Probably .org is the most sensible if they don't have access to any more legitimately governmental domain.
If they're claiming to be a government, it's pretty stupid of them to have their site in a .com domain, isn't it?
W3C is at w3.org , not w3c.com (which seems to be an ISP in India). Given that they're a noncommercial organization, this makes sense. Their validator is at validator.w3.org .
And what's a "redirect tag"? There's no such tag in HTML; do you mean a META tag with a redirection attribute, or an HTTP header specifying a redirection location, or what?
His assertion that his site is "emphatically noncommercial" would resonate better with me if he used an address that didn't end in .com... a .org or .info address would better express the site's nature.
Well, from my own standpoint of hating both Microsoft and AOL, but occasionally finding them both to be useful if only to check-and-balance the other and keep either of them from becoming a permanent monopoly, that's a win no matter which way it goes. If AOLers blame AOL for failing to render some sites correctly, maybe some of them will decide finally to drop that sucky service and get a real ISP. If, on the other hand, they blame the webmasters, that will push a few of them to start considering standards compliance a little more. (While most sites work fine for me in Mozilla now, a few still don't; I just tried RCA's site and found the menus overlayed into a horrible mess and the input forms don't work correctly, because of all the jumbled HTML and JavaScript with incorrect syntax.)
Where do you get the idea that 99% of the people want to open links in new windows? I almost never do. Sometimes I want to open links in a new *tab* (in Mozilla), which I find more convenient than windows, but there's no way for site developers to specify that, so I'm happy to do it myself with a right click option when desired. Slashdot is one of the sites where I often open links in new tabs, because the pages are so large and slow to load and often lose my place in them when I go back. But in most other sites I prefer normal navigation in a single window with the back button. I certainly don't want new windows forced on me because some marketing type wants to keep me on their site.
You don't have that option... as a user, I can leave your site if I want to, by turning off my computer if necessary. And if you make it inordinately difficult for me to leave your site when I want to, by doing your best to disable my normal browser functions, then my likely choice will be not to go back to your site again, and you'll lose my business.
But when I put a website online, people all over the world can access it. Does that mean that in your view I should be forced to comply with the laws of every country in the world, including countries restricting political speech, countries prohibiting women from being seen without veils, or countries with any number of other laws I don't even know about?
No, they're actually not taking payments for .museum domains yet until the experimental phase is over, and at that point, the domains will be delegated just like in any other TLD, allowing any sort of DNS records to be used.
This is getting really tiresome, that every time Katz writes an article, an ungodly degree of the commentary is solely devoted to bashing Katz, discussing how to filter him, or bashing the people who are bashing him. (And now I'm contributing to that myself... :)) Somebody perhaps needs to get a life. And can't anyone try to actually discuss the topic of the article, instead of the author???
And why should the rest of the world be obligated to help these companies keep their precious "branding", including setting up the naming system of the Internet in a way that suits "brand-holders" rather than Internet users as a whole, many of whom have noncommercial uses that might benefit from increased namespace?
Because he's apparently just as much of a dumbass as all the corporate types he's fighting... neither he nor they seem to have a clue about the proper use of the DNS namespace. I say he's cybersquatting, not on the corporations he puts up "sucks" sites about, but on all other potential critics who might want those "sucks" domains! (But if it's a noncommercial critic, they ought to use .org domains, anyway...)
--Dan
Well, if either "Darwin Awards" is noncommercial in nature, a .org domain would make more sense than either of these .com domains...
--Dan
You're full of shit. What grounds can the university possibly have for civil or criminal charges against a student for politically disagreeable speech???? Maybe it's true that they own everything that was posted to the university servers, so they could possibly be legally (though not morally) justified in shutting down the site, but how are they justified in bringing any sort of charges against the kid? They're a state university, so the First Amendment does apply to actions they take. About the only sensible part of your post is your advice for him to get a lawyer, but not for the purpose of grovelling; it should be for suing the university, which might make him a millionaire from the punitive damages that could result.
--Dan
"AOL has too much to lose if their software isn't pre-installed, it was their key to success in the first place. And Microsoft has too much to lose if AOL moves over to a Netscape-based client. "
But those who want to see an open-standards-based, platform-independent Internet have much to gain if this deal permanently falls through. If AOL starts using Mozilla as its browser, that instantly creates a large user base for a non-Microsoft browser, reversing the strong trend towards Microsoft hegemony in that area. Meanwhile, if Microsoft stops bundling AOL in its operating system, fewer of the newbies will automatically sign up with them and fail to ever discover that AOL != The Internet. So AOL's and Microsoft's losses are gains for fans of a non-proprietary Internet.
--Dan
There's also aim.org , which belongs to Accuracy In Media. There's also the American Indian Movement, but I don't know if they have a website. However, these things aren't related to instant messaging, so I don't think even the biased panels of the ICANN process would take away domains used in these contexts.
--Dan
Images in this article show up as broken when you view it in Netscape 4.x, due to the author's use of invalid URLs with spaces in them. See my article about stuff that doesn't work in Netscape.
--Dan
It seems to be that way with practically every program, especially multimedia viewers/players... every one of them you install automatically sets itself as the default viewer for every format under the sun, even ones it doesn't support very well!
--Dan
I think the good stuff of the Internet, the things that attracted you to it, are still there. They're just buried under heaps of marketing crap, but if you get past the junk, there are still lots of great things there.
--Dan
Actually, first-come, first-served seems to me like the most reasonable way to deal with situations where two or more people have a reasonable right to a name, such as multiple companies named "Nissan" or "Apple" or whatever.
I'm not a radical on this -- I don't think "first come, first served" should be the only rule or that it should hold in every possible case -- I don't object to the existence of a dispute policy allowing transfer or cancellation of an abusively registered domain, though I think many of the actual decisions in the UDRP have been flawed. However, I do feel that in most cases, in which more than one person has a resonable, good-faith use for a name, the one who gets it first should be allowed to keep it.
--Dan
I just noticed that ripe.org, one of the names that's supposedly restricted from new registration under these exclusions, has just been registered, apparently by an individual in Florida, with a registration date of only a few days ago. See the CheckDomain record. So they don't seem to actually be enforcing these restrictions yet. (And ripe is a particularly silly name to be the subject of a pre-emptive restriction, given that it's a common English word.)
--Dan