Should have handled this UDRP defense yourself.
Even the most out-to-lunch single-person panel would never let this one get through. If the unthinkable happens, you can still go ahead and stick a lawyer up their ass and keep your domain, but it won't come to that.
Scandalous about NAF keeping your money, though.
PS,
Canadian corporate info is available online
,
but I was unable to find a Tobacco.com, Inc.
Is it possible they filed a trademark application on behalf of a non-existent entity? By the way, 401 Queen's Quay West is Harbour Terrace (luxury condominiums), so they may have assets worth going after. Canada has an advanced legal system, after all.
PPS,
Your domain tobacco.com may not be worth as much as you think... e-commerce or even advertising is a complete non-starter in today's climate. Suggestion: put up tobacco lawsuit resource info (class action lawsuits, ambulance-chaser lawyer ads, etc), and the tobacco companies might find it cost-effective to pay you a million to take the domain off your hands (after all, literally hundreds of billions of dollars are at stake).
Another strong possiblity (for lack of SETI) is that intelligent races prefer virtual reality to real reality, in much the same way that the human race prefers to sit inside watching TV instead of going outside for a walk in the woods and grasslands where we evolved.
When we have better than Final Fantasy rendering in real time, most of the human race will probably choose to spend most of their day living and interacting there, in virtual-reality cyberspace... in much the same way that many of us today spend most of their day in an office environment, living and creating economic value in ways incomprehensible to our hunter and farmer ancestors.
When this happens, the planet may seem empty in many ways... in much the same way that suburban streets in America seem empty to a third-world visitor used to bustling and noisy street life.
This phase (human race moves into and settles cyberspace, become less visible in the physical world) is not the same as the Singularity. For one thing, it is not at all dependent on future advances in artificial intelligence... we just need ordinary number-crunching computers a few orders of magnitude faster than today.
If the AI naysayers are right, and machines never get smart enough, then the Singularity will never happen... but the "ghost planet" scenario will inevitably happen in our lifetime... either as a result of progress, or as the unhappy result of plague or nuclear war.
There are other possibilities as well for SETI's lack of success. Our solar system and our planet may be fairly unique in some ways:
the Sun is constant (not a variable star)
the Sun is a single star (not a binary or multiple star)
the presence of Jupiter in its current location (large planet gravitationally deflects and sweeps away comets and small asteroids that cause catastrophic extinctions)
nearly circular orbits (many of the transsolar planets that have been discovered are in highly eccentric orbits)
the presence of the Moon (large satellite that causes tides, which are important in the development of terrestrial life)
plate tectonics (present on Earth but not on Venus, may be crucial)
the positioning of the Earth in the "habitable zone" of the solar system (5-10% closer or farther to the Sun, and advanced life wouldn't develop)
the positioning of the Sun in the "habitable zone" of the galaxy (too much farther out and metals are too sparse and element ratios are unsuitable, too much closer and you run the risk of mass extinctions from supernovas and the like)
Probably bacteria-like life is extremely common, but advanced intelligent life might in fact be somewhat rarer than was once thought.
The human race has already been through a singularity. Its aftermath is known as "civilization", and the enabling technology was agriculture, which first made it possible for humans to gather in large permanent settlements.
There are a few living humans who have personally lived through this singularity... stone-age peoples in the Amazon and Papua New Guinea abruptly confronted by it. For the rest of the human race it was creeping and gradual, but it still fits the definition of a singularity: the "after" is unknowable and incomprehensible to those who live in the "before".
Does the apparently large number of programmers from India contradict this hypothesis? Or does India have the the same share of geeks as every other country, but they are just more visible because of recent immigration trends?
There's an obvious reason for all the programmers from India. Yes, they have a rigorous educational system, but...
In the US, there are far more lucrative careers in other fields: law, medicine, investment banking, business in general. More importantly, in those fields you can stay until retirement, unlike tech, where your career life expectancy is about the same as a professional baseball player. So lots of smart people do the math, look out for number one, and walk away from science, technology, and engineering.
But an Indian lawyer who comes here can only hope to drive a taxi. And an Indian doctor has to retrain for several years before being allowed to practise. On the other hand, Indian programmers can come here and work in their field right away.
Exploited H1-B by our standards, but the envy of all the folks back home. High prestige and big bucks, everyone wants their daughter to have an arranged marriage with a programmer in America.
People go into software in India for the same reason that they go into law in the US, which is the same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks. That's where the money is.
Yes, there's people who program for the sheer joy of it... but they're the least likely to last in
a corporate environment with either their job or
their enthusiasm intact. And there's not enough of them to go around.
Was a programmer, but got a new job where the entire project was scaled back soon after I joined, and they only gave me testing to do. Nothing wrong with testing, but I wasn't able to create my own tests or write any scripts, or even to automate the tests. Just boring repetitive manual labor that they could have hired any non-technical person off the street to do.
I stayed (big mistake), hoping it would get better and thinking it would look bad on my résumé to leave early, but finally quit after 8 months.
To my dismay, the jobs I got offered after that were nearly all testing. And it was very awkward when interviewers wondered exactly what cutting-edge stuff I'd been working on over the past 7 months... basically fsckall.
If you're young, you can recover from a setback like that, but for an older programmer it's the kiss of death. If you had a series of programming
jobs but your last job only involved entry-level testing... you've got the scarlet letter D for dinosaur tatooed on your forehead. Rather than fight to get my career back on track, I took a break from the computer industry... and never went back. Laughing all the way to the bank today, but still pissed off.
If you're not learning anything in a job, and not advancing your career, get out right away. If interviewers ask why you want to leave your previous job so soon, just tell the truth.
How about non-intrusively asking for non-mandatory micropayment donations?
Access would be free, but at the bottom of the page it would say, "click here to send the author of this page $0.10 / $0.25 / $1.00 / $5.00"
This is the "street musician" financing model... might support a lot of one-person websites.
Re:It's very mixed in my experience (Boston area)
on
Too Old To Code?
·
· Score: 1
One (or more) of those will certainly become critical to my job within the next few years. I actually have to take time out of my career to go learn about them premtively.
Very bad idea.
A few years back, I took time out of my career to get up to speed on all the newfangled Internet stuff: Java, JavaScript, etc. Thought I'd assure my future. Instead, my career got permanently sidetracked, and I ended up leaving the industry.
If you're taking time off to re-educate yourself, employers only see "unemployed". They'll wonder what's wrong with you if you're not working during a time of record low unemployment. Also, they're suspicious of self-taught skills without actual paid experience, and especially suspicious of older workers looking to switch to a field for which they have no prior paid experience on their resume ("he couldn't get a job in his field, so now he's just desperately applying for every job out there").
Fortunately, it was a blessing in disguise... doing well now working for myself. But if I was just starting out now, I'd pick some other profession that I could keep doing until retirement. Being a techie is just not a rational career choice.
They even reprint selected Ask Tim columns (though not the one we're discussing obviously).
For all his genuine anguish over the issue, I don't see Tim O'Reilly dropping this joint marketing effort with Amazon. He can't afford to lose the revenue.
Barnes & Noble doesn't have clean hands either. Remember that on the eve of Amazon's IPO, they launched a frivolous lawsuit over Amazon's use of the phrase "world's biggest bookstore".
What's the solution? I don't know. No one has clean hands.
Principles are easy when there's no money at stake. Money changes everything.
As far as we can tell, life starts out organic. But does it stay that way?
Perhaps it is a routine evolutionary step for sufficiently advanced life to map itself onto a different media: electronic, moletronic or whatever.
Ultimately, you could have "distributed" life forms that exist on a computer network with multiple processors. With quantum computing and nanotechnology, the individual processors could be extremely small, not much above atomic.
Make that a wireless network, with spread-spectrum communication and sophisticated error correction, and you could probably achieve "steganographic" life forms that are very hard to detect from the background and nearly impossible to kill.
I just missed out on being able to register bobk.com, having been beaten by a couple of months by Microsoft (remember MS Bob?). As of last month, it's registered to somebody else, and I don't know the story behind it.
Microsoft traded bob.com for windows2000.com. Here's an earlier background story.
Physics once meant everything to me, but now I'm doing the "greed is good" thing on the Internet.
Many others followed the same path. There's a vast physics diaspora out there. Among many others, consider Dr. Stephen Schutz, MIT graduate and Princeton physics Ph.D. who recently sold his online greeting card company to Excite for nearly a billion dollars.
On the other hand, I know a couple of folks who foolishly persisted in their dreams of a science career well past the age of employability (late 30s), and now they're shipwrecked and facing reality. It seems they have a lot in common with failed actors, musicians, and athletes who didn't make the big leagues. When did scientists become "starving artists"?
Is there any hope of reversing the tremendous attrition rate of potential scientists? In good conscience, should we even be encouraging young people to pursue science careers given their dim career prospects?
Do you share this pessimism, and what changes do you see in the decades to come, for better or for worse?
Slashdot Mirror
... I said nothing, because I was not a dwarf planet.
When they demoted me, there was no one left to speak up.
You overreacted, spending the $3500.
Should have handled this UDRP defense yourself. Even the most out-to-lunch single-person panel would never let this one get through. If the unthinkable happens, you can still go ahead and stick a lawyer up their ass and keep your domain, but it won't come to that.
Scandalous about NAF keeping your money, though.
PS, Canadian corporate info is available online , but I was unable to find a Tobacco.com, Inc. Is it possible they filed a trademark application on behalf of a non-existent entity? By the way, 401 Queen's Quay West is Harbour Terrace (luxury condominiums), so they may have assets worth going after. Canada has an advanced legal system, after all.
PPS, Your domain tobacco.com may not be worth as much as you think... e-commerce or even advertising is a complete non-starter in today's climate. Suggestion: put up tobacco lawsuit resource info (class action lawsuits, ambulance-chaser lawyer ads, etc), and the tobacco companies might find it cost-effective to pay you a million to take the domain off your hands (after all, literally hundreds of billions of dollars are at stake).
Another strong possiblity (for lack of SETI) is that intelligent races prefer virtual reality to real reality, in much the same way that the human race prefers to sit inside watching TV instead of going outside for a walk in the woods and grasslands where we evolved.
When we have better than Final Fantasy rendering in real time, most of the human race will probably choose to spend most of their day living and interacting there, in virtual-reality cyberspace... in much the same way that many of us today spend most of their day in an office environment, living and creating economic value in ways incomprehensible to our hunter and farmer ancestors.
When this happens, the planet may seem empty in many ways... in much the same way that suburban streets in America seem empty to a third-world visitor used to bustling and noisy street life.
This phase (human race moves into and settles cyberspace, become less visible in the physical world) is not the same as the Singularity. For one thing, it is not at all dependent on future advances in artificial intelligence... we just need ordinary number-crunching computers a few orders of magnitude faster than today.
If the AI naysayers are right, and machines never get smart enough, then the Singularity will never happen... but the "ghost planet" scenario will inevitably happen in our lifetime... either as a result of progress, or as the unhappy result of plague or nuclear war.
There are other possibilities as well for SETI's lack of success. Our solar system and our planet may be fairly unique in some ways:
Probably bacteria-like life is extremely common, but advanced intelligent life might in fact be somewhat rarer than was once thought.
The human race has already been through a singularity. Its aftermath is known as "civilization", and the enabling technology was agriculture, which first made it possible for humans to gather in large permanent settlements.
There are a few living humans who have personally lived through this singularity... stone-age peoples in the Amazon and Papua New Guinea abruptly confronted by it. For the rest of the human race it was creeping and gradual, but it still fits the definition of a singularity: the "after" is unknowable and incomprehensible to those who live in the "before".
You're wrong. In 1994 Spanish stopped considering ch and ll as separate letters for dictionary ordering purposes.
There's an obvious reason for all the programmers from India. Yes, they have a rigorous educational system, but...
In the US, there are far more lucrative careers in other fields: law, medicine, investment banking, business in general. More importantly, in those fields you can stay until retirement, unlike tech, where your career life expectancy is about the same as a professional baseball player. So lots of smart people do the math, look out for number one, and walk away from science, technology, and engineering.
But an Indian lawyer who comes here can only hope to drive a taxi. And an Indian doctor has to retrain for several years before being allowed to practise. On the other hand, Indian programmers can come here and work in their field right away. Exploited H1-B by our standards, but the envy of all the folks back home. High prestige and big bucks, everyone wants their daughter to have an arranged marriage with a programmer in America.
People go into software in India for the same reason that they go into law in the US, which is the same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks. That's where the money is.
Yes, there's people who program for the sheer joy of it... but they're the least likely to last in a corporate environment with either their job or their enthusiasm intact. And there's not enough of them to go around.
Tuvalu is a small island in the Pacific.
Tuva (throat singers) is a small region in Siberia.
No relation.
You have to dig a bit to find this...
http://registration.yapc.org/I was in a similar situation.
Was a programmer, but got a new job where the entire project was scaled back soon after I joined, and they only gave me testing to do. Nothing wrong with testing, but I wasn't able to create my own tests or write any scripts, or even to automate the tests. Just boring repetitive manual labor that they could have hired any non-technical person off the street to do.
I stayed (big mistake), hoping it would get better and thinking it would look bad on my résumé to leave early, but finally quit after 8 months.
To my dismay, the jobs I got offered after that were nearly all testing. And it was very awkward when interviewers wondered exactly what cutting-edge stuff I'd been working on over the past 7 months... basically fsckall.
If you're young, you can recover from a setback like that, but for an older programmer it's the kiss of death. If you had a series of programming jobs but your last job only involved entry-level testing... you've got the scarlet letter D for dinosaur tatooed on your forehead. Rather than fight to get my career back on track, I took a break from the computer industry... and never went back. Laughing all the way to the bank today, but still pissed off.
If you're not learning anything in a job, and not advancing your career, get out right away. If interviewers ask why you want to leave your previous job so soon, just tell the truth.
Q, X, and Z are grandfathered.
All other 1 letter (and 1 digit) .com domains are reserved.
It's not moral issues, animal rights, or the fact that it's "kinda creepy", though all are valid considerations.
It's the very real threat of cross-species viral or prion infections. Think AIDS (primate origin) or mad cow disease. The risk is unacceptable.
How about non-intrusively asking for non-mandatory micropayment donations?
Access would be free, but at the bottom of the page it would say, "click here to send the author of this page $0.10 / $0.25 / $1.00 / $5.00"
This is the "street musician" financing model... might support a lot of one-person websites.
Very bad idea.
A few years back, I took time out of my career to get up to speed on all the newfangled Internet stuff: Java, JavaScript, etc. Thought I'd assure my future. Instead, my career got permanently sidetracked, and I ended up leaving the industry.
If you're taking time off to re-educate yourself, employers only see "unemployed". They'll wonder what's wrong with you if you're not working during a time of record low unemployment. Also, they're suspicious of self-taught skills without actual paid experience, and especially suspicious of older workers looking to switch to a field for which they have no prior paid experience on their resume ("he couldn't get a job in his field, so now he's just desperately applying for every job out there").
Fortunately, it was a blessing in disguise... doing well now working for myself. But if I was just starting out now, I'd pick some other profession that I could keep doing until retirement. Being a techie is just not a rational career choice.
Amazon.com has an O'Reilly Bookstore
They even reprint selected Ask Tim columns (though not the one we're discussing obviously).
For all his genuine anguish over the issue, I don't see Tim O'Reilly dropping this joint marketing effort with Amazon. He can't afford to lose the revenue.
Barnes & Noble doesn't have clean hands either. Remember that on the eve of Amazon's IPO, they launched a frivolous lawsuit over Amazon's use of the phrase "world's biggest bookstore".
What's the solution? I don't know. No one has clean hands.
Principles are easy when there's no money at stake. Money changes everything.
Another worthy distributed math project is GIMPS (Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search).
More on Mersenne primes here.
Makes sense to marry the linux.com domain with the top Linux content and community sites.
Congratulations all around.
I know the guy who owns the domain embeddedlinux.com
He's not sure what to do with it (just a link page so far). Any suggestions?
Zinc was first discovered and refined in India, centuries before Europe did so.
The trick is, zinc is a vapor at the temperatures required to extract it from its ore. So refining it with medieval technology was nontrivial.
As far as we can tell, life starts out organic. But does it stay that way?
Perhaps it is a routine evolutionary step for sufficiently advanced life to map itself onto a different media: electronic, moletronic or whatever.
Ultimately, you could have "distributed" life forms that exist on a computer network with multiple processors. With quantum computing and nanotechnology, the individual processors could be extremely small, not much above atomic.
Make that a wireless network, with spread-spectrum communication and sophisticated error correction, and you could probably achieve "steganographic" life forms that are very hard to detect from the background and nearly impossible to kill.
Perhaps that's our future.
Microsoft traded bob.com for windows2000.com. Here's an earlier background story.
Physics once meant everything to me, but now I'm doing the "greed is good" thing on the Internet.
Many others followed the same path. There's a vast physics diaspora out there. Among many others, consider Dr. Stephen Schutz, MIT graduate and Princeton physics Ph.D. who recently sold his online greeting card company to Excite for nearly a billion dollars.
On the other hand, I know a couple of folks who foolishly persisted in their dreams of a science career well past the age of employability (late 30s), and now they're shipwrecked and facing reality. It seems they have a lot in common with failed actors, musicians, and athletes who didn't make the big leagues. When did scientists become "starving artists"?
Is there any hope of reversing the tremendous attrition rate of potential scientists? In good conscience, should we even be encouraging young people to pursue science careers given their dim career prospects?
Do you share this pessimism, and what changes do you see in the decades to come, for better or for worse?
Whoa there... it's true that someone bid $10 million for it on eBay, but we don't know yet if it's for real.
If it's true, the buyer is very foolish... Y2K is yesterday's news, and this domain has already lost most of its value.
eToys has owned the domain toys.com all along... why not rename themselves?
Alternatively, they might eventually want to expand beyond toys into other goods, and rebrand themselves more with a more generic name.
The domain went on hold for failure to pay the domain registration renewal fee.
Don't ask how I found out... don't want to give away info for domain speculators