Note that when you click "buy now", it takes you to PayPal's site, rather than asking you for a credit card number directly. From my limited understanding, PayPal makes it much harder than Visa or Mastercard to get a refund if you have problems with a scamming vendor. Can someone with more PayPal knowledge explain the tradeoffs of paying this way, with respect to refunds that circumvent the merchant?
From the article: The proposed registration fee, $75, is much higher than the fees proposed by the other winning sites, which average about $5.
The average is hella higher than $5..BIZ alone is charging $2000 (see Wired), so even if the other six were all free, the average would still be almost $300.
Kind of ridiculous when so many registrars are reg'ing the big three TLDs (.com/.net/.org) for $10 and less per year. Joker.com's down to around $9, $8 in bulk, on what I think is a $6 fixed cost they pay. So much for competition of other TLDs driving down prices. I doubt anybody who shells $50,000 per TLD (non-refundable) application fee with a 3% chance of approval (7 out of 210+ TLDs were approved) for a niche market is going to charge $8.
Gads...I just realized ICANN took in $11 million on the initial appliciations...and they're trying to revoke country domains for impoverished and unrepresented nations like Haiti and Brazzaville if they don't pony up?
From the article: Still, the first high-definition digital video camera said to be worthy of a
Hollywood blockbuster, the one Mr. Lucas used for "Episode II," is now
a reality, a result of a six-year collaboration between Lucasfilm and Sony
and, more recently, Panavision. What makes it different from other
high-definition cameras is that it captures video images at the 24
frames-per-second speed of film, rather than the 30 frames-per-second
of conventional video. "In the film world, 24-frame is the de facto
standard, and it is much loved and considered integral to the `film' look,"
said Larry Thorpe, a Sony vice president responsible for the camera's
development.
It took Lucasfilm, Sony, and Panavision six years to develop a camera that's only distinguishing characteristic is a shittier frame rate?? I wonder if they have any engineering openings...I could get into a work schedule like that.
Lucas's statements has been that he wants to release a good DVD, with lots of extras and such. There's no effort involved in VHS rereleases, since they're mostly just shoving the movie onto tape.
While that may be what he's said, it doesn't much sense. It's not that hard to shove a plain DVD out either. Fans want the DVD, and will pay top retail price for it, extras or not. In a few years, when Lucas has time to throw in extras, he can release a director's cut DVD, and serious fans will pay a premium for the rerelease. Two DVD releases combined should generate more revenue than one release.
So what's his real motivation? Here's one guess. Lucas knows the info above. But he also realizes that if he releases only VHS for the next couple years, at least through Episode II's much-hyped release, people will buy the VHS version of Episode I. Then when he releases a DVD (plain or with extras), many of the same people will buy the movie a second time. Then if he releases a directors cut some time after that, he can get the die-hards to pony up a third time!
Any evil movie publisher who can get good sales on VHS today but knows the movie will still be in high demand in five years would do well to follow Lucas' lead.
Network Solutions initially allowed all words, then banned George Carlin's "seven dirty words," alone or as substrings, with occasional slip-ups and odd exceptions. The seven words were piss, shit, fuck, cunt, motherfucker, cocksucker, and tits, preventing names like "scunthorpe.com" and "shitakemushrooms.com."
In late 1998 NSI started allowing "shit." In July 1999, other registrars were granted authority to register.coms,.nets and.orgs, and many of them took any name you wanted, and most still do. There was a piece in Slashdot about this at the time.
NSI and Register.com still refuse, perhaps to appease current and potential investors. (Register.com had IPO aspirations a while back) On the other hand, I think bulkregister.com, with no rules, has overtaken register.com as the #2 registrar, which can't be appealing to investors.
A lawsuit was filed by a person wanting to register obscene names in early 1998, so NSI registered them on behalf of the United States Attorney General to hold in escrow pending a decision. That's why fuck.com, for example, is registered by NSI to a US District Court. It's been a long legal process, and from what I gather, NSI fucked up and forgot to renew registration on at least some of them. As a result, NoNameCorp (who sucks up most good expiring domains) landed motherfucker.com when it expired in March.
There are several problems with this. Landfilled microcomputers (and monitors and printers and scanners) take a lot of space due to their cases. Ungluing components from the circuit boards would not save any landfill space.
Then consider the economics. The estimation of "hundreds of dollars" in a computer's components would be absurd for microcomputers, and that must be what the article is talking about if there will be "64 million computers" hitting landfills. If you carefully unglued all the resistors, capacitors, transistors, and chips off a motherboard, they'd be worth nothing, because it would take more work to sort them, test them, ship them, and load them for automated placement than it could possibly be worth. Even new, many of these parts cost around a penny. CPUs are the most expensive part, and you can already unplug them, yet hardly anybody does when the computer is obsolete. And if the components really were valuable, you could "unglue" them today just by heating up the solder.
Maybe the glue will have some use somewhere, but it's certainly nowhere near the landfill panacea the article portrays.
Closed source processors will never be as good as open source processors! What if my particular application favors a narrower instruction pipeline? With an open source Pentium, I could rip out the extra transistors, rewrite the branch tree predictor, and refab it while I get a cup of coffee. As it is, we're stuck with whatever inflexible options Intel shoves down our throats!
This isn't a chip slip-up, but about 12 years ago, I was at a trade show, and requested some product literature from Intel. About two weeks later, they sent me a letter saying that the shipment of booklets was back ordered for lack of the following items:
Part #.....Desc................Qty
xxx123...Cover Letter....1
'a feature that allows parents to automatically check, with one
click, what sites your kids have visited lately.'
It's sad that in an age when children are more mobile than ever
before, the candidates are concerned only with online monitoring.
With today's technology, tamper-proof GPS transponders could be
affixed to every child, providing one-click access to their
whereabouts online and off. As the costs of digital camera
and wireless technology fall so rapidly, soon we could add
one-click access to images of everything our children look at, like
the pornography and bomb-making instructions being pushed at public libraries. Coupled with pulse rate
monitors or alpha brainwave emission detectors, parents could be alerted to aberrant
thoughts even before they manifest themselves as actions, and with
two-way wireless technology, one-click corrective "pulses" could
be delivered in nearly real-time.
Candidates should look forward to addressing tomorrow's problems with
tomorrow's technology, rather than patching yesterday's problems with
yesterday's technology.
From the article: "In other words, if the text is a question and answer format rather than a personal diary, than that's not likely to raise a flag, said Condron." [Condron is USOC's media services director]
So on your personal web site, where you previously had a diary, you now have a daily question and answer: "Fan John Dough writes, 'So, what are your thoughts today?'," followed by your no-longer-a-diary entry!
I agree with the position of the article, and for the most part agree that porn doesn't just pop up when you don't expect it. But there are exceptions.
Probably the #1 porn URL for errant type-ins is whitehouse.com, whose initial page greets surfers with small pictures of topless women in traditional porn poses. This is a site that gets an estimated 60,000 users typing in the URL each day, most of them seeking whitehouse.gov, which gets an estimated 4,000 type-ins a day. (Note that this is type-in traffic only, not link traffic which is larger and presumably better targetted). They go so far as to omit RSAC tags and several other easy voluntary systems for flagging the site as having adult content (they do have one meta tag indicating adult content, but it's an obscure one), and the meta description is also ambiguous as to its nature ("this White House is a heckuva lot more fun than the other White House.").
To address the second question, how to proceed, it depends a bit on the name. Most people who think they have a valuable domain name do not. eBay is full of domains with seven figure asking prices that I wouldn't register for $70. "Gee, business.com went for $7.5 million, so e-zbizniss4u.com should get at least a mill!" Since you didn't give the name, I don't know whether you and your company are deluded or not. But, let's assume it's a decent name.
Maximizing its sale price takes work. The basic strategy is this: let as many people who'd be interested in buying it know that it's for sale, and convince those people that it's worth as much as possible.
As many have mentioned, auctioning it works best, since by its nature a domain name is a limited resource. (As E-bay domain fantasizers proudly proclaim, "very unique domain name!") But by "auction," I don't mean just throw it up on an auction site. Call the likeliest purchasers directly, and get through to the right people, like the VPs of Marketing. Do not talk to a sysadmin or receptionist and give up. And you have to explain why it's valuable...most people in big companies don't yet understand this, and few will understand it even after you explain the value, but you should try, for the few that may be swayed into researching it further.
Once you agree on a price, have attorneys handle the contract, and have the payment held in escrow until the name is transferred. Be sure to help them consider all the angles, such as that domains do sometimes spontaneously unregister during transfers (races.com made mainstream media a few weeks ago, but it happens more often without press coverage)...you should spell out in the contract who eats losses like this. And that you're not responsible if a trademark suit erupts about the name after the sale.
If you're lazy, talk to the folks at greatdomains.com. Again, this depends entirely on whether you've correctly assessed this as a valuable domain name. But if it is valuable, like an easy $250K domain, they'll do some legwork for you. When they auctioned loans, taxes, and cinema.com a couple weeks ago, they hired actors to dress up as uncle sam and crap, pounding the sidewalks in the bay area to raise publicity for the auction. It's stupid, but it got press. They take a good cut for their work, but if you're no good at marketing and negotiating yourself, you could do worse than handing it off to them.
Just listing it on eBay is *not* a good approach for a prime name. Unless you combine that with other marketing efforts, not enough people who would be interested will even know it's available, resulting in a deflated selling price. It's also difficult to discern serious bidders until after the auction, and a prank bid for $10 million will scare off other bidders who might otherwise be interested. GreatDomains runs a credit check on people or businesses bidding on valuable names. If you're talking to bidders directly yourself, you'll have a good idea of their seriousness as well...a business negotiation team from IBM isn't going to make frivolous offers just to yank your chain.
There are also a lot of other domain brokers who'd help with this. I mention GreatDomains as they're the largest, and unarguably get the most press. But that doesn't mean the smaller brokers won't find you a higher bidder...if you're their best prospect, they might give it more attention than being the fifth-best on GreatDomains.
The difference between that and some other names or properties is that Walmart is a trademarked name, and they've poured billions of dollars into making that name valuable. Just because a product or medium isn't invented yet doesn't allow people to use a trademarked name in reference to that. If another company came out with a Sony MP3 player, before Sony even considered it, it would be wrong - Sony is trademarked, and use of the name would lead to consumer confusion. This is a basic tenet of trademark protection. And whether it makes sense to you or not, the laws do provide protection for trademarks.
MS is probably not getting any money for Office. As I understand it, the license agreement Ford has for Microsoft Office includes the right for employees to use Office for home use. (Not sure what the last version that was negotiated for). However, they should get the OS money...still, that'd only be what, $25 million...like that's enough for Bill to notice.:-) Microsoft may want to rethink that "you can take it home" software policy during the next licensing negotiations!
Understand that Ford is extremely profitable at the moment...annual profit-sharing bonuses are often $5,000-$10,000. So perks like this aren't as astounding there as they would be at, say, Wal-Mart.:-) Still, I think it's a cool idea that makes a lot of sense. I hope other companies pick up on it. The UAW is pushing Chrysler to adopt a similar package.
Am I the only one who wonders about the credibility of this entire story? The only corroborative source referenced is a story on a web site that's since been replaced, with the site providing access to back issues only by subscription.
I don't doubt that Mr. Katz received a number of e-mails, and perhaps the no-longer-present story would allay my concerns. But think of all the urban legend e-mails we've all received, like kidney thefts and mrs. fields cookie recipes. And they've been picked up by the occasional mainstream media source as well.
I'm not saying this is bogus, but it sure seems unusual. For example, has the FBI ever mass e-mailed public school principals before? Have they ever launched a huge direct-mail international information campaign without issuing a public press release or otherwise informing the public? Don't the criteria seem a little too conveniently broad-sweeping in their profile, like someone was trolling for outrage? "Boys of average or above average intelligence!?"
BBSes in years past had several attractive features, such as file download sections, gaming, and chatting/e-mailing with other locals. All of these have been impacted by the Internet.
For downloading files, the Internet offers more variety than any BBSes ever did, and with web hosting that can cost less per month than a single phone line, it costs less to reach a wider audience by providing files for download over the Internet.
Modern gaming, if you like the latest in multiuser entertainment, bears too little resemblance to the "door" games in the heyday of BBSes to really compare the two.
For discussion forums, the rise of the Internet has driven people to expect more specialized communities. A few years ago, when CompuServe was essentially a huge national BBS, it offered the same advantage: there wouldn't be enough compression algorithm enthusiasts in a city to support a local BBS, but aggregated between all CompuServe users, they had a decent discussion forum for this. On the Internet, with a huge user base, Usenet and the proliferation of web-based chat boards have resulted in discussion groups defined much more by interests than geography. People did dial BBSes long-distance, but the bulk of the regular callers were generally local, except for narrowly specialized boards, or the handful of shareware and image/porn BBSes that got especially huge (100+ lines).
If you have a nostaligic longing for an active ASCII-based online community, dial Ann Arbor's Grex, +1 (734) 761-3000, N81, 14.4kbps...they have about ten phone lines. Although if you're reading this, you'll probably have an easier time telnetting to cyberspace.org...create a free shell account (they run SunOS), and you'll get the same feel through telnet as through a comm program. They've survived the transition to the Internet by promoting community interaction rather than file downloads and gaming. The Internet has introduced users from around the world, although there's still a core of Ann Arbor locals who keep things going.
The People's Choice Music project is described at http://www.diacenter.org/km/musiccd.html. I bought the CD, and wow, the most undesired song is really undesirable! It's funny for the first few minutes, with the alternating cowboy-solo, soprano, and children's choruses going on about holidays ("Veteran's Day! What's there to say? Do all your shopping at Wal-Mart!") and special interest groups ("Sugar! Beef! Bananas! Pork bellies!"). But one facet of unpopular songs is length, and I could only stand it for about 5 of its 25 minutes.
From the site's description: "The most unwanted music is over 25 minutes long, veers wildly between loud and quiet sections, between fast and slow tempos, and features timbres of extremely high and low pitch, with each dichotomy presented in abrupt transition. The most unwanted orchestra was determined to be large, and features the accordion and bagpipe (which tie at 13% as the most unwanted instrument), banjo, flute, tuba, harp, organ, synthesizer (the only instrument that appears in both the most wanted and most unwanted ensembles). An operatic soprano raps and sings atonal music, advertising jingles, political slogans, and "elevator" music, and a children's choir sings jingles and holiday songs. The most unwanted subjects for lyrics are cowboys and holidays, and the most unwanted listening circumstances are involuntary exposure to commericals and elevator music. Therefore, it can be shown that if there is no covariance--someone who dislikes bagpipes is as likely to hate elevator music as someone who despises the organ, for example--fewer than 200 individuals of the world's total population would enjoy this piece."
You misunderstood the project. These weren't all the paintings people had to look at; people were given lengthy surveys, and these paintings were created in response to that feedback. The colors in the geometric paintings, for example, were selected from the least desired colors for a particular region's survey results. The study isn't intended to be that serious, but it's not as simplistic as you had thought.
Font readability depends on context. If Serif fonts were always easier to read than sans serif fonts, why do you suppose most traffic signs use sans serif?:-) Generally speaking though, for large amounts of on-screen text, if the font isn't so small as to be illegibly distorted, a good Times font is the way to go.
> there is NO way that smoking can benefit your health
Smoking tobacco, and nicotine consumption in particular, have been associated with beneficial effects in combatting manifestations of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases, and reducing the occurrence of Parkinson's disease. Studies date back to at least the early 1990s. Smoking has also been linked to improved short-term memory. Subjectively, many people say it improves "creativity," but that's a tough effect to measure.
Smoking disgusts me, and the health risks of smoking or nicotine consumption generally far outweigh its benefits, but I do believe there are benefits.
Even among domain name disputes, this stands out as particularly absurd. People don't even need to understand much about domain names to realize how ridiculous it is. If domain name legality were a more mainstream issue, this would be choice late-night monologue material! I've got three theories on a motive:
1) Quepasa.com is publicly traded, and ostensibly has some money, so they're digging for gold.
2) Nobody I know had ever heard of whatshappenin.com, and now they have...they've gotten a tremendous boost in brand recognition out of this. What are links on sites like Wired and Slashdot worth compared to the minor legal fees associated with the lawsuit and press releases?
3) And finally, the motive best supported by Occam's razor, the people behind this suit are idiots.:-)
NSI sucks. But I still recommend them to clients! And it's not just the "nobody was ever fired for..." syndrome. They have some terrible policies, have been corporate jerks, and can take months to resolve simple change requests. But with NSI, I know pretty well how much they suck, and in what areas they suck, when I register.
I've used three alternative registrars for.COMs: register.com, netwiz.net, and nominalia.com in Spain. Unless the name contains a dirty word that NSI won't register, I'd stick with NSI. They offer the best security options to prevent unauthorized domain changes, and seem the most stable of the companies. On the downside, they can be slow making authorized changes as well, which can be a big problem.
Concerning stability, register.com is losing money, although like many big.coms, they expect a turnaround soon, and hope to go public in a year or two. Netwiz.net offers $60 2-year registrations, unlike NSI's $70. But what happens if a netwiz.net goes out of business? I suspect some solution would be worked out, but it would be a sticky situation, and if your domain name is important to you, it represents a risk.
You also need to worry about domain heists, either transferring administrative ownership, or merely redirecting the DNS listings (this is done to successful sites to steal traffic for a while). Some of the "off-brand" registrars initiate changes based solely on a form or e-mail request! Some e-mail back for confirmation, some use encrypted passwords, and so on. NSI, of the four companies I've used, is the only one that offered all those, plus PGP-encrypted change requests. Of course they still have plenty of thefts, since they don't > require you to enable good security.
To date, I don't believe there's a secure means of transferring domain names between registrars, so wherever you register, that's where your domain stays. Register.com's web site suggests this will be changing in the near future.
Slashdot Mirror
Note that when you click "buy now", it takes you to PayPal's site, rather than asking you for a credit card number directly. From my limited understanding, PayPal makes it much harder than Visa or Mastercard to get a refund if you have problems with a scamming vendor. Can someone with more PayPal knowledge explain the tradeoffs of paying this way, with respect to refunds that circumvent the merchant?
> The P4 systems from HP were recalled because of the bad BIOS chips in them.
Damn, it's a shame someone doesn't invent a BIOS chip that could be updated without removing it from the motherboard.
Hey, wait a minute....
From the article:
.BIZ alone is charging $2000 (see Wired), so even if the other six were all free, the average would still be almost $300.
The proposed registration fee, $75, is much higher than the fees proposed by the other winning sites, which average about $5.
The average is hella higher than $5.
Kind of ridiculous when so many registrars are reg'ing the big three TLDs (.com/.net/.org) for $10 and less per year. Joker.com's down to around $9, $8 in bulk, on what I think is a $6 fixed cost they pay. So much for competition of other TLDs driving down prices. I doubt anybody who shells $50,000 per TLD (non-refundable) application fee with a 3% chance of approval (7 out of 210+ TLDs were approved) for a niche market is going to charge $8.
Gads...I just realized ICANN took in $11 million on the initial appliciations...and they're trying to revoke country domains for impoverished and unrepresented nations like Haiti and Brazzaville if they don't pony up?
> Certainly 49,819,600 people can't be all that wrong now can they?
Well, it's pretty certain that 50% of voters are dumber than the average voter!
From the article:
Still, the first high-definition digital video camera said to be worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster, the one Mr. Lucas used for "Episode II," is now a reality, a result of a six-year collaboration between Lucasfilm and Sony and, more recently, Panavision. What makes it different from other high-definition cameras is that it captures video images at the 24 frames-per-second speed of film, rather than the 30 frames-per-second of conventional video. "In the film world, 24-frame is the de facto standard, and it is much loved and considered integral to the `film' look," said Larry Thorpe, a Sony vice president responsible for the camera's development.
It took Lucasfilm, Sony, and Panavision six years to develop a camera that's only distinguishing characteristic is a shittier frame rate?? I wonder if they have any engineering openings...I could get into a work schedule like that.
Lucas's statements has been that he wants to release a good DVD, with lots of extras and such. There's no effort involved in VHS rereleases, since they're mostly just shoving the movie onto tape.
While that may be what he's said, it doesn't much sense. It's not that hard to shove a plain DVD out either. Fans want the DVD, and will pay top retail price for it, extras or not. In a few years, when Lucas has time to throw in extras, he can release a director's cut DVD, and serious fans will pay a premium for the rerelease. Two DVD releases combined should generate more revenue than one release.
So what's his real motivation? Here's one guess. Lucas knows the info above. But he also realizes that if he releases only VHS for the next couple years, at least through Episode II's much-hyped release, people will buy the VHS version of Episode I. Then when he releases a DVD (plain or with extras), many of the same people will buy the movie a second time. Then if he releases a directors cut some time after that, he can get the die-hards to pony up a third time!
Any evil movie publisher who can get good sales on VHS today but knows the movie will still be in high demand in five years would do well to follow Lucas' lead.
Network Solutions initially allowed all words, then banned George Carlin's "seven dirty words," alone or as substrings, with occasional slip-ups and odd exceptions. The seven words were piss, shit, fuck, cunt, motherfucker, cocksucker, and tits, preventing names like "scunthorpe.com" and "shitakemushrooms.com."
.coms, .nets and .orgs, and many of them took any name you wanted, and most still do. There was a piece in Slashdot about this at the time.
In late 1998 NSI started allowing "shit." In July 1999, other registrars were granted authority to register
NSI and Register.com still refuse, perhaps to appease current and potential investors. (Register.com had IPO aspirations a while back) On the other hand, I think bulkregister.com, with no rules, has overtaken register.com as the #2 registrar, which can't be appealing to investors.
A lawsuit was filed by a person wanting to register obscene names in early 1998, so NSI registered them on behalf of the United States Attorney General to hold in escrow pending a decision. That's why fuck.com, for example, is registered by NSI to a US District Court. It's been a long legal process, and from what I gather, NSI fucked up and forgot to renew registration on at least some of them. As a result, NoNameCorp (who sucks up most good expiring domains) landed motherfucker.com when it expired in March.
This link was included in the Nanog link, but was unlabeled...it's Mike's Story of Ping. He sounds like a neat person just from his writing style.
Wow, no plays on "ping of death" yet?
There are several problems with this. Landfilled microcomputers (and monitors and printers and scanners) take a lot of space due to their cases. Ungluing components from the circuit boards would not save any landfill space.
Then consider the economics. The estimation of "hundreds of dollars" in a computer's components would be absurd for microcomputers, and that must be what the article is talking about if there will be "64 million computers" hitting landfills. If you carefully unglued all the resistors, capacitors, transistors, and chips off a motherboard, they'd be worth nothing, because it would take more work to sort them, test them, ship them, and load them for automated placement than it could possibly be worth. Even new, many of these parts cost around a penny. CPUs are the most expensive part, and you can already unplug them, yet hardly anybody does when the computer is obsolete. And if the components really were valuable, you could "unglue" them today just by heating up the solder.
Maybe the glue will have some use somewhere, but it's certainly nowhere near the landfill panacea the article portrays.
Look, what is it with Slashdot and Intel bashing?
Closed source processors will never be as good as open source processors! What if my particular application favors a narrower instruction pipeline? With an open source Pentium, I could rip out the extra transistors, rewrite the branch tree predictor, and refab it while I get a cup of coffee. As it is, we're stuck with whatever inflexible options Intel shoves down our throats!
This isn't a chip slip-up, but about 12 years ago, I was at a trade show, and requested some product literature from Intel. About two weeks later, they sent me a letter saying that the shipment of booklets was back ordered for lack of the following items:
Part #.....Desc................Qty
xxx123...Cover Letter....1
'a feature that allows parents to automatically check, with one click, what sites your kids have visited lately.'
It's sad that in an age when children are more mobile than ever before, the candidates are concerned only with online monitoring. With today's technology, tamper-proof GPS transponders could be affixed to every child, providing one-click access to their whereabouts online and off. As the costs of digital camera and wireless technology fall so rapidly, soon we could add one-click access to images of everything our children look at, like the pornography and bomb-making instructions being pushed at public libraries. Coupled with pulse rate monitors or alpha brainwave emission detectors, parents could be alerted to aberrant thoughts even before they manifest themselves as actions, and with two-way wireless technology, one-click corrective "pulses" could be delivered in nearly real-time.
Candidates should look forward to addressing tomorrow's problems with tomorrow's technology, rather than patching yesterday's problems with yesterday's technology.
The guidelines seem easy enough to circumvent.
From the article: "In other words, if the text is a question and answer format rather than a personal diary, than that's not likely to raise a flag, said Condron." [Condron is USOC's media services director]
So on your personal web site, where you previously had a diary, you now have a daily question and answer: "Fan John Dough writes, 'So, what are your thoughts today?'," followed by your no-longer-a-diary entry!
I agree with the position of the article, and for the most part agree that porn doesn't just pop up when you don't expect it. But there are exceptions.
Probably the #1 porn URL for errant type-ins is whitehouse.com, whose initial page greets surfers with small pictures of topless women in traditional porn poses. This is a site that gets an estimated 60,000 users typing in the URL each day, most of them seeking whitehouse.gov, which gets an estimated 4,000 type-ins a day. (Note that this is type-in traffic only, not link traffic which is larger and presumably better targetted). They go so far as to omit RSAC tags and several other easy voluntary systems for flagging the site as having adult content (they do have one meta tag indicating adult content, but it's an obscure one), and the meta description is also ambiguous as to its nature ("this White House is a heckuva lot more fun than the other White House.").
To address the second question, how to proceed, it depends a bit on the name. Most people who think they have a valuable domain name do not. eBay is full of domains with seven figure asking prices that I wouldn't register for $70. "Gee, business.com went for $7.5 million, so e-zbizniss4u.com should get at least a mill!" Since you didn't give the name, I don't know whether you and your company are deluded or not. But, let's assume it's a decent name.
Maximizing its sale price takes work. The basic strategy is this: let as many people who'd be interested in buying it know that it's for sale, and convince those people that it's worth as much as possible.
As many have mentioned, auctioning it works best, since by its nature a domain name is a limited resource. (As E-bay domain fantasizers proudly proclaim, "very unique domain name!") But by "auction," I don't mean just throw it up on an auction site. Call the likeliest purchasers directly, and get through to the right people, like the VPs of Marketing. Do not talk to a sysadmin or receptionist and give up. And you have to explain why it's valuable...most people in big companies don't yet understand this, and few will understand it even after you explain the value, but you should try, for the few that may be swayed into researching it further.
Once you agree on a price, have attorneys handle the contract, and have the payment held in escrow until the name is transferred. Be sure to help them consider all the angles, such as that domains do sometimes spontaneously unregister during transfers (races.com made mainstream media a few weeks ago, but it happens more often without press coverage)...you should spell out in the contract who eats losses like this. And that you're not responsible if a trademark suit erupts about the name after the sale.
If you're lazy, talk to the folks at greatdomains.com. Again, this depends entirely on whether you've correctly assessed this as a valuable domain name. But if it is valuable, like an easy $250K domain, they'll do some legwork for you. When they auctioned loans, taxes, and cinema.com a couple weeks ago, they hired actors to dress up as uncle sam and crap, pounding the sidewalks in the bay area to raise publicity for the auction. It's stupid, but it got press. They take a good cut for their work, but if you're no good at marketing and negotiating yourself, you could do worse than handing it off to them.
Just listing it on eBay is *not* a good approach for a prime name. Unless you combine that with other marketing efforts, not enough people who would be interested will even know it's available, resulting in a deflated selling price. It's also difficult to discern serious bidders until after the auction, and a prank bid for $10 million will scare off other bidders who might otherwise be interested. GreatDomains runs a credit check on people or businesses bidding on valuable names. If you're talking to bidders directly yourself, you'll have a good idea of their seriousness as well...a business negotiation team from IBM isn't going to make frivolous offers just to yank your chain.
There are also a lot of other domain brokers who'd help with this. I mention GreatDomains as they're the largest, and unarguably get the most press. But that doesn't mean the smaller brokers won't find you a higher bidder...if you're their best prospect, they might give it more attention than being the fifth-best on GreatDomains.
Good luck!
The difference between that and some other names or properties is that Walmart is a trademarked name, and they've poured billions of dollars into making that name valuable. Just because a product or medium isn't invented yet doesn't allow people to use a trademarked name in reference to that. If another company came out with a Sony MP3 player, before Sony even considered it, it would be wrong - Sony is trademarked, and use of the name would lead to consumer confusion. This is a basic tenet of trademark protection. And whether it makes sense to you or not, the laws do provide protection for trademarks.
MS is probably not getting any money for Office. As I understand it, the license agreement Ford has for Microsoft Office includes the right for employees to use Office for home use. (Not sure what the last version that was negotiated for). However, they should get the OS money...still, that'd only be what, $25 million...like that's enough for Bill to notice. :-) Microsoft may want to rethink that "you can take it home" software policy during the next licensing negotiations!
:-) Still, I think it's a cool idea that makes a lot of sense. I hope other companies pick up on it. The UAW is pushing Chrysler to adopt a similar package.
Understand that Ford is extremely profitable at the moment...annual profit-sharing bonuses are often $5,000-$10,000. So perks like this aren't as astounding there as they would be at, say, Wal-Mart.
Am I the only one who wonders about the credibility of this entire story? The only corroborative source referenced is a story on a web site that's since been replaced, with the site providing access to back issues only by subscription.
I don't doubt that Mr. Katz received a number of e-mails, and perhaps the no-longer-present story would allay my concerns. But think of all the urban legend e-mails we've all received, like kidney thefts and mrs. fields cookie recipes. And they've been picked up by the occasional mainstream media source as well.
I'm not saying this is bogus, but it sure seems unusual. For example, has the FBI ever mass e-mailed public school principals before? Have they ever launched a huge direct-mail international information campaign without issuing a public press release or otherwise informing the public? Don't the criteria seem a little too conveniently broad-sweeping in their profile, like someone was trolling for outrage? "Boys of average or above average intelligence!?"
BBSes in years past had several attractive features, such as file download sections, gaming, and chatting/e-mailing with other locals. All of these have been impacted by the Internet.
For downloading files, the Internet offers more variety than any BBSes ever did, and with web hosting that can cost less per month than a single phone line, it costs less to reach a wider audience by providing files for download over the Internet.
Modern gaming, if you like the latest in multiuser entertainment, bears too little resemblance to the "door" games in the heyday of BBSes to really compare the two.
For discussion forums, the rise of the Internet has driven people to expect more specialized communities. A few years ago, when CompuServe was essentially a huge national BBS, it offered the same advantage: there wouldn't be enough compression algorithm enthusiasts in a city to support a local BBS, but aggregated between all CompuServe users, they had a decent discussion forum for this. On the Internet, with a huge user base, Usenet and the proliferation of web-based chat boards have resulted in discussion groups defined much more by interests than geography. People did dial BBSes long-distance, but the bulk of the regular callers were generally local, except for narrowly specialized boards, or the handful of shareware and image/porn BBSes that got especially huge (100+ lines).
If you have a nostaligic longing for an active ASCII-based online community, dial Ann Arbor's Grex, +1 (734) 761-3000, N81, 14.4kbps...they have about ten phone lines. Although if you're reading this, you'll probably have an easier time telnetting to cyberspace.org...create a free shell account (they run SunOS), and you'll get the same feel through telnet as through a comm program. They've survived the transition to the Internet by promoting community interaction rather than file downloads and gaming. The Internet has introduced users from around the world, although there's still a core of Ann Arbor locals who keep things going.
The People's Choice Music project is described at http://www.diacenter.org/km/musiccd.html. I bought the CD, and wow, the most undesired song is really undesirable! It's funny for the first few minutes, with the alternating cowboy-solo, soprano, and children's choruses going on about holidays ("Veteran's Day! What's there to say? Do all your shopping at Wal-Mart!") and special interest groups ("Sugar! Beef! Bananas! Pork bellies!"). But one facet of unpopular songs is length, and I could only stand it for about 5 of its 25 minutes.
From the site's description: "The most unwanted music is over 25 minutes long, veers wildly between loud and quiet sections, between fast and slow tempos, and features timbres of extremely high and low pitch, with each dichotomy presented in abrupt transition. The most unwanted orchestra was determined to be large, and features the accordion and bagpipe (which tie at 13% as the most unwanted instrument), banjo, flute, tuba, harp, organ, synthesizer (the only instrument that appears in both the most wanted and most unwanted ensembles). An operatic soprano raps and sings atonal music, advertising jingles, political slogans, and "elevator" music, and a children's choir sings jingles and holiday songs. The most unwanted subjects for lyrics are cowboys and holidays, and the most unwanted listening circumstances are involuntary exposure to commericals and elevator music. Therefore, it can be shown that if there is no covariance--someone who dislikes bagpipes is as likely to hate elevator music as someone who despises the organ, for example--fewer than 200 individuals of the world's total population would enjoy this piece."
You misunderstood the project. These weren't all the paintings people had to look at; people were given lengthy surveys, and these paintings were created in response to that feedback. The colors in the geometric paintings, for example, were selected from the least desired colors for a particular region's survey results. The study isn't intended to be that serious, but it's not as simplistic as you had thought.
Font readability depends on context. If Serif fonts were always easier to read than sans serif fonts, why do you suppose most traffic signs use sans serif? :-) Generally speaking though, for large amounts of on-screen text, if the font isn't so small as to be illegibly distorted, a good Times font is the way to go.
> there is NO way that smoking can benefit your health
Smoking tobacco, and nicotine consumption in particular, have been associated with beneficial effects in combatting manifestations of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases, and reducing the occurrence of Parkinson's disease. Studies date back to at least the early 1990s. Smoking has also been linked to improved short-term memory. Subjectively, many people say it improves "creativity," but that's a tough effect to measure.
Smoking disgusts me, and the health risks of smoking or nicotine consumption generally far outweigh its benefits, but I do believe there are benefits.
Even among domain name disputes, this stands out as particularly absurd. People don't even need to understand much about domain names to realize how ridiculous it is. If domain name legality were a more mainstream issue, this would be choice late-night monologue material! I've got three theories on a motive:
:-)
1) Quepasa.com is publicly traded, and ostensibly has some money, so they're digging for gold.
2) Nobody I know had ever heard of whatshappenin.com, and now they have...they've gotten a tremendous boost in brand recognition out of this. What are links on sites like Wired and Slashdot worth compared to the minor legal fees associated with the lawsuit and press releases?
3) And finally, the motive best supported by Occam's razor, the people behind this suit are idiots.
NSI sucks. But I still recommend them to clients! And it's not just the "nobody was ever fired for..." syndrome. They have some terrible policies, have been corporate jerks, and can take months to resolve simple change requests. But with NSI, I know pretty well how much they suck, and in what areas they suck, when I register.
.COMs: register.com, netwiz.net, and nominalia.com in Spain. Unless the name contains a dirty word that NSI won't register, I'd stick with NSI. They offer the best security options to prevent unauthorized domain changes, and seem the most stable of the companies. On the downside, they can be slow making authorized changes as well, which can be a big problem.
.coms, they expect a turnaround soon, and hope to go public in a year or two. Netwiz.net offers $60 2-year registrations, unlike NSI's $70. But what happens if a netwiz.net goes out of business? I suspect some solution would be worked out, but it would be a sticky situation, and if your domain name is important to you, it represents a risk.
I've used three alternative registrars for
Concerning stability, register.com is losing money, although like many big
You also need to worry about domain heists, either transferring administrative ownership, or merely redirecting the DNS listings (this is done to successful sites to steal traffic for a while). Some of the "off-brand" registrars initiate changes based solely on a form or e-mail request! Some e-mail back for confirmation, some use encrypted passwords, and so on. NSI, of the four companies I've used, is the only one that offered all those, plus PGP-encrypted change requests. Of course they still have plenty of thefts, since they don't > require you to enable good security.
To date, I don't believe there's a secure means of transferring domain names between registrars, so wherever you register, that's where your domain stays. Register.com's web site suggests this will be changing in the near future.