But it seems like you're offended that they offered them to you and that's a waste of energy.

What you call "enterprising" I call "pigs feeding at the trough".

Maybe they should find a way to provide value to someone else instead of domain squatting. Now, THERE'S your waste of energy.

They aren't holding intellectual property hostage. And by the way, when is personal gain evil? Do you go to work each day primarily to benefit other people, rather than yourself:?

They are providing added value, they registered a domain that someone else didn't think of.

The problem here is, that you regret not registering it, and so you, rather than accepting blame for your own failure, are blaming the person who was smarter or faster than you.

Back in the 1990s, I looked up USWeb.com. I almost registered it, but was on the fence, then went back three days later to register it and found that it had been taken the day after I thought of it-- and that company became a big company eventually before the bust.

Were they holding my intellectual property hostage? No.

Where does this sense of entitlement come from? IT reminds me of people who build a house in a neighborhood and then complain because a walmart gets built nearby... as if they think they somehow have property rights in the land that walmart bought. LOL.

Safe to say you and I don't see things the same way. When I read this post, I felt so compelled to respond that I slowed down and then realized that you are the same person I "debated" with just the other day in the Crappy Programmer thread. You referred to the work of Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (Structured Programming) as "idiocy" and presumed to know what I thought (which included a "borderline" personal attack). I responded to your last post here

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=83191

but never heard from you again.

You did not know what I was thinking then and you do not now. Here IS what I think...

"Do you go to work each day primarily to benefit other people, rather than yourself:?"

Both. I don't give away my work for free, but the day I begin doing what I do WITHOUT providing (highly demanded) value for others is the day I hang it up.

"The problem here is, that you regret not registering it, and so you, rather than accepting blame for your own failure, are blaming the person who was smarter or faster than you."

To use a phrase you like, "LOL!" I regret nothing. I accept blame for nothing. I failed at nothing. I blame no one for being smarter or faster than I. I provide value. They don't. That's all I said. That's all I meant.

"Where does this sense of entitlement come from?"

I'd respond to this remark if I had any idea what you were talking about.

You are certainly entitled to your own opinion and I imagine we'll get to see more of it here. I suspect though, from your point of view, you will get lots of "debate" from others here. Don't expect too many people to see things your way, and don't ever presume to know what someone else is thinking. There are better ways to show your underwear.

Or maybe you just like to argue. Fine. But I have much better outlets for my "energy".

"It's a nice domain name you have there; it would be bad if something happened to it..."

Or it could be taken by somebody for whom the domain name also made sense. For example, someone who sells paintings of octopusses.

Also, by keeping the domain name available to you, they provide a service to you at no present cost.

LOL right back at ya, especially if you think J. Random Shopper has enough time or interest to keep track of "bad PR", and somehow that will solve your problems for you. It doesn't work that way, which is why we reality-based types have zoning ordinances.

If someone else has a better use for octopart.cn, they'll buy it; if the Octoparts are the best possible users, they'll pay for it. If octopart.cn is worth more than X, where X is what they pay to get it, they're still ahead (just less so than they could be). If not, octopart.cn is overpriced from their perspective, and will end up going to whoever thinks it's cheap.

The domain squatter serves no beneficial function at all to society, so nothing is lost by banning that behavior except a sliver of economic freedom. If economic freedom is a very high priority for you, of course you're going to be against regulating the registration of domain names. You're entitled to your principles, but don't expect everyone else to share them.

I like how you glide right past the argument I made. You note that you disagree, and then note that you disagree, but I see no refutation, so I'll illustrate it again: toilet-seat.com gets registered by a loving toilet-seat fanatic. He posts pictures of all the awesome toilet seats he's seen, and writes a fantastically detailed blog about the aesthetics of toilet seats. He is in the 99th percentile for Adsense users, earning upwards of $10 a month.

He realizes, however, that Global Toilet Seats, Inc, a massive conglomerate, could earn $500,000 a year more from their Internet operations, just by buying his URL. They offer him $5 million to give up his hobby site. He'd rather have $5 million than the URL. They'd rather have the URL than the $5 million.

You'd rather both sides walk away sad, because you can't see the value in reselling a domain to whoever can use it best, given that this sometimes benefits whoever thought of a good domain name first.

"You're entitled to your principles, but don't expect everyone else to share them."

I don't! That's why I argue them with examples, rather than. Um. Flatly stating that I'm right. I know of plenty of economic libertarians who do just say "Not allowing people to sell domain names they own violates freedom of contract," as if that settles it. But the people they're arguing with largely disbelieve in freedom of contract, so it's a wash.

Duelnode, we need you: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/10/duelnod...

I would view the sale of "sex.com", at whatever price, to be a good and natural example of free markets tending to reallocate resources for near-optimum utility. I believe I read your parent post correctly as claiming that domain squatters serve a beneficial function by auctioning off domains to high bidders rather than letting fast-moving hobbyists set up disappointing web sites at those domains, and pointed out that the hobbyist could sell the domain just as well as a squatter could -- thus the squatter doesn't provide any added value for society as a whole.

So no, I would not "rather both sides walk away sad", and likewise I would not agree with most of your characterization of my comment. I'm sorry I was not more clear.

That's great for physical commodities, but it doesn't take a genius to see that this doesn't do any good with domain names. It takes a committed libertarian to fail to see that, though.

this is called being a jerk

It helps that the Mac has HFS+ and Journaling.

There is a much larger universe of "wouldn't it be neat..." ideas than there are "this would really ad value and people will be begging to pay us..." ideas. Even things that people will pay for because they add value but that are so small a morsel of functionality don't work either- eg: little tiny utilities where people would gladly pay you $1/month to use, and where you could make big money at $1/month given the size of the audience, but are simply not worth the effort to renew on an annual basis for people because $1 a month isn't significant enough in the customers mind to get them to sign up. (EG: a spam filtering service is borderline here, anything less featurful or significant is not going to get many customers, I expect.)

The market needs pay-for-software because without it, there's no way to have the software industry make things the users want. Sure you can count eyeballs, but simply because I'm willing to surf over somewhere doesn't mean that I assign the place value -- I surf all kinds of places. In fact, the places I surf are kind of a herd mentality thing. The software I buy is based on my careful analysis of what I need and what it's worth to me. Free software is worth nothing -- even if it has a lot of users. This is the difference between just looking at a pretty girl from afar and actually getting a date -- both experiences may feel good, but one has a lot more significance than the other.

It's also interesting to note that there is a gap between free, nada, el zilco -- and paying money. Ten bucks a year is probably too close to zero. Something like 20 bucks or more sounds like more of a commitment. That's just a guess, though.

This is the problem with all the people that embrace open source or free software. The developers price themselves out of existence. Sure you have to hand out the source code, but you can still charge for the software.

Personally, I don't use Opera or one of the three main browsers most of the time, so I periodically run into a site that tells me they don't support my browser, in which case I switch browsers.

I don't expect everyone to cater to my whim all the time.

in SV, its like being in a bar full of hot chicks who are constantly coming on to you, and telling you that they will sleep with you, if only you'll get a vasectamy, shave your ballsack, take female hormones, grow your hair out, start dressing in womens clothes, etc-- where each time you do something to please one of them they have another suggestion and two more show up with completely different suggestions. You can never make them happy and none of them will sleep with you, until you have proven yourself to be completely desperate, and wrapped around your finger. So you ultimately end up with an ugly one after being teased by hot chicks to the point of total desperation. Then when they do sleep with you, you find out they have herpes, and a few days later, they start sleeping with your best friend instead and tell you that you have to stop going to bars, or they will make sure you never get laid again.

In the end you're screwed, diseased and have wasted several years trying to get laid when you should have been trying to build your business.

Only, when I talk about women here I'm talking about VCs and when I talk about changing you I'm talking about really bad business advice. You're left with the choice of running your company into the ground based on their bad advice, or being pushed out of your own company because you wouldn't destroy it for them. No VC realizes that they are incompetent at business and giving their clients bad advice-- the best you can hope for is one that is so busy they aren't paying attention to you. People say you just need to find a good VC-- but the reality is, VCs are like politicians: there are no good ones. If they were decent people they wouldn't be in that line of work. (Not that there's anything wrong with venture investing, just the way its practiced in Silicon Valley is death to high tech startups.)

Unless you're a MBA with a marketing focus and cant' write code to save your life, and your only way to make it big is to latch onto some actually talented people and od the high burn rate high profile startup thing-- the Valley is the last place you want to go.

You need roughly as much money to do a given startup outside the valley as in it. That means you're roughly as beholden to investors no matter where you are. And stupid as many SV investors are, they are on average smarter than those outside it.

1. You foist idiocy upon others and refuse to listen when they point it out as such, because someone told you that the idiocy was "effective established principles".

Your "effective established principles" seem to be neither effective, nor established, nor principled.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structured_programming

Isaac Newton "stood upon the shoulders of giants." Interesting to see that you know better.

-----------------------

"...someone told you..."

Actually, I learned what I'm sharing in this thread (and much, much more) from MANY excellent mentors. I hope you find some, too.

----------------------

"The number one sign you're a crappy programmer"

I have hundreds of (well paying) clients that would disagree with you.

----------------------

I "foist" standards only upon those who work for me. You won't ever have to worry about that.

I'll add two items to this list:

1. You believe anyone who doesn't write unit tests is a crappy programmer. (I'm done trying to explain this to carppy programmers- not only are they crappy they think that unit tests make them not crappy, and so they can't concieve of the reason unit tests are bad (and often they are...) If you want to write unit tests for yourself, that's fine, but if you've ever told someone else that they should write unit tests, you're a crappy programmer.

2. You believe in Scrum. Like global warming, Scrum is a religion... back in the old days, when programmers had to actually program, we used to use the "daily status meeting" as an example of the height of absurdity that pointy-haired-bosses could achieve. Now crappy programmers think that it makes them less crappy. (No, it doesn't, it actually means your code is crappy... especially if you think scum is an improvement.)

Really.

I know I am speaking crazy talk-- at least most programmers under 30 seem to think its crazy talk-- but it isn't.

The reason we have crappy programmers now? I think its cause they are going to colleges and getting CS degrees. Back in the "old days" when you had to write code to become a programmer, when you had to learn and you cared about getting things done well, we had to self teach and the learning curve was higher.... nowadays really crappy programmers train crappy programmers by the ten-score at universities who's primary goal is separating fools from their money (and I mean any university other than maybe caltech and MIT this applies to.) and they just teach really crappy programming practics. Those that can do, you know.

Speaking of which, you gotta be poor at math to go to univeristy in the first place-- teach yourself and start working right out of high school, after 4 years you're senior software developer, you're much better than the people who have been taught bad practices at university, and instead of being up to your armpits in debt, you'll have a good job and a great income... and four years later- a8 years into your career and 4 years after your friends got out of college, they might have paid off their student loans but you'll still be making twice what they were.

But then, I'm expecting to get pounced on because this is a site full of university grads. :-) Sorry, this has been my experience, and I've interviewed a LOT of programmers in my time.

In fact, I've found that PhDs in CS are useless, Masters in MS are good for grunt work, if you watch them close but generally shouldnt' be hired, and people with jsut a BS degree can usually be retrained if you can get them focused... if they get a job at a big corp right out of school, though, they are lost forever. (Most of them anyway.)

All the really brilliant programmers I've known didn't go to college. (BTW, I did, so I know first hand it was a waste of time.)

Anyway.....here's a bonus "how to know you're a crappy programmer":

You're a crappy programmer if you think while (foo) { stuff }

is wrong because the curly brace goes on the same line as the while. Generally ,the sloppy programmers who think they are really productive but produce nothing but shite are adamant about that... the ones who think about what they are writing and are useful, put the brace on the next line.

Really should use that as an interview question.

I mean, we can debate silly stuff all day, like LISP versus C, Firefox vs. IE, Mac vs. PC, web 1.0 vs web 2.0, etc. But these "braces on the same line" guys are just completely out of their minds. :) <-- Smiley face means humor was used in this comment.

Maybe it really should be used as an interview question. There is no point in mixing same-liners and new-liners together.

Only remedy might be to use a programming language without curly braces.

 if (a==b) { doStuff(); } else doOtherStuff();

I would consider this a little bit of a hangup on my part, though, as it seems other programmers go the other way. An interesting topic for a book is all the weird things programmers get hung up about. Variable naming comes to mind, as does error handling strategies. And when we get hung up, usually we're not too shy about explaining why everybody else is wrong!

  if(...)
  {
    ...
  }
  else
  {
  ... 
  }

  if(...) {
    ...
  } else {
    ...
  }

(...) ? $doThis : $doThat;