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When I heard that Compaq recently paid one fellow an astonishing $3.3 million to buy the Internet domain name altavista.com I panicked. How much longer could I wait to register quittner.com True, my family name is not (yet) a primary destination on the Web. But neither was altavista.com when Jack Marshall, a San Jose, Calif., electrical engineer registered it in January 1994. Happily for Marshall, Digital Computer Corp. (later bought by Compaq) launched a popular search engine in 1995 called AltaVista. By this year, some 500,000 people a day were typing altavista.com into their browsers--and going directly...
...around the time that Marshall was registering altavista.com I was snagging the domain name mcdonalds.com for a Wired Magazine story. I suspect that Marshall paid for altavista exactly what I paid: nothing. In those good old days, name registration was free. A $3.3 million profit is a pretty good return on your investment--though some readers might point out that it's in line with the kind of performance that Wall Street expects from Internet businesses...
What's clear is that humans have expanded into habitat that was once the relatively exclusive domain of the cougar. "We're having more encounters because we're moving into their territory," says Lynn Sadler, executive director of the Mountain Lion Foundation, a national pro-cougar lobbying group based in Sacramento, Calif. "We are not only reducing the size of their available range but fragmenting it." She recalls a recent incident in Roseville, Calif., where a lion walked right through a brand-new apartment complex. The site straddled a natural pathway that lions used to travel between neighboring ranges. "There...
...never read the book and got the jokes from a bartender friend. "I had a friend familiar with the Internet, and we came up with all kinds of hits for every one of those jokes," Barnicle claims. "They're just out there floating in the air in the public domain." But when Boston's WCVB-TV, where he is a contributor, produced a tape of a June 22 segment in which Barnicle held up the book and said it had "a yuk on every page," the paper asked for his resignation; he refused. At week's end, word...
Speculating in domain names is not new: Enterprising individuals bought hundreds of Internet addresses such as unitedairlines.com and held them for ransom from their namesakes. (In 1996 a court ruled against registering copyrighted names.) But Marshall had his fair and square -- the Alta Vista search engine wasn't launched until November 1995, and was first registered under the name www.altavista.digital.com. (Why they picked a name that was already taken is inexplicable.) However, having a search engine's traffic mistakenly piling into your site daily isn't necessarily desirable, especially next to $3.5 million, and Marshall finally settled...