News, Views and a Silicon Valley Diary
Network Solutions and Hoarding


Network Solutions, the monopolistic domain-name registrar and database holder now owned by VeriSign, has been keeping expired domain names off the market with the apparent intention of auctioning them off. NSI doesn't own those names.

The situation has attracted a lawsuit alleging illegal hoarding. But as Interactive Week reported, the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers is ducking any responsibility.

Now VeriSign has purchased Great Domains, a reseller of domains. It takes no guessing to figure out why.

How can this be legal? Where are the Federal Trade Commission and other authorities? Sleeping?

ABCNEWS.com : Answer Geek: Making Nonstick Teflon Stick
By Jack Valko
Special to ABCNEWS.com
Q U E S T I O N :?? If nothing sticks to Teflon, how do they get the Teflon to stick to the pan?
? Michael S.??

A N S W E R :???? This question certainly poses one of the most famous scientific Catch-22s of our generation. Teflon, the industrial nonstick polymer coating developed by DuPont in 1938, allows your pancakes and grilled cheese to glide out of the pan with ease. So if Teflon is so frictionless, why doesn?t the coating slide out of the pan as well?
???? Manufacturers of nonstick cookware have tried a few creative approaches to get Teflon to stick and stay stuck. In the early days, they textured a pan by sandblasting it, gouging out little pits in the surface. They also tried spraying the cookware with stainless steel that formed small bumps when it hardened.
???? These techniques gave the slippery Teflon molecules something to brace themselves against. When the Teflon wore off the tops of the peaks, there was still enough of it clinging in the valleys to keep the scrambled eggs rolling out of the pan. This was the idea, anyway.
???? In the end, these methods didn?t hold up very well in everyday use. If you use?d a metal utensil on the nonstick surface you?d carve off a strip of Teflon with ease. (My wife has certainly been conditioned to this fact by her mother and gets the shakes whenever I so much as look at a tablespoon while cooking soup.) In order to save some cooking pans and a few marriages, the scientist went back to the drawing board.

Sticky Nonstick
To make the nonstick coating stick to the pan, it?s now applied in layers. The first layer contains a sticky additive that grabs both metal pan and nonstick molecules. Then there?s a layer of nonsticky nonstick that clings to the sticky first layer, and then a topcoat of nonstick laced with tougheners to hold the sticky nonstick sandwich together.
???? Got all of that?
???? Teflon coatings still aren?t perfect. Even though it?s designed for high heat, it still gets soft when warmed to a sufficient temperature. Forks are as damaging as ever. Additionally, if you leave an empty nonstick pan on a hot burner, you can roast the surface to such a state that even a plastic pancake turner will carve the molecules off like string cheese.
???? My advice to men: Stay out of the kitchen. It?s too hard to remember which utensil to use with what pan without damaging it.

No end to e-mail marketing in sight
Watch out -- junk e-mail has just gotten started, according to a new report from eMarketer, a data analysis firm. The study claims that combined expenditures of e-mail marketing products, services and email advertising will increase from US$1 billion at year-end 2000, to $4.6 billion by 2003, an increase of 360 percent

GW Bush Sucks - all purpose anti-Bush portal


The Stupidity Factor - Tue, Oct 24th @ 06:36 AM
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Michael Kinsley writes in the Washington Post:
George W. Bush's handling of the stupidity issue has been nothing short of brilliant. A Martian watching the last presidential debate might have concluded that this man would be well advised not to put quite so much emphasis on mental testing. But earth-based commentators mostly shied away from such a conclusion. The rule seems to be that if a candidate can recite half a dozen policy positions by rote, and name some foreign nations and leaders, one shouldn't point out that he sure seems a few whereases shy of an executive order.

The problem is probably laziness or complacency rather than actual inability, and journalists' reluctance to call someone who may well be our next commander in chief a moron is understandable. But if George W. Bush isn't a moron, he is a man of impressive intellectual dishonesty and/or confusion. His utterances frequently make no sense in their own terms. His policy recommendations are often internally inconsistent and mutually contradictory. Because it's harder to explain and prove, intellectual dishonesty doesn't get the attention that petty fibbing does, even though intellectual dishonesty indicts both a candidate's character and his policy positions. All politicians, including Al Gore, get away with more of it than they should. But George W. gets away with an extraordinary amount of it.
Read More at WashingtonPost.com

Fool.com: Lucent At Bat (Special) October 23, 2000
Batter Up
Now let's take a look at its performance so far this year. Lucent investors and the stock market itself will serve as the umpire.

Strike 1
The first strike was called on Lucent in January, when it pre-announced an earnings and revenue shortfall for the first quarter. This was primarily attributed to Lucent's failure to foresee shifts in customer purchases of optical networking products, and its inability to meet demand. There were also capacity and deployment issues related to these and other products, as well as changes in customer purchasing problems. At the time, Lucent said the problem would be cleared up by the end of its March quarter.

Strike 2
It looked like things were getting better for Lucent until it released its third-quarter earnings in July. It set expectations for Q4 2000 and fiscal 2001. The news wasn't good and the market reacted by ringing up Strike 2. Fourth-quarter expectations were lowered due to product transition issues -- Lucent didn't foresee the rapid decline in circuit switching sales. It also admitted that it was taking longer than expected to ramp up in optical networking. At the time, Lucent's new CFO, Deborah Hopkins, promised that this wouldn't happen again. Guess what? It did.

Strike 3
With an 0 and 2 count, Lucent needed to protect the plate. It couldn't. Strike 3 came in early October when Lucent pre-announced that the problems with its fourth quarter were even worse than it led investors to believe back in July.

Amazingly, the problems continue to be at least partially related to Lucent's optical systems business. This really should have been a home run for Lucent. It's actually the number two player in this fast-growing business. The vast majority of optical components companies, like those covered in this month's Internet Report, and optical networking companies are seeing sales grow in this rapidly expanding market.

Campaign 2000's Joke-Off by Jacob Weisberg
Bush first appeared on Letterman back during the primaries, by satellite. He crashed in flames. When Letterman, just back from quintuple bypass surgery, asked Bush what he meant by saying he was a "uniter, not a divider," the governor replied, "That means when it comes time to sew up your chest cavity, we use stitches as opposed to opening it up." Letterman looked askance. The audience booed.

The Complete Bushisms - Updated daily. by Jacob Weisberg
"Drug therapies are replacing a lot of medicines as we used to know it."

ZDNet: Interactive Week: AT&T Broadband Aims For Greater Market Share
AT&T Broadband is scouring the landscape for ways to make more bucks - including cashing in on delivering customers to Web merchants.

With giant AT&T's stock slump sparking shareholder angst on the eve of its third-quarter earnings announcement Oct. 25, an old idea of leveraging its networks to gain new revenue has taken on fresh urgency. And some insiders expect the company may announce a spin-off of its consumer long-distance unit.