I have the following hypothesis: 1. every word that's actually in the dictionary has been registered as a .com. 2. every possible letter combination of 6 letters or less (more than two billion) has been registered.

This hypothesis was developed just now, by going through wiki articles on orbital mechanics and whois-ing each word, and then later, in anger and frustration, trying random letter combinations.

I need more money to continue my research.

Don´t worry. Soon you´ll be able to register anything.tofu [for a few hundreds of thousand dollars]

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If you're careful enough, nothing bad or good will ever happen to you.

I gave up looking for good names under .com and even .org and .net. I finally bought a domain name under .info. There's also .tv and .biz, but that's really gettng out on the fringes.

Don't worry. It won't be long before they open up a slew of other top-level domain names.

I just hope that this time they'll outlaw the reselling of domain names (unless it passes certain litmus tests for bona-fide business operations), and that they'll revert any domain name that's not actively developed within 30 days of registration (Under Construction and Would You Like To Buy Me types would not qualify).

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I am Mugs, of the Alien clan of Usa, Nordamerica, a Terran, of Sol. Human.

Whoever says "perception is reality" is daft. It's merely an abstraction, and often not a very good one.

My understanding is that if you try a domain name which hasn't already
been taken, within 30 seconds a robot will register it so that if the reason
you tried that domain name was to find out if it was available, you will now
have to buy it from the new owner who just took it at no cost.

-- Jeff, in Minneapolis

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http://www.FreeMars.org/jeff/

"I find astronomy very interesting, but I wouldn't if I thought we
were just going to sit here and look." -- "Van Rijn"

"The other planets? Well, they just happen to be there, but the
point of rockets is to explore them!" -- Kai Yeves

Not true. My five-letter idea is still available. However, that particular name took a little thought and a liberal application of my own geekiness.

Well, I finally used who-is for this name instead seeing if a page would load. I'll let you know if you're right later today, Jeff.

And they eat old people's medicine for fuel

(sorry)

The question is, how do these people know that you've tried to buy a domain name? I imagine there probably are some unscrupulous websites out there that claim to offer registration, but actually pull this trick. I've also heard of unscrupulous websites not actually registering the domain in your name, but in their name. A third scam I've heard of is to quickly buy up a domain when it expires. But I had a domain that I used in a class project. It expired several months ago and nobody bought it up. So maybe much of this is just unfounded rumor. I use command-line tools to look up domains and yahoo to register. Hopefully, I wont fall victim to any of that.

Not "tried to buy". "Tried". You do a lookup to see if it is available. Then the lookup service promptly pounces on it.

eWeek: Whois Hijacking My Domain Research?

Edit: The practice might just have been made unprofitable early this year:

Dotsauce: NetworkSolutions Scandal: Hijacking User Domain Searches

Edit: Someone wrote that the practice is called domain name front running (Wikipedia).

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0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 ...

some "reverse spammer" (or defensive spammer?) could take advantage--search for an awful lot of long nonsense names:

hdoiuoqnoaishfioshf.com

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Todd (Bowie, MD, US, North America, Earth, Sol System, Vega region, Local Bubble, Orion arm, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Virgo A Cluster, Virgo supercluster, the universe in which spock is clean shaven)

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

personal page: http://blog.astrosketches.info

You mean, to cause a nuisance for the name-grabbers by making their
robots register a lot of useless names? I don't think so. As I understand
it, it costs them nothng to register the domain names for a few days,
and if I recall correctly, when that time expires, they just register the
name again, within minutes or seconds of the expiration time. They
could grab a hundred million names at essentially zero cost, and hang
on to them for years by constantly re-registering them.

-- Jeff, in Minneapolis

__________________
http://www.FreeMars.org/jeff/

"I find astronomy very interesting, but I wouldn't if I thought we
were just going to sit here and look." -- "Van Rijn"

"The other planets? Well, they just happen to be there, but the
point of rockets is to explore them!" -- Kai Yeves

service. i.e. a website.

as I said, hopefully if you use a command line tool you're safe. attitudejet.com was what I was considering purchasing yesterday. It's still available, though I'm not going to buy it.

I can't believe network solutions is so slimy! I've always used yahoo and have found them to be pretty good. I've heard a lot of people recommend godaddy, but their marketing is kind of insulting, so I'm sticking with yahoo.