Site certificates cost too much damn money and are too damn restrictive. I can't buy a certificate that will cover every conceivable iteration of my domain name unless buy an "unlimited subdomain" cert which is usually 2-3x more expensive than a single domain cert. And GOD HAVE MERCY ON YOUR SOUL if you actually have more than one domain name pointing to the same server...

Obviously you could just turn on https and redirect all traffic to it with a self-signed certificate, but when you do that every browser that visits your site starts screaming OH MY GOD I DON'T KNOW WHO SIGNED THIS EVIL HAXXX0R5 MIGHT BE STEALING YOUR IDENTITY AND SIPHONING YOUR BANK ACCOUNT AS WE SPEAK. This tends to degrade your average visitors confidence in the authenticity of your site.

I'm speaking from experience, since I had to go through this crap last October when Firesheep came out.

The good news is that 99.9% of all blogspam doesn't know how to handle https. Yet.

... that certain components (for example, audio) take a long time to figure out how to make work, and end users tend to get impatient about such things. That doesn't mean no progress is being made, or even that good progress isn't being made.

I've used Linux since about 2000-2001, and I'm not really an expert. From my perspective, Linux of today is leaps and bounds over what it was then in terms of user friendliness, configurability, etc. And in terms of multimedia, well... it's somewhat usable but not there yet. But it gets closer constantly. That doesn't mean it isn't frustrating, and I still cuss out pulseaudio (and eventually uninstall it) every time I try to get it to do things that seem intuitively obvious to me... but each time I've used it I notice improvements, and I'm pretty confident that one day it will just work... at which point there will be something ELSE that everyone complains about.

Because Linux developers don't have direct access to proprietary information, progress on proprietary-heavy aspects of an operating system (like audio, and video, etc.) is unfortunately slower than other areas. Nothing can get around that other than companies open sourcing their drivers and putting patents in the public domain (which is a longer way of saying "nothing can get around that.") But the progress is still both remarkable and laudable. Though I still reserve the right to cuss out the parts of Linux that don't work when I want them to. It's nothing personal, guys, it's just a pain in the ass.

SuricouRaven isn't saying that perpetual motion can be done, you're parsing the sentance wrong. Read it this way:

"Cold fusion isn't a theoretical impossibility (like perpetual motion). It can, in principle, be done."

In other words, OP is making a distinction between cold fusion and perpetual motion. Perpetual motion is an impossibility, cold fusion is at least in THEORY not impossible.

The sentence could have been parsed better so I can see how you misread it.

Does each individual patent cancel each other out? I'd always assumed if you owned a patent on a technology that was rather fundamental to the functioning of an entire industry it trumped 30 patents in a specific branch of that industry. I'm not saying those are the patents Google owns, I just didn't think that it was necessarily a #'s game.

To ssh into my site, modify files, and reboot it remotely. I wouldn't say it was "well-suited" for it, though. More like "it's there if you have absolutely nothing else."

So... sort of an Infoworld-lite, then? Ugh.

Has Apple trademarked Jobs' image? Or is there some kind of international law that covers selling the likeness of someone without their permission?

I'm not being snarky, I genuinely don't know.

...that if the current administration's relationship with Google is like the relationship the previous administration had with Haliburton, then it's OK.

Ooops, did I type that instead of just thinking it?

... does that mean we'd eventually see versions of vCenter Server and vCenter Client that run on something other than Windows? That would be nice.

I'm in the strange position of having reached the realization that essentially, unless I'm willing to devote about 20 years of my life studying the matter on my own I'm going to have to decide to accept it by faith and not by reason. Oh irony, you are so delicious.

The movie will star Samuel L. Jackson as gravity who will quote a passage from the Old Testament before he makes my brain go splat.

This is why I never did well in the higher math classes in college.

So... I thought gravity required there be something with mass in order to create gravity. Doesn't that mean in order for there to be a law of gravity you need stuff with mass attracting each other? Which requires something, not nothing, so --

Damn. There it goes again, brain matter all over the wall. Excuse me while I get a spatula.

What in my post ever compared AT&T to Google and called Google the good guy? It was specific to AT&T's comments on net neutrality and made no comparisons whatsoever.

1. We do things on the internet that you pay us for.

2. You do things on the internet that you pay us for.

3. When you do things on the internet that other people pay you for, you pay us for the privilege of doing them.

4. If we find out you are doing things on the internet that we are also doing, you will pay us for the privilege of doing them slower than us.