Agreed. I used to use StartSSL certs for several things over the last decade. And I too have moved to and endorse (for whatever little that's worth) LetsEncrypt.

The official lets encrypt client didn't meet any of my needs when i first switched although it may be better now (!?) Things seem to have been moving along over there.

I currently use the acme.sh client on linux and it's been solid and easy to use. I don't have anything positive or negative to say about the multitude of other options. And again... things have likely moved along a lot since i switched a year ago.

remain relevant [by having a] day-job language(s) and learn a new one on the side

That makes my shoulder cramp up.

Seriously, WTF is with programming language names?

WTF has been superseded by HolyShit++

You use your video card to print?

Back in the old days they did all kinds of kludgey things to save bytes and/or processing time. These days we usually view such tricks as maintenance, dependency, and security risks because the hardware is cheap enough.

(Except we use web browsers to try to act like desktop GUI's, so I guess wacky kludges never die, just morph.)

A good example of #4 is Javascript. Horrible crap language, but the JS engines in modern web browsers are fiendishly fast at it.

Slick, it can now execute billions of bugs per second!
 

The problem with the browser is that HTML browsers were not originally designed to act like and/or mirror desktop-style GUI's. However, that's exactly what the industry has been trying to do for the past 2 decades, and badly. Even the big vendors F up their UI's.

If a browser were designed UP FRONT to be GUI-oriented, then browsers wouldn't need to download giant GUI JS libraries to try to mirror real GUI's. It's almost like every app downloading an OS to run. Dumb! Illogical! Bad humans!

One of my common suggestions is to make the (GUI) browser be a "dumb" vector plotter: plot shapes and input boxes based on simple linear coordinates. The flow and relative placement control would be done on the server side. This would greatly simplify the client and related standards.

That way you have only ONE layout/flow engine instead of 50-ish you have to test for on the client (Mac, Windows, iPhone, Android, times each version X, version Y, etc. etc.) Fonts would be a little trickier, but I've kicked around various solutions for those that would take a while to describe here.

I'm tired of UI's breaking and overlapping wrong in different ways on different browsers/devices. I'd rather have the 90's DLL Hell back instead of this insidious Render Hell.

Lets do it logically this time. First, we have to admit we fucked up really bad and turned UI's into rocket science. Actually, rocket science is easier: it follows physics, while the HTML stack follows Chaos Theory. It's great job security until you count your grey hairs and Tums.

Almost 3x area Arecibo.

Yes, but Arecibo has access to Colombian coffee, so it's 3x more efficient. Works that way for coders.

Despite what the linked article says, FAST needs to undergo a long testing...

Didn't that Lego* thingumabob detect gravity waves during its testing phase? Ya never know.

* And don't tell me to google the correct spailing on a fruggin monday

Air travel should not be justifiable under any circumstances if AGW is true. It can only be justified if AGW is false.

I just want to amplify Mr Marxist Hacker's comment.

You could start a graduate level course in logic from those two simple sentences. Here they are again:

Air travel should not be justifiable under any circumstances if AGW is true. It can only be justified if AGW is false.

Impressive. It's like saying, "If drowning is real, then no bathing should be justified under any circumstances. Bathing can only be justified if drowning is false."

I'm 61 and I was taught this in school.

This is some very impressive evidence. I'm sure you couldn't be mistaken.

Please cite more than a handful of scientists who actually suggested there would be another ice age back in the 1970s. Otherwise, we're just going to have to disallow your impressive memory of grade school as proof of anything.

And don't forget to schedule that colonoscopy. At your age, it should be done every 5 years. And who knows, you may find that citation.

A properly designed system shouldn't be highly dependent upon any kind of persistence layer, although if you follow the provider's example programs you'll tend to spread dependencies through your code. But a smart designer hides that all away deep down in some kind of abstraction.

A demonstration of exactly how little you are dependent on a vendor is probably a very good thing, if you're a big customer. Oh, we'll run *this* part of our product on the other guy's cloud service and boom. It happens. Shows the vendors who's boss.

Depends on whether they use the age reversing tech, see young Arnie in Terminator: Gensys or the young Bridges in Tron:Legacy.

These are some strange times we live in man, we got Elvis on tour with the TCB band via video, you have holograms bringing Ronnie James Dio and Tupac back from the grave, and you can have a 70 year old and his 28 year old self in the same scene interacting. Hell give it a couple more years and I really wouldn't be surprised if they put out a new movie with Marilyn Monroe or James Dean as that seems to be the direction we are headed.

So you are literally arguing that command prompts are magic? Or are you arguing that you cannot read?

Because you don't HAVE to use the GUI if you do not want to, you can just run the scripts straight from the folder and simply throw away the GUI if you want as all it is doing is simply editing a script called "update" that is in the parent folder right next to the GUI. Throw away the GUI and run the script, which again you can just open in any editor and guess what? It does exactly what the GUI does, installs the updates with the conditional flags you chose. The options you choose? Again all just basic scripts with easy to read descriptors like "install DotNET" "InstallOfficeUpdates" and "MakeLogFile" and anyone who can read even the most basic script can read these quite easily as they are all laid out in classic "if this then that" script language with no attempts at any obfuscation.

So I'm sorry but now you are either just trying to sling FUD or you honestly do not understand how virii work and think computers are magical black boxes that some boogeyman can wave a wand and create a bug. Scripting is something anyone with any kind of IT knowledge or support background is not gonna have any trouble reading, the websites being called to download the updates are the Windows Update site owned by MSFT so unless MSFT gets their own update servers pwned there is no issue there, and once you have downloaded the updates no network or third party programs or even the GUI itself is required as it is simply manually installing Windows Updates from a command line.

Does this count the huge numbers that took the free upgrade, found they didn't like it (or just wanted to lock in the upgrade) and then went back? Does this count units sold to stores but not through to end users?

This is why I don't buy the numbers put out by companies, there is just too many ways they can manipulate the data to make it look bigger than the actual figures indicate.

bad education is turning our cops into blathering idiots.