There *is* a heck of a lot .. on 16 Psyche.

I dunno about you, but the idea of shipping off in a space ship for a year or two, to mine my fortune in space minerals, sounds kinda .. fun ..

You have a point.

The StackExchange sites have a weak spot for late answers. The voting and sorting system reward mediocre answers that are posted early over great answers that are posted months or years later. That means that the best answer is sometimes half way down the page and may never reach the top.

It is often problematic that the person who asked the question gets sole control over which answer is at the top via the green check mark that "accepts" the answer. I've seen them choose some really bone-headed answers as accepted on occasion. There is just no way for the community to over-ride them, even with at 10:1 ratio of votes on some other answer.

My other pet-peeve is the large number of separate StackExchange sites with somewhat overlapping topics. It is almost impossible to figure out where to post a question sometimes. Most of the sites have non-obvious rules about what is off-topic. You are likely to ask in the wrong place and get your question closed the way it is set up. For example if you have a question about the security of Google Analytics for your WordPress website running on IIS. You might ask it on Security, WordPress, Webmasters, WebApps, or Server Fault. Most people seem to just ask it on StackOverflow because it is the one they know.

>>> reviewed by actual humans. .. Max Headroom!

It gets much more complicated once there is a load balancer involved. I end up redirecting the acme-challenge directory to a subdomain that gets hosted without a load balancer, generating the certificate there, and then having scripts push it to the load balancer.

The other problem I have is that certbot is not idempotent. Certbot doesn't check if the deploy scripts actually succeed or not, it just assumes they did. If they didn't, they will never get called again. Just running certbot auto-renew is not enough. You have to compare locally available cert to the live installed cert to know if a deploy is needed.

With all those extra check, it works, but it is several hundred lines of scripts.

This really sucks for customers of StartCom (StartSSL):

• Your website suddenly stops working with no warning.
• There is no equivalent alternative to StartSSL

Basically Google (and to a lesser extent Firefox) have handled this really badly. I found out about this issue when I got a new certificate and it wouldn't work: StartSSL certificate gives SEC_ERROR_REVOKED_CERTIFICATE in Firefox and ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID in Chrome

• The browser error messages are cryptic and inconsistent. None of them say what the problem actually is. None of them offer links to the blog posts or bugs announcing the revocation. The only way to figure out the issue is through searching.
• Google is killing existing certificates without making any attempt to contact webmasters. Google should be putting alerts in Google Search Console for every site that will be brought down by this change. At least Firefox limited the scope such that all existing certificates were grandfathered in.

StartSSL was the only certificate authority at its price point. You didn't have to pay by the certificate. You didn't have to pay for the automated process by which you validated ownership of domains. You only paid for validations of who you are and who your company is. Once you were validated, you could issue as many certificates as you wanted for any domains you own. For a flat fee of $200 per year, I could get all the certificates I needed.

The only alternative that I have been able to find is LetsEncrypt. While it is completely free it has some major disadvantages:

• LetsEncrypt doesn't offer wildcard certificates. I have a domain with about 60 subdomains. The lack of wildcard really hurts for me here.
• LetsEncrypt only offers the most basic level 1 certificates. They only validate that you have control over your domain. They don't offer level 2 that validates who you are. They don't offer level 3 that validates who your company is. They don't offer the level 4 extended company validations that give the green bar in browsers.

Set up IceComm on a web site that only you and your kids can access, and give them the Chrome browser with a bookmark to go there at scheduled times .. https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Ficecomm.io%2F

Very easy to set up server less video conferencing. Add a bit of TogetherJS to the mix and you've got realtime chat as well - without needing to install anything on any local computers besides the Chrome browser.

I use IceComm on my main server as the 'front door' to my business - I have a browser sitting on my front door all day, and whenever clients visit I'm ready for them. Its just like having a virtual front door to the business .. very handy and very care-free for the customers.

I agree: Lua is absolutely one of the best things to be teaching high school students. You can either sit entirely in the Lua language itself, or you can learn to extend the capabilities of the VM and interface with outside libraries and frameworks.

I think the big elephant in the room is more to be found further upstream, in the area of manufacturing. Worrying about software hacks is one thing - not having the faintest absolute clue exactly *what* is inside the chip package is something else entirely. Think its an accumulator bank? Oh sorry, maybe we forgot to mention the harmonic bundles associated with wave guidance within the interstitial distances of the rapidly blinking transistors .. yeah, those can be read from space. With a satellite (or 12).

The game is over folks, or rather .. the game is on, depending on how you look at it. Until you are capable of investigating and participating, directly, in the sub-assemblies, you will always have a weak back door. Either we, ultimately, become able to assemble our own chips on the desktop, or there will always be a power class: those who can build such devices, and those who can only be ruled by them.

We need to evolve to adapt to this new threat to the species, and instead of seriously *resisting* its effects on our being, we - the true power - direct the feature to our favour. If, out of the NSA catastrophe, we gain a "New Internet" wherein *everything, everywhere* for 15 years, was available to everyone, then we'd have indeed a new era in the human species. A truly evolutionary step, made by mistake - perhaps.

But then why is the bookmarks bar below the URL bar. My bookmarks are more like the menu. They don't change based on which tab is open. Shouldn't the bookmarks go above the tabs?

Firefox bookmarks sync is much better than Chrome bookmarks sync. Firefox stored your bookmarks locally and updated them periodically from the cloud. Chrome appears to have to download everything when I start the browser. I get a blank bookmarks bar for a few seconds when the internet is slow and I open Chrome. This is one place where Firefox got the design right and Chrome has it wrong.

Push to production as soon as the (many) automated tests that you have pass. This means you should have comprehensive unit tests and tests that run in the browser, probably written in Selenium. You'll also want to script your release so that you can do it with the push of a button. Once the tests pass, and the mechanics of a release are trivial, there is little reason to hold up a release.

I worked for a top 500 website (East coast) for 7 years that did weekly releases. Since I left, they decided that wasn't fast enough and now release multiple times per week. I'm now self-employed on my own website and release within an hour of finishing development of a feature.

I started my development career writing firmware for laser printers. When you are shipping code on a physical product, the cost of bugs can be quite high. Especially when it leads to returns or recalls because customers are not satisfied. Our release cycles there were 6 months+. Quite appropriately, IMO.

On the web, the cost of bugs is much lower. In most cases it is the only cost of another release. Sometimes it could cost more because of downtime, but good automated test coverage mitigates that risk pretty well (especially if there is load testing involved). The worst case would be data-corruption, but I've never actually seen that in practice from a release, that has only been related to hardware failure or accidents in my experience.

Facebook has a real name policy as well. It hasn't hindered their growth. The problem is that Google+ has a real name policy, but doesn't require mutual friendship. This leads to a duplicate one way friendship problem.

Here is the use case: you want to add a friend who isn't on the network but you have their email address.
Facebook: You add the user by email. It goes to "friendship requested" status.
Google: You add the user by email. That email address is added to your circles
Then later, the user signs up for the social network, but not using the email address you supplied then friends you.
Facebook: You are friends!
Google: You are friends, plus you have a zombie email address friend in your circles. FAIL!

That and Google+ is full of bugs. For example you open a Google+ account at your own email address. Then you sign up for gmail. This changes the email address of your Google account to your new gmail address with NO WAY TO CHANGE IT BACK. The people in your circles are associated with your old email address. Google has DELETED all the friends from your circles. You then have to re-add all of them.

The OEMs should be profiting from their own app stores .. profits being driven from their customers. That they don't get this yet is hugely disappointing .. appstores - and naturally, software updates - are of huge interest to "next-gen" cell users .. but the carriers just don't want to get into it.

I suppose its because of the draconian US laws about content delivery over telephone networks, in the end, though ..