For some context - I hope they just have forgotten to renew their domain (which is still very bad). The client software does not connect either though - and they do no answer the phone.
Disclaimer: I have a number of free StartCom certificates.
However, even though I own some certs with StartCom, I personally think this comment has literally no basis.
Looking at the CA market - if anything - we should be happy that a CA like StartCom exists. It is a very small team lead by Eddy Nigg (he is very helpful by the way) and given that they are the ONLY ones (as far as I am aware) offering free certs - we should applaud them. Besides, the fee for revoking is very small.
I also was very much aware that revoking a cert had a charge before I signed up for one - I think it is pretty clear - so not a problem for me at all. Of course if I had to revoke a cert because of StartCom's mistake that would be a different story.
Bare in mind these are only domain validated certificates - perfect for small website owners who wish to offer their site over httpS without paying any extra fee.
If I remember correctly, http://gandi.net/ offers 1 year free SSL cert if you buy a domain. To be honest the difference between an excellent cert and good-enough cert is what you want to protect. If you think your data is so sensitive and you accept that we must rely on CA at the moment, you wouldn't be using StartCom free cert.
This seems quite drastic to me. Personally I don't have a lot of Karma (and I don't really care to) but every known and again I post a comment and usually I hope it provides a good contribution.
Like this the system is putting a lot of weight on the users with more Karma... and I am guessing there are "many" more users with less than 1000 compared to those with more? Some people may never have a chance to state their opinion like this.
Rather, the opposite approach might work? Users with more than X karma can completely remove some comments, and say if your comment has been removed, you are not allowed to comment again for a specific period of time. If you post x rejected comments in a row then potentially you get banned.
EDIT - maybe a little off topic: another "comment" about comments - I notice you can up vote and down vote comments. I see this functionality sometimes is used to indicate agreement (or lack of) towards a comment. This as far as I cant tell is not the intended functionality, I am unsure however how this can be fixed easily.
http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders shows at least a hundred with over 1000, and probably many more than that considering the falloff in points becomes more gradual as you go down the list. My comments are nothing special and I have >6000 karma. Even if only 10% of those people are still active, there will be no shortage of endorsers for the livelier discussions.
The HN leaderboard shows 100 users with > 15500 points, they mostly all seem to be active users, and the scores seem to be doing the usual long tail dropoff that such distributions tend to do.
So I would expect there to be a ton of active HN users with more than 1000 points.
according to a comment in this thread, there are 5500 users with over 1000 points. Whether they are active or not is unknown. Whether they want to view pending comments or just read and comment like normal users is unknown.
If you are in this >1000 karma club, please approve this comment. I have been a user for 1044 days.
It's not that hard to get to 1000+ slowly. All you have to do is hang around for years and make the occasional decent comment. If anything this is biased towards old timers.
It's not currently that hard to get to 1000+ slowly. By slowing down commenting and making it harder to even get comments through, this is presumably going to make it harder.
I browser HN daily, been around for coming up on a year, and I'm not even half way there.
Since commenting is such a huge aspect of these sites for me, I'll probably frequent HN much less often since I won't be able to participate in conversation. PARTICULARLY, I won't be able to get in the early comments that are necessary for making high-karma. You can't have your comment show up an hour or so later after "approval," you'll only net a handful of upvotes, because you'll be buried under the high-scoring top comments by senior HN users.
Perhaps make a mid tier, say 500 karma, where you can't endorse users, but don't need endorsement?
I've been around for 250 days or so and am not even halfway there.
Then again, I only say something whenever I feel I have something to add, rather than just blasting comments and hoping to get upvotes (and now, endorsements)
I think this would result in a worse off situation because by allowing users with X karma to remove comments and prevent other users from commenting, it is effectively censoring them.
True, however you could require say 4 users to block a comment out and this maybe would mitigate the problem a little?
I think the point I was trying to make was that by turning it around it would require "less" active participation from the users and by default everyone gets a chance, but the really bad comments would still get removed I think. Anyway we shall see how it works out!
I get the feeling no one has a clue yet. It is easy to come up with theories... e.g.
Malfunction in plane - transponder turns off - cabin loses pressure (and everyone on plane goes unconscious or similar) - because cockpit is locked crew does not manage to do anything in time - plane keeps on going - fuel runs out.
of course that is probably totally wrong.
One thing though - if it did fly low over land - I would expect at least someone would have used their cell phone - so I would rule out that option.
Let's not forget to mention the Spring RTS open source engine:
http://springrts.com/
which has some really good free games (usually based on Total Annihilation).
Also new currently in beta (it has already been mentioned), Planetary Annihilation: http://www.uberent.com/pa/
There is also MegaGlest, which is under active development and already pretty good. One cool feature that I don't see elsewhere is the fully 3D positionable camera.
Well, that is not the full story though...
I expect older people to watch more TV. All my grand parents basically sit in front of the TV all day... I would expect I would watch a lot more if I was older currently, even simply because I would have a lot more free time.
As an older guy I can assure you personally that when I have free time, the last thing I want to do with it is watch TV. Too much living to do.
I do agree with your observation about old people and TV in that my experience with elderly ancestors is an extremely high correlation between watching TV all day and death within the next couple years. When you can't do anything anymore physically but open your eyes, the socially accepted dumping ground (at least on a small scale) is in front of a TV. I believe this explains the peculiar claim that 80 year old people "watch" 16 hours per day of TV on average. This does not explain the claims about 50 year olds.
Maybe I'm a contrarian or I see lot of this here on HN for what it is but I find these comments funny and ironic. How do you find time to comment HN with all ths living to do?
By not watching TV, LOL. Supposedly in my age bracket, at least according to ad sales folks trying to peddle their time, its saving me on average 10 hours per day or some bogosity like that.
That's what I mean about bogus stats. I never power my phone off (why would I?) and its got 3G internet everywhere I go, therefore on the graph by the same logic I have 24 hours of mobile use per day.
