If it is an irrelevant feature for the most part, why are they announcing it? Either it is relevant and Linux (and BSD and OSX and...) was ahead, or it is not and Linux was still ahead but the point is rendered moot.
He is probably referring to directory listings, which do vary (considerably in some cases) between ftp daemons. Many, but far from all, output the format usually returned by "ls -l" in a GNU environment. While the result codes are described by the standard laid down by the relevant RFCs so even if the exact message is unrecognised the general meaning can be understood, the format of directory listings returned is not so different implementations are free to return whatever they like.
When I tried sshfs I fount it to intermittently break even on otherwise reliable routes, though that was a time ago so things could have moved on far since then.
My swiss-army-knife for file transfers both to/from remote hosts and local ones, is rsync-through-ssh (and even sometimes rsync for local file copies) - especially when updating a file or selection of files (it can be rather efficient at only sending the changed parts over) or transferring something very large (with the right options transfers are easily resumed if something interrupts them).
At some point I might have to full apart the sshfs FUSE code, if it is generally reliable these days, and see if I can hack together an rsyncfs...
Most home firewalls are, in their default configuration which most home users never change (they are never told they might need to), doing nothing but a subset of Network Address Translation.
While I personally wouldn't call this particularly insecure (it at least keeps out unwanted incoming connections for the most part) some people would and it is certainly less secure than a proper firewall arrnagement that polices traffic intentionally rather than just blocking outside connections due to a side effect of how the packets for connections made from the LAN-side are translated. A cheap home "firewall" won't stop an infection merrily sending out your data via IRC for instance, where a fully configured firewall might (it wouldn't stop the data doing out over HTTP in most cases, unless your company operates a white-list of web sites you are permitted to visit or some such limiting arrangement).
Also some home routers have been sold with simple or blank default admin passwords for accounts for an admin interface that is by default exposed to the WAN side. This is rare though, the last example I can state being some cheap Apple Airport knockoff devices that were floating around eBay a year or two ago, so I'd not tar all consumer targeted routers with that brush.
And to pull back to somewhere close to on-topic I'll add a little more anecdotal evidence: FTP through corporate firewalls is definitely a problem often in my experience. In fact some companies (just about all our clients for instance) deliberately don't allow FTP in either direction at all, dictating (sensibly, in my opinion) that SCP/SFTP (and sometimes rsync through ssh) be used instead where a file transfer protocol with authenticated is needed. Though this isn't about Verizon forcing users to use a better protocol, it is about Verizon charging for a previously free service for which they offer no alternative (other than paying for it, of course, or paying someone else for hosting).
Do you HONESTLY think that guys like you that hate that kind of shit is the targeted audience for FB?
If you nip back and read my post you'll notice I mentioned another significant segment of the facebook population. But you are wrong that my part of the population is not as much part of the target audience as your ex's part. facebook don't care if you play the games or not, as long as you use their site. Their target is the network of links between people, and the warehouse full of data collected from other websites that use facebook's like button and comments features - which they can sell to the advertisers. They don't care that I'm not playing the games or interacting with any of the other apps, as long as I'm using facebook in some way, shape, or form.
It is those like my ex GF that LOOOVE that shit, have a bazillion apps on their FB, play Zynga games, and generally live on FB.
Precisely. A bazillion apps. People with a bazillion apps don't have that long an attention span. They are not going to miss these ones for more than five minutes, after which time there will be replacements if there aren't already. Like I said: if Google did do this to deliberately harm facebook rather than for any other reason what-so-ever I very much doubt it was money well spent, and I don't think they be that daft.
I could be wrong of course. Though I'm unlikely to be as far off the mark as your al-Sahaf analogy...
Uhhh...how EXACTLY is buying a company that provided value to a competitor and shutting it down NOT considered evil?
If they had other reason to want the company (perhaps they wanted the people that worked for it so that they could use their experience for some part of the G+ project?) then shutting it down may just be a side effect of moving the bits they wanted elsewhere and the rest not being viable to carry on as-is.
I doubt Google specifically did this to affect Facebook, because they'd be daft to think it would have any affect beyond a very short term (if that). There are no doubt other apps that do the same things, and more will turn up too. If these apps had become some sort of defacto standard amongst people who like that sort of thing then it they may have stagnated and perhaps the users will benefit from the renewed competition in the area as other people/companies improve or expand their offerings in order to compete with each other for the newly opened top slot. HEck, such a move might actually increase the use of Facebook as a platform if people thought there might be a chance of "make popular facebook apps, get bought by Google" will happen again.
People like me who can't stand that sort of thing (and only use facebook because family do so it is useful for keeping aware of what is going on) won't care in the slightest. People who do like that sort of thing will just move to a different app. Facebook almost certainly won't care overly.
Please no. Do not use anything that reads their format, it will only encourage them. Any content you find in the format can be found elsewhere in other formats. Make sure any outlet that puts out stuff in their format that you are getting stuff elsewhere instead. Let the format and what is left of their business model die the death it so richly deserves.
Even my regular old clamshell has pre-installed non-removable games and applications.
And worse. I've not bought a phone via a mobile network provider since getting one that Orange had deliberately broken the mp3 playback functions on. Without a hack (someone found the keys for the DRM so people could sign their own content with certain tools) you couldn't play anything as either a track or a tone without it having a digital signature - presumably they wanted me to rebuy all my stuff from their online store. What incensed me was that the advertising for that phone by that network played up the media capabilities a lot but neglected to mention that they have deliberately broken the feature they were advertising (I reported the matter to trading standards, but heard nothing back).
The phones I use have always come more directly from the manufacturer since then. Of coarse even with this route there will be probably be crap from the manufacturer that you can't remove (Motorola's "Blur" for instance), so that doesn't stop everything (we'll see what Google does about that now Motorola is in their hands).
If I'm in the position where I could get a subsidised phone, and I'm happy with the contract extension that implies, I get the best phone (where "best" is defined by what people will pay for the available devices boxed+unopened on eBay) they'll give me for free for renewing the tariff I'm currently on (or taking the one I want if my needs dictate a change would be beneficial) for 12 or 18 months and flog it to subsidise the cost of a non-neutered phone (or if my current device is fine, to subsidise the monthly dues for a while).
Oh, did you mean that they are specifically paid to also protest?
More like unofficially expect payments to stop if they don't, either because they've been told so or just that they are bright enough not to bite the hand that feeds.
Yep. Remember this is the same Government who use top Gun footage as evidence of a successful AA missile deployment test and hoped no-one would notice.
I too prefer focus-follows-mouse, with the "desktop doesn't get focus unless I click" option, particularly on multi-screen displays, though I find it gets a bit messy when dealing with Remote Desktop sessions so I've started putting up with leaving click-for-focus on. Also some Windows apps have an annoying habit of climbing to the front of the stack when they get focus which makes the decision moot anyway.
The vast majority of users are (in my experience) either unlikely to know options other than click-to-focus exist or are so used to it that they may find focus-follows-mouse to be quite irritating during the retraining period (so may switch back to CTF before giving FFM time to settle in their routine). The people who use FFM tend to be those that have used it for a several years at least, or have tried it for fairly specific reasons (on small screens it is very useful for typing into one terminal while referring to another which has the majority of the screen, and other such tasks, and on multi-monitor displays where focus related visuals can be contradictory (Windows XP will often make it look like I have one window focused on each screen, so the pointer would serve as an extra visual cue, I don't know if this is resolved i later versions (or if it is a facet of something not Microsoft's doing, like my display drivers)).
Some limited functionality? Do you realize how many surprise-birthday-planning sites require Flash?
That is why people that know what they are doing get their content for surprise birthday planning via "trusted" private trackers not flash infected websites.
So what is single window mode and what will it buy me?
The current GIMP interface is a multi-window affair which many find hard to grasp for one reason or another, or just find inconvenient.
A single window environment will improve your productivity if:
* you have trouble with the existing interface
* you have never used the existing interface, and are trying the program after using other graphics tools (i.e. less retraining effort as it should in theory be closer to what you are already used to using)
* you just don't like the existing interface
I'm quite happy with GIMP the way it is, though I would probably be quite happy with the single-window mode too if that became default (caveat: I don't do a lot of graphics editing, so I can't claim my opinions on the matter come from a position of expertise). I think the multi-window arrangement made more sense than it does now back when focus-follows-mouse was the dominant focus control method in unix-a-like environments, but almost everyone now uses click-to-focus.
When pulling things (using ISO images of the software you are after for testing) down from the MSDN subscribers area as a development shop with MSDN subscriptions you have to use MS's download manager. But that is all that it is, a download manager (allowing you to pause and resume transfers, and for transfers to survive connection drops, automatically pulling data from the faster parts of their CDN for your area, and so forth) - it does not introduce any extra apps/toolbars/settings/whatever, it just downloads the stuff, tells you it has downloaded the stuff, and when you close it it goes away without leaving any extra cruft (other than itself ready for next time) hanging around.
I don't know if this is any different for downloads from the more public Microsoft download sites, as I've not picked anything up from those for a while.
There is at least some valid justifications for effective price differentials between nations: currently variations (they'll set their prices less often than currencies grow and fall, so will set prices a little higher to allow for a fall in worth), cultural variations in what currency is worth compared to different items/services (the perceived value of a currency does not always match the global market value, and this perceived value can vary a lot within the same local economy), transport costs including physical transport and import/export fees, differing sales volumes (if you sell less in a given market, fixed costs of operating in that market are more significant), localised tax differences (in VAT and other such seen directly by the customer, and in corporate and employment taxes which are a little more transparent to the man on the street), and so forth.
Of course Apple may be charging significantly more than what they need to to cover these differences. They seem to in the UK by my understanding - a significant part of the difference between what I would (but won't, but that is another discussion) pay for an iProduct here compare to the same product state side is our 20% VAT rate, but even allowing for other tax structure differences, "safety padding" with regard to currency variations, transport and market size costs, and so forth, the cost difference has still always seemed high (then again, it is for most items, particularly electrical, just not quite so much so).
In the example of a club where young women get in free or get free drinks, they are not actually getting something entirely free that the men are paying for. They are providing a service in exchange for entry and/or drinks instead of handing over cash. The service? Attracting men to the club who the club hope will spend silly amount of money to compete with each other to try impress the girls.
I can see some people being offended by it (showing off your body in exchange for the value of an entrance fee could be quite devaluing if you think of it more as "here's a fiver, now jiggle your tits on the dance floor") but it is certainly not the same as discriminating between black/white/brown/yellow/green IMO.
That makes it worse though. If you are buying high-spec requiring games then the outlay buying a high-spec PC to play them (unless you need the impressive parts for something else too: that CPU for video editing or number crunching, that GPU as a space-heater, and so forth) is getting amortised over a much smaller set of games and makes the whole thing feel more expensive.
Portal is the example IMO. I think it took me about five hours first time, but all that time was worth it. It was challenging enough to be interesting, different enough to start with and varied enough to be fun to the end, funny as a bonus, and very well paced. Repayable too, particularly with the commentary track feature second time around.
I have a problem judging value for money though, as it didn't really have a price of its own - for me it was a part of HL2, EP1 and EP2 (I didn't have any of the HL2 series to start with, and wasn't really interested in TF2). I certainly feel I got my money's worth and more out of the Orange Box over all, but I have no idea what part of the cost was Portal.
Having said that I'd have been happy to have paid 10UKP for it, probably more, and IIRC the whole box was £35 so that is a fair portion. I tend to judge value for money in games against other entertainment (mainly full price DVDs, £7 DVDs some months after release and £3 "classic" DVDs - each of which is ~2.5 hours if there are interesting extras plus a rewatch or few over time), and by this measure £10 for portal would be a bargain.
One of the main problems with Sealand, if I remember rightly, is that the thing is not actually far enough from land to be considered "in international waters" since the definition of that (according to UK law at any rate) increased from 3 miles from shore to 12 miles from shore.
Of course you could be 100 miles from any other territory and someone could declare their territory included your area - the only things stopping it would be diplomacy (good luck with having the upper hand in that if all you have is a rig and a boat) or conflict. And if it comes to conflict you're done - you won't have much by way of standing navy and there will be little reason for any other country to want to intervene in your little war by helping you out of the hole.
That only protects you once you hve first accepted the certificate - it does not help first time you connect. You can't trust a certificate coming from some.domain.tld because it appears to come from some.domain.tld - the two things can not mutually verify each other.
Also it does not allow for any form of revocation, if the server and/or certificate becomes compromised, other than you manually revoking the trust. You could implement expiry as with current certificates (the system as designed has full revocation support too, though I don't know how well it is implement in reality) but then you are repeating the validation issue after each period.
You are proposing a system like used with SSH, but it only works if you have some other secure means of transmitting enough information to allow the identity to be verified. You might blindly accept the first certificate a server sends you when you first connect via SSH to, for instance, a web hosting account (most people do) but you would want better assurance than that for a banking related account. For instance the banking people I work with in my day job transmit the server fingerprints to us by other means so we can verify any new server we may need to connect to, and we do the same for when they need to open connections to our services - you would want to be that careful for your own personal information too.
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First, the plural of box is boxes, boxen is not a word.
And the correct spellings of colour and favourite are colour and favourite. And Barbie is a name, not an outdoors cooking device.
Language is mutable, for better and worse, get used to it. Boxen is a perfectly cromulent word.
If it is an irrelevant feature for the most part, why are they announcing it? Either it is relevant and Linux (and BSD and OSX and ...) was ahead, or it is not and Linux was still ahead but the point is rendered moot.
It's one of the most heinous law trends out there for propping up a trade.
Have you met my neighbours? I'm happy that they aren't playing with the electrics. If they burn down their home it might take mine with it.
ftp still has it's place
On a plinth in a museum?
He is probably referring to directory listings, which do vary (considerably in some cases) between ftp daemons. Many, but far from all, output the format usually returned by "ls -l" in a GNU environment. While the result codes are described by the standard laid down by the relevant RFCs so even if the exact message is unrecognised the general meaning can be understood, the format of directory listings returned is not so different implementations are free to return whatever they like.
When I tried sshfs I fount it to intermittently break even on otherwise reliable routes, though that was a time ago so things could have moved on far since then.
My swiss-army-knife for file transfers both to/from remote hosts and local ones, is rsync-through-ssh (and even sometimes rsync for local file copies) - especially when updating a file or selection of files (it can be rather efficient at only sending the changed parts over) or transferring something very large (with the right options transfers are easily resumed if something interrupts them).
At some point I might have to full apart the sshfs FUSE code, if it is generally reliable these days, and see if I can hack together an rsyncfs...
In what way is a cheap home firewall insecure?
Most home firewalls are, in their default configuration which most home users never change (they are never told they might need to), doing nothing but a subset of Network Address Translation.
While I personally wouldn't call this particularly insecure (it at least keeps out unwanted incoming connections for the most part) some people would and it is certainly less secure than a proper firewall arrnagement that polices traffic intentionally rather than just blocking outside connections due to a side effect of how the packets for connections made from the LAN-side are translated. A cheap home "firewall" won't stop an infection merrily sending out your data via IRC for instance, where a fully configured firewall might (it wouldn't stop the data doing out over HTTP in most cases, unless your company operates a white-list of web sites you are permitted to visit or some such limiting arrangement).
Also some home routers have been sold with simple or blank default admin passwords for accounts for an admin interface that is by default exposed to the WAN side. This is rare though, the last example I can state being some cheap Apple Airport knockoff devices that were floating around eBay a year or two ago, so I'd not tar all consumer targeted routers with that brush.
And to pull back to somewhere close to on-topic I'll add a little more anecdotal evidence: FTP through corporate firewalls is definitely a problem often in my experience. In fact some companies (just about all our clients for instance) deliberately don't allow FTP in either direction at all, dictating (sensibly, in my opinion) that SCP/SFTP (and sometimes rsync through ssh) be used instead where a file transfer protocol with authenticated is needed. Though this isn't about Verizon forcing users to use a better protocol, it is about Verizon charging for a previously free service for which they offer no alternative (other than paying for it, of course, or paying someone else for hosting).
Do you HONESTLY think that guys like you that hate that kind of shit is the targeted audience for FB?
If you nip back and read my post you'll notice I mentioned another significant segment of the facebook population. But you are wrong that my part of the population is not as much part of the target audience as your ex's part. facebook don't care if you play the games or not, as long as you use their site. Their target is the network of links between people, and the warehouse full of data collected from other websites that use facebook's like button and comments features - which they can sell to the advertisers. They don't care that I'm not playing the games or interacting with any of the other apps, as long as I'm using facebook in some way, shape, or form.
It is those like my ex GF that LOOOVE that shit, have a bazillion apps on their FB, play Zynga games, and generally live on FB.
Precisely. A bazillion apps. People with a bazillion apps don't have that long an attention span. They are not going to miss these ones for more than five minutes, after which time there will be replacements if there aren't already. Like I said: if Google did do this to deliberately harm facebook rather than for any other reason what-so-ever I very much doubt it was money well spent, and I don't think they be that daft.
I could be wrong of course. Though I'm unlikely to be as far off the mark as your al-Sahaf analogy...
Uhhh...how EXACTLY is buying a company that provided value to a competitor and shutting it down NOT considered evil?
If they had other reason to want the company (perhaps they wanted the people that worked for it so that they could use their experience for some part of the G+ project?) then shutting it down may just be a side effect of moving the bits they wanted elsewhere and the rest not being viable to carry on as-is.
I doubt Google specifically did this to affect Facebook, because they'd be daft to think it would have any affect beyond a very short term (if that). There are no doubt other apps that do the same things, and more will turn up too. If these apps had become some sort of defacto standard amongst people who like that sort of thing then it they may have stagnated and perhaps the users will benefit from the renewed competition in the area as other people/companies improve or expand their offerings in order to compete with each other for the newly opened top slot. HEck, such a move might actually increase the use of Facebook as a platform if people thought there might be a chance of "make popular facebook apps, get bought by Google" will happen again.
People like me who can't stand that sort of thing (and only use facebook because family do so it is useful for keeping aware of what is going on) won't care in the slightest. People who do like that sort of thing will just move to a different app. Facebook almost certainly won't care overly.
Please no. Do not use anything that reads their format, it will only encourage them. Any content you find in the format can be found elsewhere in other formats. Make sure any outlet that puts out stuff in their format that you are getting stuff elsewhere instead. Let the format and what is left of their business model die the death it so richly deserves.
Even my regular old clamshell has pre-installed non-removable games and applications.
And worse. I've not bought a phone via a mobile network provider since getting one that Orange had deliberately broken the mp3 playback functions on. Without a hack (someone found the keys for the DRM so people could sign their own content with certain tools) you couldn't play anything as either a track or a tone without it having a digital signature - presumably they wanted me to rebuy all my stuff from their online store. What incensed me was that the advertising for that phone by that network played up the media capabilities a lot but neglected to mention that they have deliberately broken the feature they were advertising (I reported the matter to trading standards, but heard nothing back).
The phones I use have always come more directly from the manufacturer since then. Of coarse even with this route there will be probably be crap from the manufacturer that you can't remove (Motorola's "Blur" for instance), so that doesn't stop everything (we'll see what Google does about that now Motorola is in their hands).
If I'm in the position where I could get a subsidised phone, and I'm happy with the contract extension that implies, I get the best phone (where "best" is defined by what people will pay for the available devices boxed+unopened on eBay) they'll give me for free for renewing the tariff I'm currently on (or taking the one I want if my needs dictate a change would be beneficial) for 12 or 18 months and flog it to subsidise the cost of a non-neutered phone (or if my current device is fine, to subsidise the monthly dues for a while).
Oh, did you mean that they are specifically paid to also protest?
More like unofficially expect payments to stop if they don't, either because they've been told so or just that they are bright enough not to bite the hand that feeds.
Yep. Remember this is the same Government who use top Gun footage as evidence of a successful AA missile deployment test and hoped no-one would notice.
Am I so much in the minority here?
In my experience, yes it would appear so.
I too prefer focus-follows-mouse, with the "desktop doesn't get focus unless I click" option, particularly on multi-screen displays, though I find it gets a bit messy when dealing with Remote Desktop sessions so I've started putting up with leaving click-for-focus on. Also some Windows apps have an annoying habit of climbing to the front of the stack when they get focus which makes the decision moot anyway.
The vast majority of users are (in my experience) either unlikely to know options other than click-to-focus exist or are so used to it that they may find focus-follows-mouse to be quite irritating during the retraining period (so may switch back to CTF before giving FFM time to settle in their routine). The people who use FFM tend to be those that have used it for a several years at least, or have tried it for fairly specific reasons (on small screens it is very useful for typing into one terminal while referring to another which has the majority of the screen, and other such tasks, and on multi-monitor displays where focus related visuals can be contradictory (Windows XP will often make it look like I have one window focused on each screen, so the pointer would serve as an extra visual cue, I don't know if this is resolved i later versions (or if it is a facet of something not Microsoft's doing, like my display drivers)).
Some limited functionality? Do you realize how many surprise-birthday-planning sites require Flash?
That is why people that know what they are doing get their content for surprise birthday planning via "trusted" private trackers not flash infected websites.
So what is single window mode and what will it buy me?
The current GIMP interface is a multi-window affair which many find hard to grasp for one reason or another, or just find inconvenient.
A single window environment will improve your productivity if:
* you have trouble with the existing interface
* you have never used the existing interface, and are trying the program after using other graphics tools (i.e. less retraining effort as it should in theory be closer to what you are already used to using)
* you just don't like the existing interface
I'm quite happy with GIMP the way it is, though I would probably be quite happy with the single-window mode too if that became default (caveat: I don't do a lot of graphics editing, so I can't claim my opinions on the matter come from a position of expertise). I think the multi-window arrangement made more sense than it does now back when focus-follows-mouse was the dominant focus control method in unix-a-like environments, but almost everyone now uses click-to-focus.
When pulling things (using ISO images of the software you are after for testing) down from the MSDN subscribers area as a development shop with MSDN subscriptions you have to use MS's download manager. But that is all that it is, a download manager (allowing you to pause and resume transfers, and for transfers to survive connection drops, automatically pulling data from the faster parts of their CDN for your area, and so forth) - it does not introduce any extra apps/toolbars/settings/whatever, it just downloads the stuff, tells you it has downloaded the stuff, and when you close it it goes away without leaving any extra cruft (other than itself ready for next time) hanging around.
I don't know if this is any different for downloads from the more public Microsoft download sites, as I've not picked anything up from those for a while.
No, those are different matters.
There is at least some valid justifications for effective price differentials between nations: currently variations (they'll set their prices less often than currencies grow and fall, so will set prices a little higher to allow for a fall in worth), cultural variations in what currency is worth compared to different items/services (the perceived value of a currency does not always match the global market value, and this perceived value can vary a lot within the same local economy), transport costs including physical transport and import/export fees, differing sales volumes (if you sell less in a given market, fixed costs of operating in that market are more significant), localised tax differences (in VAT and other such seen directly by the customer, and in corporate and employment taxes which are a little more transparent to the man on the street), and so forth.
Of course Apple may be charging significantly more than what they need to to cover these differences. They seem to in the UK by my understanding - a significant part of the difference between what I would (but won't, but that is another discussion) pay for an iProduct here compare to the same product state side is our 20% VAT rate, but even allowing for other tax structure differences, "safety padding" with regard to currency variations, transport and market size costs, and so forth, the cost difference has still always seemed high (then again, it is for most items, particularly electrical, just not quite so much so).
Terrible analogy.
In the example of a club where young women get in free or get free drinks, they are not actually getting something entirely free that the men are paying for. They are providing a service in exchange for entry and/or drinks instead of handing over cash. The service? Attracting men to the club who the club hope will spend silly amount of money to compete with each other to try impress the girls.
I can see some people being offended by it (showing off your body in exchange for the value of an entrance fee could be quite devaluing if you think of it more as "here's a fiver, now jiggle your tits on the dance floor") but it is certainly not the same as discriminating between black/white/brown/yellow/green IMO.
That makes it worse though. If you are buying high-spec requiring games then the outlay buying a high-spec PC to play them (unless you need the impressive parts for something else too: that CPU for video editing or number crunching, that GPU as a space-heater, and so forth) is getting amortised over a much smaller set of games and makes the whole thing feel more expensive.
They know what it means. They are just being as bad at getting episodes out of the door on time as they were getting earlier stuff out.
Portal is the example IMO. I think it took me about five hours first time, but all that time was worth it. It was challenging enough to be interesting, different enough to start with and varied enough to be fun to the end, funny as a bonus, and very well paced. Repayable too, particularly with the commentary track feature second time around.
I have a problem judging value for money though, as it didn't really have a price of its own - for me it was a part of HL2, EP1 and EP2 (I didn't have any of the HL2 series to start with, and wasn't really interested in TF2). I certainly feel I got my money's worth and more out of the Orange Box over all, but I have no idea what part of the cost was Portal.
Having said that I'd have been happy to have paid 10UKP for it, probably more, and IIRC the whole box was £35 so that is a fair portion. I tend to judge value for money in games against other entertainment (mainly full price DVDs, £7 DVDs some months after release and £3 "classic" DVDs - each of which is ~2.5 hours if there are interesting extras plus a rewatch or few over time), and by this measure £10 for portal would be a bargain.
But then again, Rapture was UNDER the water, while this city is ABOVE the water.
For now...
One of the main problems with Sealand, if I remember rightly, is that the thing is not actually far enough from land to be considered "in international waters" since the definition of that (according to UK law at any rate) increased from 3 miles from shore to 12 miles from shore.
Of course you could be 100 miles from any other territory and someone could declare their territory included your area - the only things stopping it would be diplomacy (good luck with having the upper hand in that if all you have is a rig and a boat) or conflict. And if it comes to conflict you're done - you won't have much by way of standing navy and there will be little reason for any other country to want to intervene in your little war by helping you out of the hole.
That only protects you once you hve first accepted the certificate - it does not help first time you connect. You can't trust a certificate coming from some.domain.tld because it appears to come from some.domain.tld - the two things can not mutually verify each other.
Also it does not allow for any form of revocation, if the server and/or certificate becomes compromised, other than you manually revoking the trust. You could implement expiry as with current certificates (the system as designed has full revocation support too, though I don't know how well it is implement in reality) but then you are repeating the validation issue after each period.
You are proposing a system like used with SSH, but it only works if you have some other secure means of transmitting enough information to allow the identity to be verified. You might blindly accept the first certificate a server sends you when you first connect via SSH to, for instance, a web hosting account (most people do) but you would want better assurance than that for a banking related account. For instance the banking people I work with in my day job transmit the server fingerprints to us by other means so we can verify any new server we may need to connect to, and we do the same for when they need to open connections to our services - you would want to be that careful for your own personal information too.