But lets make an effort to have more mostly naked green alien chicks. That was the best part of the original Star Trek series, and since we don't have a budget for writers, props, or even a decent editing crew, we'll have to have something going for us.:)
It worked just after the Lowdown for Atlantis was on. I guess that means I'm signed up, and all the Slashdotters who want to get in on it too are out of luck! Yippie! I hope it stays broken, it increases my chances of winning.:)
Get a TiVo.:) I had mine recording Stargate from three different stations (two local, and the SciFi channel). I've seen every episode at least once now. I actually told it to stop recording until this new season started, it was really boring watching the first two seconds, saying "seen it", and deleting it.
I guess that's a good and bad point of TiVo, especially with DirecTV. You can't miss a show, because it'll always record it. I already have it set to keep the Atlantis shows. I won't be rushing home on Friday to see it, it'll be patiently waiting for me when I sit down on the couch. I can have it recording two shows, and be catching one that I missed at the same time.:)
Unfortunately, the girlfriend's daughter has figured out the magic too, so I get a bunch of daytime soaps and teen shows on there too.
I think Stargate has such an insane following because the cast could be real people. I'd kinda expect any of the SGC people to be my neighbors, and they reinforce that idea with the real-world scenes, like at the houses.. They're living out a fantasy of many. Visiting far distant (and impossible) places, going through exciting adventures, and playing with nifty technology. Oh ya, and big guns. Can't forget big guns.
hehe, that's how I started using it. I'd always have a disk failure half way through, and have to try again. I hated floppy disks.
We've been using Slackware on our servers for years, and loving it. Over 100 machines currently deployed. We install it, and re-roll it into a nice tight installer to deploy to our servers. Once we have our deployment package, it takes 5 minutes from the first time a new machine is turned on, to the time it's ready to serve.
We've installed Slack 10 on a few servers, and have had no problems. I still haven't done my workstations yet, but they're Slack 9.1 . I'm nervous about it changing X on me.
Hmmmmm.. Thinking back to all those 3-5th season episodes, you're absolutely right. On the first lowdown, didn't they reference those seasons as the ones they try to pretend never happened?:)
I'm worried about Atlantis. The first season of almost any show pretty much sucks until the actors and writers really figure out the new characters. Obviously, if they bring the SG1 characters in, they'll be well defined, but these new characters are going to be less than perfect.
They'd probably judge it by how good you were. I kinda feel sorry for them. They'll get some 300 pound completely geek freak that wouldn't even fit into a SGC uniform, that they couldn't even have as an SGC soldier extra.
If they were *LUCKY*, they'd get someone with at least a little acting experience and ability, but I kinda doubt it.
I'd love to get the walk-in part just for the sake of meeting the folks, and walking around the sets for a few minutes. If they'd let me talk, all the better. All in all, I'd say I look something like Daniel Jackson, unless I ditch my glasses, then I could fit in as any generic role.
I've been tempted to edit myself into some clips and send them over as an e-audition.:) Too bad I don't live in Toronto.
We do changes to individual servers with scripts.. {sigh} If it takes more than a minute to do, and you have to do it a bunch of times, why keep typing it? Shell scripts are your friend.
But hey, if they like their pretty GUI tool to do it, enjoy, and enjoy when you hose all your machines simultaniously because you sent the wrong command to all of them.
I write scripts to do all kinds of fun things. Like, we upgrade softwares (like Apache) on heterogenos servers, and I have it down to:
That's fairly easy to copy&paste, and if I wrote update.apache well, it'll do it's job without screwing up. (that's my job to write things that don't screw up)
vi isn't really very hard. I usually write down a cheat sheet for newbies, that consists of the commands I usually use.
i o x dd:wq:%s/old/new/g
People look at me like I'm nuts when I'll fluidly zip through files like they're nothing. For example, to change networks that a machine is on (like for a new install)
cd/usr/local/bin vi rc.inet1:%s/1.2.3/1.2.6/g:%s/999/7/g:wq!
vi/etc/HOSTNAME dd i new.hostname.tld:wq!
passwd newpass newpass
shutdown -r now
It usually takes longer for me to tell them the IP and password for their server than it did for me to configure it.
Half the time, I'm talking to someone while I'm doing it. But I guess kids of the hunt&peck school of typing may have a harder time of that.
It's not rocket science, it's a few keystokes in a very basic (and powerful) text editor. Installations with elvis linked to vi still throw me, it doesn't take the commands as fast as I type them. I prefer vim. But hey, if all people know how to do is point&click on colorful icons, let 'em keep using Windows, and take twice as long doing changes.
I always take Slackware and recompile things to suit my needs. Slackware's always been almost perfect, except for a few little things, but of course I always compile my own kernel specifically for my hardware (is there any other way? {grin})
Since these are servers, I'll be skipping the X, KDE, and/or Gnome, and multimedia stuff.
I may have to try Gentoo on a server finally.:) The two x86_64 servers I'm working on are not yet complete, so I can still switch.
I'm more than happy to pay into something that I'm completely satisfied with. You'll see me and a few of our staff running around with Slackware disks and gear (hats, shirts, etc). Heck, I'm wearing my BOFH hat right now.:)
I've known a lot of people who run Linux on workstations, mostly beginners trying it out, but heck, they're still users. But there are many *MANY* more hosting companies using it, which dramatically sway the numbers to servers. For example, where I am, there are about 6 workstations running Linux. But there are roughly 150 servers and network devices running Linux. Most of the people who I've known that consistantly run Linux either are or have been techs or admins.
I'm starting to agree with Microsoft's TCO analysis though. I installed RedHat on a machine today, but to get their updates I'm gracefully guided to a page where I'm to pay money for the support. Ummm.. Not nice. But until either Slackware comes up with an x86_64 distro, or I roll my own (that'll be a while), I'm stuck using one someone else has already thrown together. I'd probably be quicker at mine, if I had a machine that I could develop on, rather than putting it together to put into service.
I've seen something very similiar to this, which was for the same purpose. But the guy simply said how to form it yourself.:) Anyone with 5 minutes, some cardboard, foil, scissors, and tape, can do it.
There's plenty of math that can and should be done with it, but lots of people do it by the "wing it" method. I took a day calculating the dimensions for a 2.4Ghz pringles-can type antenna, and made a few from dryer vent tube (cheap at Home Depot). It worked out very well, but I still prefer a good parabolic antenna.
Jesus has nothing to do with spam filtering. Please keep your religious brainwashing to yourself.
Spam filtering is a whole lot more than just using some blacklist and assuming anything from that mail server is spam. Sure, that's what some places do. "Ooooh, look, 1.2.3.4 spammed, lets block 1.2.0.0/16"
Have you even looked at the SpamAssassin page, before making yourself look like an idiot? It checks the header, body, blacklists, and Vipul's Razor.
Generally, it's score is based on the subject and body of the message, not the server it came from.
For a long time, we didn't use any blacklists. I added a few, and ended up blocking more "good" messages than it should have (>1). SpamCop is the only one which I see being consistantly good at their blacklisting, so we volunteered a mirror for them. Sometimes we use it, sometimes we don't, it all depends on my mood.
Obviously Gmail is doing something of this sort, but is not up to the quality of SpamAssassin (yet).
The hostname dejanews.com still works.:) It takes you to groups.google.com, but hey, I've been typing 'dejanews.com' for years. I never did accept their move to deja.com.
Actually, Gmail's spam filtering isn't all that great. I've been forwarding all my regular account's mail to my gmail account, and it misses about 3:10 messages that my mail server catches with SpamAssassin and SpamCop as the only blacklist. But hey, it's better than the other free services.
Weird. I didn't believe you, so I went to the link in FireFox on WinXP. It did exactly what you said. MSIE gives a "The page cannot be displayed... Cannot find server or DNS Error"
In FireFox on Linux, it goes to http://www.http.com/www.ebay.com due to attempting to correct for the user mistake (Changing the second http to www.http.com). I wonder why Windows does that? It doesn't appear to be something that they hard-coded into Windows DNS resolution.
BTW, both machines are using the same DNS resolvers (mine) and are on the same network.
To keep on topic, after the last round of MSIE exploits, and cleaning up hundreds of pieces of spyware, most of the people I know either switched to FireFox or Opera on Windows. Of course us Linux users already have a whole bunch of choices.:)
Haven't you ever written a script to do image processing? The actual overlay part, I could do 6000 in less than an hour on average equipment. Once you know where it is, and size what you're overlaying appropriately, the rest is a piece of cake.
On my workstation, I plugged in a hard drive destined to go into a server. My drive was/dev/hda, and this new drive was/dev/hdc . It was late, I was tired, and I was just trying to get done before I went home.
`fdisk/dev/hdc`
and I got interrupted. I [ctrl]-c out of it, and do what they need. I come back and again `fdisk/dev/hda`. Oh, already partitions? This drive may have already been used once, so lets blow those away. Write my changes, and lets format the partitions.
`mkfs/dev/hdc1`/dev/hdc1 doesn't exist. Hmmmm.. Oh. Shit. I removed and recreated the partitions on/dev/hda.
For some reason, because the partitions were still mounted on/dev/hda, it didn't actually break anything. I realized if I shut down the machine, I'm screwed. So I copied off the essential parts to another machine, and swore I wouldn't reboot my computer ever again, so I wouldn't have to reinstall.:)
That lasted for about 3 months. Then the power went out in the office. Dammit.
My ex-wife worked at a theater for years. The movies would come by truck shipment the day before release. The movies are delivered on multiple reels, so they have to be put together into one reel. You can spot the reel changes by a small black oval flashing in the top left corner. The first flash indicates the reel change is coming. The second one indicates it should happen now. They'd also need to make sure the aspect was set correctly.
To make sure that they put the reels together correctly, they'd run the movie the night before. This was required in this theater chain, as it's kind of embarassing to have a reel run backwards, upside down, or out of order.:) The staff and a few close friends could watch the movie the night before. It was the only theater I've ever been in where it was acceptable to bring in beer, pizza, or whatever, and smoke during the movie. Talking and screaming were perfectly acceptable while we were previewing the movies. It was like sitting at home watching the movie, except with a *MUCH* bigger screen.
What I don't understand is why they still distribute on film. LCD projectors have come a *LONG* way, and have far better quality than the film projectors. Instead of shipping several reels, they could be FedEx'ing single DVD's. I know some theaters are now doing this, but the majority are still film projectors.
You're right. They could be really creative with it. They could take almost anything and use it to encode data. Lightning flashes, flickers in a TV screen, street signs. I made a video for someone one day, and slowed down one piece which lasted about 1 second to run about 10 seconds. I forgot to remove the audio track, so his voice came out like a mechanical rumble. If I took that 10 seconds and brought it back up to speed, you'd be able to understand what he said. Obviously, they wouldn't want to have someone say 6000 serial numbers, but a TTS program (like festival) would be an easy solution.
That actually would be amazingly easy, and almost undetectable.
I could do it.:) Well, almost. I know it can be done, I just haven't played with video work that much.
I know there was a project "Film Gimp", which has since been renamed to something else, which allowed frame by frame editing (obviously that's not impossible). Me, being the non-video-professional, I could take those frames, pick a spot (like a street sign in 10 frames of scene 14), and use imagemagic to overlay the serial number over where the road name should be. Who would notice? Probably just the people who knew that the street sign had the serial number of the movie.
I think that goes along the lines of, if the software on the machine can decode it, someone else's software can do it too.:)
They story says that they'd have on-screen indications of who's tape it was too. Probably something along the lines of a text across the screen somewhere saying "Screener serial# 123456".
Making a new disk isn't impossible. I've been toying with my DirecTiVo. It has wonderful outputs to go to my receiver, but not really good outputs for recording. I bought a DVD recorder, and got creative with the wiring. Now I get S-Video in, but I'm still lacking on the audio. The DirecTiVo has the choices of digital fiber optic, or L&R RCA jacks, and the DVD recorder doesn't have a digital fiber input (I couldn't find any with that). It still makes very nice DVD's.
Once I make the DVD, it's not a really hard task to take the resulting disk and edit as needed, such as blocking over whatever is indicating who's disk it is. That may be an unreasonable task, if the text is in the middle of the screen.
I can't imagine too many Academy Awards judges wanting to go through all the bother to release a bootlegged video though. I think their trouble comes when they loan it to friends, who make copies for friends, who make copies for friends (etc, etc).
It still doesn't remove the possibility of a slightly corrupt theater manager setting up a digital video camera in the booth beside the projector and hooking into their sound board, and getting an almost perfect copy of a movie though. They could still get a movie on the Internet the night before it's released to theaters.
I don't see the big difference between a self-signed cert and a CAcert. It's going to be virtually impossible for web sites to get their users to install their root certificate. Users are stupid. Generally, I don't expect they can click a link, much less add a cert.
I've been looking into using SSL on http://freeinternetpress.com . We're not a registerd company, nor do we turn a profit, so it would be an extra cost and hassle to get a real certificate. For us, the only reason to do it is to make some of our users happy by letting them browse by https.
A self-signed cert isn't any sort of magic, the instructions are in the OpenSSL documentation. I made it a step easier for people we worth with, I have a web page that they submit their information to, and it generates everything including the self-signed cert. There's no real magic to it, anyone (err, anyone with a clue) should be able to write the same thing in about 10 minutes. I spent an extra 10 minutes making it pretty.
People I deal with never use the self-signed cert. They just take the CSR and get the cert signed by a regular signing authority. What's the big difference if I sign it, or if I call myself "Joe's cert company" and start automatically signing certs? It's not much different than what CAcert is doing, other than the fact that they have a donation button on their page. At least with the people I make CSR's and self-signed certs for, I know who they are, and that I'm not accidently signing a fake microsoft.com cert.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe we can start our own show..
:)
Lets call it, "Wormhole X-Treme"!
(hehe)
But lets make an effort to have more mostly naked green alien chicks. That was the best part of the original Star Trek series, and since we don't have a budget for writers, props, or even a decent editing crew, we'll have to have something going for us.
Ha ha.
It worked just after the Lowdown for Atlantis was on. I guess that means I'm signed up, and all the Slashdotters who want to get in on it too are out of luck! Yippie! I hope it stays broken, it increases my chances of winning.
{ducking}
Get a TiVo. :) I had mine recording Stargate from three different stations (two local, and the SciFi channel). I've seen every episode at least once now. I actually told it to stop recording until this new season started, it was really boring watching the first two seconds, saying "seen it", and deleting it.
:)
I guess that's a good and bad point of TiVo, especially with DirecTV. You can't miss a show, because it'll always record it. I already have it set to keep the Atlantis shows. I won't be rushing home on Friday to see it, it'll be patiently waiting for me when I sit down on the couch. I can have it recording two shows, and be catching one that I missed at the same time.
Unfortunately, the girlfriend's daughter has figured out the magic too, so I get a bunch of daytime soaps and teen shows on there too.
I think Stargate has such an insane following because the cast could be real people. I'd kinda expect any of the SGC people to be my neighbors, and they reinforce that idea with the real-world scenes, like at the houses.. They're living out a fantasy of many. Visiting far distant (and impossible) places, going through exciting adventures, and playing with nifty technology. Oh ya, and big guns. Can't forget big guns.
hehe, that's how I started using it. I'd always have a disk failure half way through, and have to try again. I hated floppy disks.
We've been using Slackware on our servers for years, and loving it. Over 100 machines currently deployed. We install it, and re-roll it into a nice tight installer to deploy to our servers. Once we have our deployment package, it takes 5 minutes from the first time a new machine is turned on, to the time it's ready to serve.
We've installed Slack 10 on a few servers, and have had no problems. I still haven't done my workstations yet, but they're Slack 9.1 . I'm nervous about it changing X on me.
Hmmmmm.. Thinking back to all those 3-5th season episodes, you're absolutely right. On the first lowdown, didn't they reference those seasons as the ones they try to pretend never happened?
I'm worried about Atlantis. The first season of almost any show pretty much sucks until the actors and writers really figure out the new characters. Obviously, if they bring the SG1 characters in, they'll be well defined, but these new characters are going to be less than perfect.
They'd probably judge it by how good you were. I kinda feel sorry for them. They'll get some 300 pound completely geek freak that wouldn't even fit into a SGC uniform, that they couldn't even have as an SGC soldier extra.
If they were *LUCKY*, they'd get someone with at least a little acting experience and ability, but I kinda doubt it.
I'd love to get the walk-in part just for the sake of meeting the folks, and walking around the sets for a few minutes. If they'd let me talk, all the better. All in all, I'd say I look something like Daniel Jackson, unless I ditch my glasses, then I could fit in as any generic role.
I've been tempted to edit myself into some clips and send them over as an e-audition.
We do changes to individual servers with scripts.. {sigh} If it takes more than a minute to do, and you have to do it a bunch of times, why keep typing it? Shell scripts are your friend.
But hey, if they like their pretty GUI tool to do it, enjoy, and enjoy when you hose all your machines simultaniously because you sent the wrong command to all of them.
I write scripts to do all kinds of fun things. Like, we upgrade softwares (like Apache) on heterogenos servers, and I have it down to:
wget myserver.mynetwork.com/update.apache ; sh
That's fairly easy to copy&paste, and if I wrote update.apache well, it'll do it's job without screwing up. (that's my job to write things that don't screw up)
vi isn't really very hard. I usually write down a cheat sheet for newbies, that consists of the commands I usually use.
i o x dd
People look at me like I'm nuts when I'll fluidly zip through files like they're nothing. For example, to change networks that a machine is on (like for a new install)
cd
vi rc.inet1
vi
dd
i new.hostname.tld
passwd
newpass
newpass
shutdown -r now
It usually takes longer for me to tell them the IP and password for their server than it did for me to configure it.
Half the time, I'm talking to someone while I'm doing it. But I guess kids of the hunt&peck school of typing may have a harder time of that.
It's not rocket science, it's a few keystokes in a very basic (and powerful) text editor. Installations with elvis linked to vi still throw me, it doesn't take the commands as fast as I type them. I prefer vim. But hey, if all people know how to do is point&click on colorful icons, let 'em keep using Windows, and take twice as long doing changes.
Mmmmm.. Sounds good.
I always take Slackware and recompile things to suit my needs. Slackware's always been almost perfect, except for a few little things, but of course I always compile my own kernel specifically for my hardware (is there any other way? {grin})
Since these are servers, I'll be skipping the X, KDE, and/or Gnome, and multimedia stuff.
I may have to try Gentoo on a server finally.
I'm more than happy to pay into something that I'm completely satisfied with. You'll see me and a few of our staff running around with Slackware disks and gear (hats, shirts, etc). Heck, I'm wearing my BOFH hat right now.
I've known a lot of people who run Linux on workstations, mostly beginners trying it out, but heck, they're still users. But there are many *MANY* more hosting companies using it, which dramatically sway the numbers to servers. For example, where I am, there are about 6 workstations running Linux. But there are roughly 150 servers and network devices running Linux. Most of the people who I've known that consistantly run Linux either are or have been techs or admins.
I'm starting to agree with Microsoft's TCO analysis though. I installed RedHat on a machine today, but to get their updates I'm gracefully guided to a page where I'm to pay money for the support. Ummm.. Not nice. But until either Slackware comes up with an x86_64 distro, or I roll my own (that'll be a while), I'm stuck using one someone else has already thrown together. I'd probably be quicker at mine, if I had a machine that I could develop on, rather than putting it together to put into service.
I've seen something very similiar to this, which was for the same purpose. But the guy simply said how to form it yourself.
There's plenty of math that can and should be done with it, but lots of people do it by the "wing it" method. I took a day calculating the dimensions for a 2.4Ghz pringles-can type antenna, and made a few from dryer vent tube (cheap at Home Depot). It worked out very well, but I still prefer a good parabolic antenna.
Jesus has nothing to do with spam filtering. Please keep your religious brainwashing to yourself.
Spam filtering is a whole lot more than just using some blacklist and assuming anything from that mail server is spam. Sure, that's what some places do. "Ooooh, look, 1.2.3.4 spammed, lets block 1.2.0.0/16"
Have you even looked at the SpamAssassin page, before making yourself look like an idiot? It checks the header, body, blacklists, and Vipul's Razor.
Generally, it's score is based on the subject and body of the message, not the server it came from.
For a long time, we didn't use any blacklists. I added a few, and ended up blocking more "good" messages than it should have (>1). SpamCop is the only one which I see being consistantly good at their blacklisting, so we volunteered a mirror for them. Sometimes we use it, sometimes we don't, it all depends on my mood.
Obviously Gmail is doing something of this sort, but is not up to the quality of SpamAssassin (yet).
The hostname dejanews.com still works. :) It takes you to groups.google.com, but hey, I've been typing 'dejanews.com' for years. I never did accept their move to deja.com.
Actually, Gmail's spam filtering isn't all that great. I've been forwarding all my regular account's mail to my gmail account, and it misses about 3:10 messages that my mail server catches with SpamAssassin and SpamCop as the only blacklist. But hey, it's better than the other free services.
Weird. I didn't believe you, so I went to the link in FireFox on WinXP. It did exactly what you said. MSIE gives a "The page cannot be displayed ... Cannot find server or DNS Error"
:)
In FireFox on Linux, it goes to http://www.http.com/www.ebay.com due to attempting to correct for the user mistake (Changing the second http to www.http.com). I wonder why Windows does that? It doesn't appear to be something that they hard-coded into Windows DNS resolution.
BTW, both machines are using the same DNS resolvers (mine) and are on the same network.
To keep on topic, after the last round of MSIE exploits, and cleaning up hundreds of pieces of spyware, most of the people I know either switched to FireFox or Opera on Windows. Of course us Linux users already have a whole bunch of choices.
Haven't you ever written a script to do image processing? The actual overlay part, I could do 6000 in less than an hour on average equipment. Once you know where it is, and size what you're overlaying appropriately, the rest is a piece of cake.
How about this..
On my workstation, I plugged in a hard drive destined to go into a server. My drive was
`fdisk
and I got interrupted. I [ctrl]-c out of it, and do what they need. I come back and again `fdisk
`mkfs
For some reason, because the partitions were still mounted on
That lasted for about 3 months. Then the power went out in the office. Dammit.
My ex-wife worked at a theater for years. The movies would come by truck shipment the day before release. The movies are delivered on multiple reels, so they have to be put together into one reel. You can spot the reel changes by a small black oval flashing in the top left corner. The first flash indicates the reel change is coming. The second one indicates it should happen now. They'd also need to make sure the aspect was set correctly.
To make sure that they put the reels together correctly, they'd run the movie the night before. This was required in this theater chain, as it's kind of embarassing to have a reel run backwards, upside down, or out of order.
What I don't understand is why they still distribute on film. LCD projectors have come a *LONG* way, and have far better quality than the film projectors. Instead of shipping several reels, they could be FedEx'ing single DVD's. I know some theaters are now doing this, but the majority are still film projectors.
You're right. They could be really creative with it. They could take almost anything and use it to encode data. Lightning flashes, flickers in a TV screen, street signs. I made a video for someone one day, and slowed down one piece which lasted about 1 second to run about 10 seconds. I forgot to remove the audio track, so his voice came out like a mechanical rumble. If I took that 10 seconds and brought it back up to speed, you'd be able to understand what he said. Obviously, they wouldn't want to have someone say 6000 serial numbers, but a TTS program (like festival) would be an easy solution.
That actually would be amazingly easy, and almost undetectable.
:) Well, almost. I know it can be done, I just haven't played with video work that much.
I could do it.
I know there was a project "Film Gimp", which has since been renamed to something else, which allowed frame by frame editing (obviously that's not impossible). Me, being the non-video-professional, I could take those frames, pick a spot (like a street sign in 10 frames of scene 14), and use imagemagic to overlay the serial number over where the road name should be. Who would notice? Probably just the people who knew that the street sign had the serial number of the movie.
Make the link go to a particularly slow CGI for full effect.
I imagine that it just became a pile of magic smoke.
I think that goes along the lines of, if the software on the machine can decode it, someone else's software can do it too. :)
They story says that they'd have on-screen indications of who's tape it was too. Probably something along the lines of a text across the screen somewhere saying "Screener serial# 123456".
Making a new disk isn't impossible. I've been toying with my DirecTiVo. It has wonderful outputs to go to my receiver, but not really good outputs for recording. I bought a DVD recorder, and got creative with the wiring. Now I get S-Video in, but I'm still lacking on the audio. The DirecTiVo has the choices of digital fiber optic, or L&R RCA jacks, and the DVD recorder doesn't have a digital fiber input (I couldn't find any with that). It still makes very nice DVD's.
Once I make the DVD, it's not a really hard task to take the resulting disk and edit as needed, such as blocking over whatever is indicating who's disk it is. That may be an unreasonable task, if the text is in the middle of the screen.
I can't imagine too many Academy Awards judges wanting to go through all the bother to release a bootlegged video though. I think their trouble comes when they loan it to friends, who make copies for friends, who make copies for friends (etc, etc).
It still doesn't remove the possibility of a slightly corrupt theater manager setting up a digital video camera in the booth beside the projector and hooking into their sound board, and getting an almost perfect copy of a movie though. They could still get a movie on the Internet the night before it's released to theaters.
I don't see the big difference between a self-signed cert and a CAcert. It's going to be virtually impossible for web sites to get their users to install their root certificate. Users are stupid. Generally, I don't expect they can click a link, much less add a cert.
I've been looking into using SSL on http://freeinternetpress.com . We're not a registerd company, nor do we turn a profit, so it would be an extra cost and hassle to get a real certificate. For us, the only reason to do it is to make some of our users happy by letting them browse by https.
A self-signed cert isn't any sort of magic, the instructions are in the OpenSSL documentation. I made it a step easier for people we worth with, I have a web page that they submit their information to, and it generates everything including the self-signed cert. There's no real magic to it, anyone (err, anyone with a clue) should be able to write the same thing in about 10 minutes. I spent an extra 10 minutes making it pretty.
People I deal with never use the self-signed cert. They just take the CSR and get the cert signed by a regular signing authority. What's the big difference if I sign it, or if I call myself "Joe's cert company" and start automatically signing certs? It's not much different than what CAcert is doing, other than the fact that they have a donation button on their page. At least with the people I make CSR's and self-signed certs for, I know who they are, and that I'm not accidently signing a fake microsoft.com cert.