Hate to say it, but parent is almost completely correct.

There are some bennies to being on-site (hands-on labs with an expert on hand), but otherwise most conferences are just a big marketing push with a lot of hanger-on companies and startups vying for your attention on the main floor.

It wouldn't be so bad if the exhibitors had actual experts on hand to answer the tough questions w/o resorting to market-speak, but most of them don't, and are too busy evangelizing. If I wanted to get pounded with marketing-speak, I'd invite VARs to stop by at my office for that. If I want swag or bennies, there are plenty of local ones that local VARs are happy to give/throw (e.g. watching a Trailblazers game from a box seat while the VAR spends halftime talking to you about his product lines).

The last conference I went to was VMWorld in 1999, which had the hands-on labs and an opportunity to speak with the actual VMWare developers in an intimate setting about upcoming bits and existing problems (albeit the latter was restricted to certain big buyers/partners), but otherwise it seemed to be nothing more than a means to work over VPN interspersed with advertisement on-site, and more marketing disguised as after-hours drinking parties.

Seriously... They were fun as hell, and you used to learn a lot in the process, but the days of COMDEX and NetWorld are dead; you can thank the Internet for that.

Now classes or boot-camps? Different story, and still well worth going to depending on the technology and the depth offered. Conferences? Not so much.

Here's a nothing, kid. Buy a dictionary. "conformity with fact or reality; verity", "actuality or actual existence", "accuracy, as of position or adjustment" ... Science is the pursuit of truth. What it is not is a declaration that a matter is forever settled. Everything is open to question. Some of the debates are considered settled for all practical purposes, and don't really need to be revisited unless other base assumptions are challenged by new findings, but that still doesn't mean that science is not a pursuit of truth. That everything is open to question is you know that it is. If the goal were to feel good, then we could declare all current matters closed.

Correct. Furthermore when you have gutted the demand side of the economy what emerges are phenomena like Walmart where lower consumer prices are achieved through a monopsony (the private sector form of the "single payer" holy grail socialized medicine seeks for the same reason) that not only pays its suppliers less, but also its employees less because as the jobs market contracts, there is nowhere else to work ultimately. Walmart also knows EXACTLY what it is doing when it trains its employees in the art of extracting government benefits from a decreasing government revenue stream.

All of this wouldn't be so bad if the tax base were on net assets rather than economic activity as at least then the companies engaging in corrupt hiring practices --such as I witnessed during the huge ramp up in H-1b circa 2000 when I was told I could hire all the programmers from India for HP but not the single US-citizen specialist in the field that I needed -- will be dumped because the companies doing them will be put out of business by a more level playing field in the free market.

You mean nationalization? It's legal if you pass a law that says it is.

Nonsense. Laws are changed all the time. There's no constitutional guarantee to any of those rights, and many of them are based on deliberate misinterpretation of existing laws in any case.

silfen confesses "Yes, H-1B workers are at the bottom of the pay scale for the simple reason that H-1B visas are for people just starting out."

Ah I see. So the violation of the H-1B statute is so pervasive now that people are under the impression that it is for people who are just starting out.

My mistake.

Mark et al should simply be thrown in jail for fraud and since this has gotten so far out of hand as to permit responses like silfen's to have the remotest credibility, the jail time should be mandatory without parole.

Its tragic that Mark et al are being forced to put up with just sort of OK US workers.

You know one step that Mark et al could take that would grease the skids on their immigration reforms?

Pay the geniuses they want to import what they're worth. See The Bottom of the Pay Scale: Wages for H-1B Computer Programmers.

In fact, Mark et al should either pay back salaries to all of the H-1b workers they've ever employed or Mark et al should be thrown in prison for fraudulent abuse of the H-1B guest worker provision.

There isn't a solution to that. You have to talk to other points, and you have to do so from a connection you are on. That information, on ANY network in the world, is inevitable.

The only thing you can do is obscure it as much as possible so that people can't tell WHAT you did over the connection, or WHAT you passed to those others. They will be able to know who they were, but unless you can introduce sufficient plausible deniability (with Tor, that's just by using random people as the next hop), you can't do anything about that.

I don't think that's a problem we should waste time trying to solve. You aren't going to be able to obscure your endpoint's knowledge when 100% of the time someone is paying money for that endpoint to be connected to other endpoints. We do not have a darknet.

But it's also not that big a deal. With proper encryption and enough fake / routing data running through your connection with that encryption (and PFS), it's meaningless. All that can happen is someone can say "you were online, and so was John". If that's enough to convict you, you have bigger problems than the protocol of the network you used.

Is there any reason to believe that you won't be able to find room inside the case to add the functionality, at least to run a cable?

No, he's right. The benefit of laser cutting is that it is predictable and repeatable. It's far easier to laser-cut millions of holes with tight tolerances with near perfect repeatability with a laser cutter than it is to do it with a mill, provided that the surface being cut lends itself to laser cutting. The problem of positioning the laser is no more complex than the problem of positioning the part on a mill (arguably, it is less so) while milling the holes adds a significant number of additional complexities which are not present in a laser cutting system. That's why laser cutting has become so popular, to say nothing of its ability to handle materials which cannot practically be machined. Then again, laser cutting a fat billet isn't really practical either, so clearly both approaches have their benefits. I imagine that's why both approaches are used by Apple on the same hardware.

Nonsense. A percentage of everyone's behavior is defined by their reactions to how they are treated. If this weren't true for you, you wouldn't have even felt a need to leave the above comment. QED.

The problem with that notion is that you can and will be pushed aside if Apple wants to do a bunch of manufacturing right now. You are last in line for the big guys. You need to be matched with the appropriate manufacturer.

The simplest fix is to charge a tariff to offset the benefits of cheap labor. Then you get money and eliminate the benefits of slavery, without actually outlawing trade. In order to prove that you're unfairly assessing these tariffs, they have to prove that they're not oppressing their people, so the process drives transparency.

It won't fix the low value of human life in China overnight, but it will apply pressure in the correct direction. Sadly, it's not even on the radar.

The complexity of equipment we're talking about here is nothing like software development. You do realize that even machine tools only have a handful of moving parts, right? Tools which hold animals (or cut, smash, or otherwise affect them) can be apprehended simply by dissasembling them. Then you measure some distances center to center, and maybe the bore and stroke of some cylinders, and do some simple math (as in, even I can do it, and I have issues with numbers) and et voila, you know how it works. Especially if they have more than one of them, and replacement parts can be copied from another machine. Farm equipment is regularly repaired by people who don't have a manual.

Because in order for me to give a shit, I have to be able to afford it. Otherwise, I really don't care. I can, however, muster enthusiasm for open-source cameras with the quality of video provided by an expensive DSLR, but cheaper, and still able to use their lenses. If someone can point me to something like that, I'll be excited.