Convention News

RSA Conference Fades Away

Lede: RSA conference shutters undertakings after attendance at most recent gathering only attracted gay males with business suit fetishes.

An RSA conference official is quoted as saying "We don't have anything at all against gays, and we know they need security products too, but they only make up a relatively small proportion of the population. We just couldn't pay our bills." Executives at the company were insulated by their golden parachutes, but the rank and file workers were let go with only 4 days official notice and no termination pay. "I knew something was going on when I saw my boss carrying out his golf clubs", one unnamed source told this reporter. Another ex-employee told me she had early warning when by a week before the conference, they only had 21 advance signups, and all of them were from San Francisco. "I'm going to go to work as a stripper" she said. "I can make more and make people happy that way, too. Customer service was a nightmare of unhappiness and depression. I'm glad to be out of there, though I didn't plan it this way."

Vegas Adult Conferences see Record Attendance

Lede: In Las Vegas, the libido rules as adult conferences draw larger and larger crowds.

Sex sells, as any experiencing marketing exec will tell you; and looks matter, as Hollywood demonstrates every day of the year. Beautiful, scantily clad women populate the kiosks at all the adult conferences, and men flock en masse to the show floors in order to get a closer look and take snapshots with them; all the while being well exposed to the products and services being marketed their way. Women, too, crowd the convention room floor as they take careful note of the latest trends in sexuality and sex toys, making sure they maintain their "leg up" over the Birkenstock-wearing, makeup-free adherents of the now critically derailed feminist movement. A great time is clearly had by all. I asked a paired couple of showgoers if they had kids; "Yes, we do" was the answer. I asked where the kids were right them, and got this response: "Since the government deported all the immigrants, we've been hiring ex-programmers and ex-engineers as babysitters. Off-shoring and the H1B visa programs have made picking up a desperate tech person very easy. And they're so much better at caring for the kids. You should see the LEGO creation we came home to yesterday!"

It's not the buttons themselves, it's using them to execute more than one command at once. If you seem to manage to press some key combination with perfect timing all the time.

the Christian Science Monitor asks if social media will control the future of news

The Internet -- not so much social media, but that somewhat too -- already control the news, and I expect this to continue without break.

Unless you are willing to term "news" the vapid, nipple-slip and corporate-fellatio pap that FOX, CNN, MSNBC, the NYT and their other editorially constipated brethren feed us.

The consumers of those sources get immensely slanted and dumbed down takes on nothing but things carefully picked to feed their preconceptions as the oligarchy has served them up, or meaningless filler.

I am not saying that the "list of ten amazing... whatever" posts are worthy, nor popular dullard watering holes like Drudge; they're as bad as or worse than anything the media ever put in front of us, but the Internet is much more that that; there's just no way the news can compete with the many people who are truly interested in a subject and go to lengths to specifically cover it -- not on level of detail, not on level of accuracy, and not on interactivity. Even those media sites with open comment sections (and no, that doesn't include the ones with facebook-driven forums) fail to measure up, because it's all commenters talking to commenters -- there's very rarely any engagement at all from the author of the story, explaining the whys and wherefores due to having generated the story as fast as possible, every thought about it completely abandoned in favor of the next story.

Compounding their problem, traditional media is embracing the very worst habit of lowest common denominator clickbait sites, short videos that are difficult to comment on, much more difficult to quote, and generally of massively less worth than an actual written report or opinion.

There's another factor -- I've found that the very best reporting seems to consistently come from sources that lean towards the least commercial approach. The presence of ads seems to be an incredibly consistent flag that the content will be lower quality. The more ads, the more that seems to be the case. Stories-as-ads are a serious red flag, content-wise. You can still find worthy content in comments, but the stories from the source... they really deserve a healthy dose of skepticism.

Yes, I'm very negative about the media. That's the result of being exposed to it for fifty years. BENGAZI! DRUGZEZ! TERRORMISTS! PERVERTAGE! and of course there's that old standby: publish something relatively sane, then give equal time to a fucktarded, worthless, rationale- and evidence-free counter view. That's always helpful. Not.

EVE players get banned for programmable buttons. You really can pick your poison.

Selling people homeopathy wasn't enough, now there are medical devices. That Thync thing looks like pure snake oil. Unless you walk around with it strapped to just the right spot on your head.

And since air disasters necessarily depend on extremely low-probability events, this is not an argument for the proposition "therefore this was most likely not the cause".

We know that whatever happened it had an outrageously low probability. This makes speculation in advance of data useless, because there are an almost unlimited number of highly improbable things that could have happened, and anyone who thinks they can imagine their way to the correct one is innumerate: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=...

I'm pointing out that there is certainly quite a bit of mass hysteria going around. Sometimes that manifests as whackos killing innocent people, as per your definition. Other times it manifests as whackos engaging in multi-year legislative and regulatory exercises.

The OP was talking about cockpit door regulations. I tend to think that's a good idea, but it obviously has a downside; his point isn't unreasonable. Lots of other "legislative and regulatory exercises" are harder to defend: the random stuff airport security comes up with seems to be borne completely of overreaction. Also things like special border zones hundreds of miles from a border, domestic spying to make Orwell blush, decades long wars, that kind of thing.

Idiots killing innocent people and overbearing regulators: different sides, same mass hysteria coin.

I also found this interesting:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/n...

Yup, no witch hunts at all. http://rt.com/usa/231839-musli...

It's tough for an untrained person to kill another in a confined space without a weapon. It makes noise and takes a while. The rest of the crew would notice.

No foreign power needs to, either. It's a meaningless political nothing.

So even if you charge $1 for it and assuming you're working by yourself, you're looking at anywhere between $7,000 to $47,000 (minus hardware and licensing fees). If you had anyone else helping (which is probably the case), then yeah... you're looking at poverty level wages.

There's a questionable assumption buried in that: The assumption it takes a year to put out an app. It certainly should not. Unless the developer really, really sucks. And in which case, perhaps that should be considered with regard to remuneration.

A good dev can put a working skeleton of an iOS app or a full blown mac app up in a matter of hours. I can do it in minutes. Filling it with whatever one wants it to do doesn't generally take all that long, certainly not a year, unless you're building something as extended and construct/art heavy as Angry Birds, and in that case... you're likely to make more than 50k.

Now, as for those who are filling the app store (Android too, I'm not discriminating) with 50mb apps that hardly do anything at all... well, there you go. Given the level of what they've produced, perhaps it does take them a year. But I can't say I'm terribly worried about them, either. :/

He sure isn't. My lady has an iPhone 5; I have a Samsung Galaxy Note 4. Guess what she's about to buy? Hint... not another iPhone... We both also have recent iPads. Quite familiar with iOS.

You see anyone not sitting on the sidelines here?

All kinds of noise was made about Hitler's early moves, it's just that other than noise, everyone sat. Which is just what everyone is doing now. Not saying there's much to conclude from that, but it's certainly a similar thing thus far.

This. I would go further -- I bet the components are ready to plug together. And they already have ballistic capable launch platforms. And they've had nuclear reactors for years, not to mention some of the smartest, well educated, motivated individuals on the face of the earth and huge industrial powerhouses very well acquainted with keeping tight security.

Although I should admit that it doesn't worry me even a little bit, nor do any of the known nukes around the globe. They're just really big bombs. Sucks just as much to be blown up by a grenade, or shot with a 50 caliber bullet. Being taken out by a bayonet or other bladed weapon is no party either. I truly think it's just beyond awesome that politicians are finally on the front lines -- if we get nuked, they are finally the first to go, as they should have been for every war they declared, frankly. And I don't think for even a second that the actual leaders of Muslim countries are taken in by that 72 virgins BS, any more than most US presidents are seriously religious (except for poor old drugged out Bush, but that's our own fault...) Religion is a tool of control. Smart people quietly ignore it, or go through the motions as needed. Religion is not there for people smart and cunning enough to get to positions of national leadership. It's there for everyone else.

Once you have the bomb, you're not going to get attacked

You might want to keep an eye on India and Pakistan...