Voting for the other corporate-controlled, militaristic party doesn't seem like a viable plan for getting out of this mess.

We already tried that a few times; voting in Democrats does not help.

Republicans are only into conflicts they can win and stop fighting; Democrats are the ones who like to cause endless conflicts they can pour money and people into. Under Bush we helped turn Iraq into democracy; under Obama we abandoned them to be consumed by ISIS, at least to the point we get to go over and fight for the same land all over again.

Isn't it better for people in Australia to know their network data will be retained for two years, than for the people in the U.S. to be unaware data is being retained, but then in actuality have it retained forever by the NSA?

That's too bad, I've never been in person but had been wanting to go for a while... sounds like I missed the best run.

So you have no philosophical objection the the NSA acting completely outside the law

Everyone else is acting completely outside the law these days, and the law has been built up over time to give too many protections to guilty people, so I've pretty much stopped caring.

My objections are on the level of "well, I wouldn't do it personally, but whatever".

Especially for the guys that encrypt other people's data and ransom that. Who cares what happens to those jerks.

How so? Good looking people can still sell from a booth

Good looking people can of course be in any role.

However at least some former booth babes are models that really can't do things other than look good. Since they would not be good in an informational role, they would not be hired.

Like I said, better for attendees in some ways as at least you can talk to someone more about the product. But not as good for the women (and men) now out of work.

The exceptions at PAX are from people cosplaying representations of game characters. I don't see anything wrong with that. I also don't think it's reasonable to ban people who want to show up in cosplay outfits that may be sexy.

Some people like expressing sexuality, to deny them the ability to do so is just as repressive as any other kind of censorship.

The summary doesn't really explain why that dilemma is harder for German companies to solve than American companies.

For Americans, the answer is: always hit the pedestrian(s). What the hell was anyone doing outside of a car?

How is this a first? The most recent PAX banned booth babes. Also MacWorld did a while ago... I'm pretty sure there are other examples, including lots of smaller technical conferences.

The surprise to me is that an RSA conference even HAD booth babes.

I have mixed feeling about this, it seems discriminatory against the good looking... however it always was kind of pointless, and annoying to have people at a booth that didn't know much about whatever the booth was promoting.

The funny(?) thing is that as this movement ratchets down into conferences everywhere, it will probably mean a rise in the number of women turning to literal, instead of figurative, prostitution to make a living.

I can't understand in a case like this why they can't restore the system from some earlier backup (well, I can, but it seems absurd they are not able to).

If nothing else just whip the system and re-install software. It seems like they could recover email addresses from servers the emails went through before... perhaps they would be without some records but you can't go on like this. Even if you pay the demands and unlock everything you'd have to reinstall everything from scratch anyway.

Why would the NSA have to reveal anything? I'm imagine they are "taken care of" in a way that means revealing nothing.

We're already assassinating leaders of terrorist groups. I don't know why ransomware rings affecting government institutions would not qualify.

That's a really good point, I did some research into DOCSIS myself at one point to decide if I should upgrade my cable modem to support a newer version.

I didn't really think about corporate IT guys never encountering those day to day, in fact if anything they would be probably less inclined to dig into it since it's so close to work... at least for a programmer it's something a bit different.

I wouldn't go that far. Sure, he probably RDP, VNC, or SSH into his remote servers with the occasional upload/download to them. But being in IT and knowing quite a a few devs

If you work at home much or have more than one system you are having to do quite a lot more than that.

You are at the very least, figuring out port forwarding on your router... also diagnosing reachability and DNS issues from your ISP.

Not to mention that any developer doing much with servers at all is going to be pretty familiar with tracing and examining networking traffic - even if it's mostly HTTP and not much UDP.

Over the years just because I do so much from home, I've had to learn to diagnose networking issues the cable support reps just could not understand.

From the story:

I was floored. âoeTimed out?â How can that even happen?

Excuse me, but are you REALLY a software engineer to just some dude who badly wants Netflix access?

After reading the account, it seems the real issue was that Comcast never got around to bringing out an engineering team to the area to run a cable drop to the house.

Well what if the local cable infrastructure was accidentally damaged? It seems like then they'd already have trucks out repairing the line anyway, so they could also do a run to the house...

You should respect their right to move the location of their event to a jurisdiction of their choosing

I do! I'm just saying there are financial implications to them, for people that would have otherwise attended but disagree with that stance - just as others pointed out there are financial implications for the state of the convention moves. As I said in my original subject - it goes both ways.

They aren't the ones trying to pass a law mandating compliance

That's not what the law is, at all.

Though I suspect your position is an empty one as I find it very probable you had no intention of attending GenCon in the first place.

I've attended in the past, I wasn't planning to go this year but I was planning to go again eventually.

I also suspect said Legislative members behind this bill would have no problem not respecting the right of gay people to exist while gay,

Wrong.