Cargo shorts are ubiquitous.

Piercing, tattoos and henna are part of the hacking culture these days though

looks down Hmmmm ... I'm not wearing any henna now, and my hair is my natural color, and I no longer have an eyebrow ring ... but really, this has been nerd chic since I was in junior high school, which is really only a subset of shabby punk from the 70s.

Or as I like to call it, clothing.

As far as wizards and elves

Mmmmm .... Skyrim ...

ZOMG, I 4m teh hax0r!! Or, as my wife puts it ... " hey dork".

Let's be honest here, this isn't exactly new.

Damn, suddenly I was a lot more interested in attending ... who doesn't like disco-bondage headgear, leather, and steampunk?

Yes honey, I have to go to Vegas for work. No, I really do need my steampunk goggles and leather chaps, it's for, um, safety. Yes, for safety. Have you seen my cape?

Yeah, like I'm supposed to believe he had a heart.

That's just where they topped up the evil. ;-)

Nerds in t-shirts and glasses, now that's what I expected ... the whole leather thing threw me a little.

"my wizard impales your elf".

I don't even know where to start with how wrong that statement is.

Why, thank you.

still tons of leather, piercing, and body art

Is this a security convention, or an S&M one?

I'm confused ... I've never been to one, is this one of those 'it can be two things' deals?

Is everybody walking around in their disco-bondage headgear and steampunk outfits talking about security?

I'm just imagining a keynote speaker in leather chaps, and suddenly I'm very afraid. No wonder the rest of the world still thinks we're all running around playing D&D and shouting "my wizard impales your elf".

And based on your completely ignorant and idiotic posts, I assume you have nothing at all to refute any of this, other than your firmly held idiocy and conviction that they must be wrong?

Why don't you go visit the creation museum or something, you might find other people who care about what you say.

If they don't get the results they're looking for they'll "adjust" the data or "calibrate" the instruments until they show what they want NASA to show.

Cite your facts and your science, because otherwise we conclude you're doing nothing more than making an ad hominem attack on science.

Oh, wait, you don't have any facts, right?

Sorry, but if you want to be given any credibility, you need to show some science which refutes it.

Otherwise, it's the same as if I said "Pino Grigio will reject any science which doesn't fit in with his childish worldview, and nothing he says can be taken as more then the rantings of a deluded idiot".

If I had to choose between the integrity of the NASA scientists and the intelligence of your post, I'm going to have to go with NASA on this one.

I don't really understand why you have so much love for the 360, but so much hate for the X1

My XBox 360 hasn't been plugged into a network in several years, and the XBone isn't backwards compatible with my existing library of games.

Microsoft has sent so many mixed messages about this platform that I don't know what to believe about it any more.

I don't care about DLC, I don't care about on-line gaming, I don't care about multi-player, I don't care about pretty much anything they said was a "feature" of this new console. It brings zero value for me.

If CO2 were a leading cause of warming, why would the temperatures not be spiking along with CO2 levels?

You seem to be assuming it's linear and immediate, as opposed to being a complex system with built in lag and other factors -- which would boil down to "if I release X amount of CO2, tomorrow the temperature will go up by Y".

It doesn't work that way, and is much more complex.

Much like if you turn up your thermostat, your house isn't instantly warmer, because, thermodynamics.

when they dont get the results that they want the sat suddenly loses communications.....

More likely scenario ... if it starts getting results confirming AGW, some congresscritter will vote to cut its funding on behalf of his 'constituents' (the oil companies).

There is a group interested in not seeing the truth here, and it isn't the climate scientists.

And terrorists would want either something REALLY hot for a dirty bomb

Is that true?

Say your goal was purely to scare the crap out of people and cause panic -- the low hanging fruit of terrorism. You don't actually need to do anything with lasting effects. If you suddenly make a high visibility target read with a trivial amount of radioactivity, you'll pretty much accomplish your goals, wouldn't you? One can only assume this kind of this is actively monitored.

By the time people figure out it's not life threatening, you've already achieved your goal. Do it a few more times, and people will be so scared that when the microwave goes bing they'll run screaming.

Sure, you can cause more actual damage with something else, but the psychological damage is going to be vast and widespread.

Do you really think this wouldn't mobilize a lot of people and generally wreak havoc? I'm picturing FEMA and a whole ton of agencies going nuts over this.

Like most people, I know pretty much nothing about dirty bombs. But even if you couldn't do any real damage, you can still create a hell of a response.

Now, of course, it's entirely possible these 'lesser' things can't actually do that. As I said, I know nothing about it. But, it seems like you could cause a lot of panic, and that seems like it's as valuable as doing the real thing.

Stupid is not a finite quantity in the universe, and it's not a zero sum game.

You can have an infinite amount of stupid.

Now, one might argue that telling the spammers how they've fallen for this and what to avoid ... well, that might be stupid.

it's about making sure people can't just copy downloaded games onto a USB drive and make multiple copies and pirate games that trivially whilst making sure they can use USB storage for games

Right, so it's not a technology issue, and never was.

I'm so tired of technology being crippled in the name of copyright and DRM it's not funny -- the copyright lobby has more or less decided we can't do anything without their permission.

worse, the 360 even had it's own bespoke memory cards originally

I'm aware of that, and again, I've always assumed it was because of corporate greed.

At the end of the day, the Xbone is a very anti-consumer piece of technology, and I simply will not buy one.

I will buy a spare for my beloved 360 before that ever happens.

Microsoft can shove their DRM, copyright protection, and POS system up their collective asses.

Will they care even a little that I'm doing this? Absolutely not. Do I expect others likely are making the same choice? Definitely.

Yeah, no kidding.

I worked on a government contract once. Getting anything done required extensive amounts of fighting the process, and sometimes fighting the people -- they had their process, there was nothing in the world which could streamline it, and everybody was so incredibly territorial about their own stuff it was absurd. To the point that an Oracle DBA went in and removed permissions from an Oracle product -- the Oracle product explicitly said "need these permissions", the departmental policies said "no you can't" -- and then we spent 3 days understanding why something broke until the DBA said "oh, I removed those".

And then as the pilot project was coming on line (and it was purely a pilot project), the government employees started demanding the training course, the manuals, the support callflow, and a dozen other things which didn't exist yet.

It was maddening, the Director (or whatever he was called) would say "this must be done today", and we'd start doing our part ... and then the government people would throw up dozens of roadblocks to make it impossible. Even when directly told by him to do it this way, they just simply didn't.

There were some smart people, but everybody had been so beaten down by the bureaucracy that it was impossible to get anything done.

I sure as heck wouldn't want to be doing tech in the government, because getting anything done was nigh on impossible, and there were usually 3-4 layers of CYA going on as everyone tried to ensure that if anything ever went wrong they could say "well, I followed all appropriate processes".

The tie, I could live with since I don't find them to be that bad. I actually like the tie.

The processes and pointless procedures ... that was just crazy.