Typically the booth babe at RSA's booth at the RSA show is Rivest (I don't think I've seen Shamir or Adleman there.) Usually he's been working on something interesting and is having fun showing it off, but he's also there for fanboi value.

They were a really clear indicator that the occasional companies that hired them seriously didn't understand their audience, and hadn't brought anybody who knew anything technical to their booth, probably not even any marketing people who understood the product, so you could pretty much skip them, because they were pretty much always useless as well as unprofessional.

On the other hand, you can totally bribe us with chocolate or especially coffee, and we might sit through your silly magician act for a raffle ticket for an iThing as long as there was technical content at your booth, and we'll pick up blinky tchotchkes with your logo on them. The woman I'd rather talk to at your booth is the one who developed the cool product, or can explain it well.

When my company's been at trade shows in the area, about half their staff are booth-running professionals, rather than product-related, from the people who set the thing up and make sure all the marketing content is there to the people who herd customers in, figure out what they're interested in (even if it's just at the buzzword level), bring them over to the right part of the booth or find the right person if they need to, scan your contact info, get the speakers on and off the stage, etc., and about half are either main-office or local people who know something about whatever we're trying to sell. They seem to do a good job on the mechanics of it (I've occasionally ended up as local booth staff), and they're seriously good at respecting the audience.

They're the ones over in the NSA booth, showing off the cool Enigma machine, and handing out other spook agency trinkets. Sometimes other groups of Feds are there (Homeland Security or whoever), and they don't understand that, unlike the NSA who are evil but cool, they're evil but not cool.

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.

Again, why would they do that? The only members of the "trucking industry" who stand to lose if trucks go automated are truckers themselves, but they can't possibly out-lobby trucking companies.

No. Wal-Mart will just contract with whoever can moves the trucks most cheaply. But they're not going to do the leg-work themselves. They'll just contract whoever has the self-driving trucks, after they do the lobbying.

Wal-Mart doesn't give a shit how cheap trucking is, only that they get it at the lowest possible cost, because they don't care what their prices are, only that they are lower than the competition.

You're assuming that there were not earlier events which led to this event, and also that the producer didn't say anything to exacerbate the situation.

Look, violence is not a wonderful answer to something other than violence or impending violence, but the anti-Clarkson force seems to believe that he just got the wind up his arse and started throwing fists. But since none of us were party to the conversation, and none of us know what was said, none of us knows how unreasonable violence was as a response.

As someone who was bullied in almost every possible way in school, including a whole lot of verbal abuse, I know that verbal abuse can be as painful as the physical kind. In fact, studies have shown that emotional abuse actually causes physical pain responses in the nervous system. That's right, words literally hurt. If the BBC were as progressive as they'll have you believe, they'd fire people for saying mean things to other people. And then it might well have been the producer who was out of a job, before he even got a chance to eat a fist.

So they cracked down on a shot to the jaw as a response to being soft on pedophilia?

Nobody really believes that "no excuse for violence" canard, do they? The world certainly isn't run that way.

I'm not turning away because of the lack of data. He-said, she-said, few-facts-available.

It's not just you. Watch any car review show, there are many to choose from and you can watch pretty much all of them on Youtube. The presenters will always talk about how much better the fit and finish are in the kraut cans, and will always talk about how they are a much "nicer place to be" than their American rivals.

People don't understand how to watch reviews. Reviewers who aren't nice don't get to do reviews, so you have to mentally turn down the nice on every statement. If they say that something is quality, then it could be a lot better. If they say it's better than the competition, then you know it's that.

And that fee is mandatory and difficult to escape, even if you don't have a tuner in your house. Which is what makes the BBC a government organization.

Uh, what? The McDonald's "hot coffee" incident was decided in favor of the customer. That's the opposite of not having merit. McDonald's served coffee at a temperature above their own published standards, which were set in part because they knew that the cups become inadequate at doing their job when used at those temperatures. The coffee was hot enough to cause substantial burns to the woman's flesh, which is not the case if they follow their own guidelines. The case might have been decided the way you imagine absent those guidelines, but it proved that McDonald's was aware that there was a legitimate danger.

Care to try again?