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.

None of those even comes close to two heads of state declaring that sovereign Ukrainian land belongs to Russia.

No one needs to. They've already taken what they wanted. Fait accompli.

You're really letting this stuff fly right over your head. Odd. Russia -- and the US -- are the 800 lb (~363 kg for you victims of the metric system) gorilla of international "we did it, you can suck it" politics. Approval from others is not something that changes the course of much in particular, although it's typical when some kind of externally facing benefit is desired from them.

Germany, on the other hand, was a small, massively industrial country between the size of the 4th and 5th largest US states (Montana and New Mexico) and smaller than Severo-Kavkazsky federalny okrug, the second smallest of the nine federal districts of Russia. Germany was very busy trying to consolidate a starting foothold for a major, vicious, multi-country land grab. The remainder of Europe as a whole was terrified. Initially, they did what they thought they had to do, true enough, but in the end it was nothing but deterrent-free conciliation, just as many actions aimed at Russia today are. The specifics of the act mean very little; it's the nature of it that guides future action.

"$7,000" ... "The assumption it takes a year"

The point I was making rather explicitly, which went right over your head, is that 7k is a good return for a short bit of work. 47k is excellent. The complaint about 7k of income as made in the GP is only valid if the development takes a long time. If it takes a week to put together an app, a not unreasonable amount of time for something of moderate complexity (assuming, again, that one is competent, and continuing not being the least bit concerned about those who are not), 7k is a thousand bucks a day, assuming you work all seven days.

Another thing is that if a dev spends a whole lot of time on a poor idea, then perhaps the message isn't so much that "this work produces a poor return" as it is "you suck at this work and/or you suck at figuring out what people will buy", and in either (or both) cases, this is simply the market's way of telling you to consider a more remunerative line of effort.

I highly recommend that you talk to HR about your compensation.

Retired, my home is what amounts to a small castle (ex-church), multiple vehicles, 200" home theater, no mortgage, no loans, investments a-plenty, two wholly owned, profitable businesses that run themselves, and the software that put me here now available for free to anyone...

Yeah, sorry, no time for your HR person. What was it they wanted from you? Ten years experience in rehabilitating sentient AI bartenders, a no-compete / no-disclosure / no harassment / must-wear-panties contract, daily drug tests and cavity searches, you provide your own insurance, move to India and obtain Indian citizenship, be paid in rupees+curry, and no pets in the office?

I'm sorry, I'm just a bit cranky today. Was thinking one lousy assumption deserved another, albeit with a little humor thrown in. :)

And the US has plenty of those, as well as accidents with less dire consequences.

Yeah, actually it is 9/11 stupidity.

Solution would have been armored cockpits rejiggered to include food service, bunks and restroom sufficient for cockpit crew, separate, external door (doesn't open to the passenger section) into the aircraft for the pilots. An expensive 1-time cost. Instead of half-assed conversions and the open-ended expense, inconvenience, and dignity trampling of the TSA and associated rules and strangulations.

The current situation is a band-aid, and a pretty poor one at that. It does no good; it offers great potential for harm. As we have seen here.

And inasmuch as it is extremely unlikely that any load of passengers will ever again let a terrorist take control of an aircraft, knowing that doing so could lead straight to their death without passing go, so action is now always the better choice -- and terrorists know it -- the whole thing is basically wrongheaded from start to finish.

The most serious problem was commercial aircraft being used as guided kinetic weapons. That will likely never happen again unless the aircraft is transporting several terrorists and no one else but a load of first-year brownies. Perhaps not even then.

You should keep this in mind -- Russians embraced dash cams well before the US did, and in considerably greater numbers (mine is still the only one I've seen in my smallish town of 3000 people to this very day.) There were motivating insurance / liability / responsibility issues -- even some fairly widespread scamming. This inevitably means that more accidents have been and are being recorded, and of course, to make the video, the most sensationally fucktarded ones are chosen. Don't you believe for a moment that US drivers don't do similarly crazy things. On a drive back from Billings, Montana to my home, about 300 miles, on a snowy, icy day, we counted over fifty cars in the median, one- and two-car accidents, plus one really serious multiple-vehicle one involving a semi. There were actually more people in the median, having slid there, than there were on the road with us (I drive a 3/4 ton 4WD drive pickup, and you'd better believe I was in 4WD and going s...l...o...w... Horrific accidents make the news fairly often too, here and elsewhere -- but no dash cams. I have yet to "run into" dash cam footage for a US accident on the news though there must be some out there somewhere.

Face it. If Russians were as crazy as that video makes them seem, there wouldn't be very many Russians left.

the situations are very different.

You think so? consider this, for instance. And this too. And this. No appeasement? Hardly. You just don't see it in the news. You'll read more about it in the histories when this behavior is revealed as part of the present diplomatic pattern, and what it led to is in the rear view mirror. Just as we did with Nazi Germany.

It's a shell game. Nothing is quite what it seems, and sure as little green apple seeds make little green apples, no one is eager to tell the public what is actually going on.

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!"

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.

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.