Our company attends conferences but not trade shows anymore. We used to have a big rush to get our marketing material and booth ready every year for the Design Automation Conference (DAC) but even the big vendors have long pulled out of that one and we abandoned it before that. It's just too much effort (and expense) for very little benefit. The only people going to the trade shows in the last few years were existing customers who would come by for a chat. New customers just go to the web.

Please tell Irish women. They slather their makeup on with a trowel until they look like Data.

Finally someone in the field!

Maybe you can help me with this. I've always wondered why space launches have always been from a vertical take-off. From what I know about Harrier jump jets you can get a heavier payload into the air from a horizontal take-off (assisted in the Harrier's case by a ski-jump deck on the ship). When I first saw the Pegasus launch system I wondered why that hadn't been a standard launch method before. Is it down to the size of aircraft needed to get the heavy rocket stage to a high enough altitude? IIRC the Pegasus system could only lift very light payloads.

Thanks.

Hey idiot! Suicide is no longer illegal!

I remember the first time I tried to watch NYPD Blue. It was also the last. I got motion sickness after about five minutes. How anyone watched that whole show on a regular basis I do not know.

I agree. I always preferred the models in the original Star Trek movies, I really had a sense of a giant spaceship. I never quite got the same sensation from later Star Trek incarnations. TNG's ship was cool to look at but in my mind there was something cartoonish about it. I hear that that was a model too but there must have been something about the way they did their post production that put the wrong kind of shimmer or light on it. There was something about the Enterprise D that never quite sat well with me, and I suspect it was the light. It was always the exact same colour no matter how deep into space it got, whereas NCC 1707 showed the light sources because they were built into the model.

The Star Wars prequels are terrible. The CGI edits are so easy to spot, and as the guy on youtube says they just keep showing more shit into your face to distract you. Luke and Obi-Wan sitting in a non-descript room on Tatooine had far more character development going on than Chancellor Velorum sitting in the oppulent senate chamber surrounded by a squillion muppets.

Speaking of muppets, why did every single alien and bad guy in the prequels have to be a monster? I seem to remember the bad guys in the original Star Wars only needed an English accent and a bit of arrogant bickering going on between them. They were far more interesting. Remember the admiral of the imperial fleet and one of the commanders of the Death Star getting into a pissing contest over who's weapon was bigger? That was freaking awesome! And it took place in a drab grey room with simple but sinister looking high backs on the chairs. Genius.

Did they nominate themselves for any award? I went hunting for the list of 2011 contenders and it took about four clicks of links, each of which promised me I was going to get to the 2011 contenders. Every time I clicked a link it opened it in a new window. The ads were so intrusive I didn't know if they were bitching about the companies advertising on their page or something else.

As others have mentioned, it slows down their program by making them dig deeper to hide it. This is especially important in Iran's case because its regime is on borrowed time. The longer the mullahs and their presidential puppet hang on to power, the more the pressure builds from the people who are increasingly disaffected by the dictatorship they're living under. They're especially frustrated after the last "election" when they defied the regime and protested but didn't succeed in having Ahmedinijad "Mubaraked". Maybe next time. Iran may not be an Arab country but the Arab spring will have certainly lifted the spirits of the Iranian opposition. The hope is that the regime will fall before it arrives at nuclear capability.

As well you might. Do you write perfect bug-free code?

It comes from open source fundamentalism. Anything proprietary is evil in the /. mind. Flash has taken a lot of flak here over the years for that reason. In fact Flash is probably one of the most unfairly maligned products I've ever seen mentioned on /.

HTML 5 has taken a long time to come around, Flash was a great interim measure that allowed us to spend the last 5 years watching video and enjoying interactivity on the web in the days when a HTML page was written in stone once it was rendered. Sure, some people abused it with annoying "skip intro" pages and springing audio on the unsuspecting user, but that's not the technology's fault. JavaScript has been abused a whole lot more (popups, pop-unders) but it never seemed to generate the same amount of vitriol. I think it was just a personal thing. Flash was beloved of the more artistic types and the engineering types didn't like it or their creations.