Hackaday Poll

Yes, we have polls now. Rock on. We’ll be using these a lot now and we like!

Will you be attending Defcon?

Yes I am!

No, I’m not.

No, but I’ll be in Vegas during then.

  

26 thoughts on “Hackaday Poll

  1. Unfortunately, the white text inside the poll “box” does not hold its color in the RSS feed (I’m guessing that’s because it only uses a stylesheet locally). In Bloglines, all I saw was a black square with a couple of radio buttons in it, until I highlighted the text to reveal it. Can you guys fix that?

  2. Will you have a defcon booth setup, or what exactly? I’ll be attending this year, and would like to see what you guys are up too. I live in Pennsylvania also, but am unable to go to the meetings, as I have no license or car.

  3. I’ve been to several of them, 6, 7, 8 and 9, but DefCon just isn’t the same anymore.

    I’m taking a road trip with a bunch of car geeks to South Bend, Indiana instead. Plus, it’s closer to Kansas City. I love Vegas but DefCon just got too lame for my tastes. Maybe if I have a lot of disposeable income next year, then if it sucks I can still gamble or buy tickets to Black Hat.

  4. the guy in pa:

    take a train to philadelphia. i don’t drive either (i do have a license though)

    and I believe it’s too late for us to have a booth. plus we’re covering the event. you’ll still be able to meet us and what not though. we’ll have a “makeshift” booth ;)

  5. errr m0th, your forgetting about the billions of people who don’t live in America or Europe. Africans, Asians, Island dwellers (ie Australia and NZ), and arctic dwellers are people too.

  6. apologies m0th, I should have had a :P with my comment. I try not to take anything seriously. Your original comment made me lol ’cause when I read it i was thinking “yeah, damn straight!”, but then I realised that you’d forgotten us who are sitting down here on the arse end of the world. meh, no harm done.

    Sean, *arctic dwellers are people too*! Just look at santa, he sure as hell isn’t a snowman. I have a strong impulse to print this slogan on a t-shirt or use it as the name of a blog or something.

  7. too many undercover federal agents lurking around there. it feels like your being spyed on. i don’t trust this damn government. if you ever went to some mainstreamly known “hacker” conference your probably already on some list. screw defcon, stay at home and tinker with some electronics instead.

  8. too many undercover federal agents lurking around there. it feels like your being spyed on. i don’t trust this damn government. if you ever went to some mainstreamly known “hacker” conference your probably already on some list. screw defcon, stay at home and tinker with some electronics instead.

  9. It isn’t about the feds. They don’t care. Besides if they didn’t show up how would we play SPOT THE FED?!

    Seriously, too many other counterculture constituents showing up lately besides for hackers. Scene whores, wannabe’s, goths, punks, and all that. Which would be GREAT if like a ton of goth or punk hackers showed up, but they aren’t hackers, and just show up to show up. Save it for Burning Man, guys! Jeez!

    I haven’t been around since DC9 but the talks were getting more bland by the year, too. 2 or 3 people would have GOOD talks about The Next Big Thing(tm) while everyone else either talked about old stuff without breaking any new ground, or the new stuff with a crappy presentation.

    It was fun while it lasted for me. As a network security engineer, it used to give me that yearly “spark” that kept me going, but DC9 didn’t do it for me and overall, I just wasn’t feeling it anymore. Maybe I’m getting old.

  10. I went to defcon, last year, I was very disapointed. There were LONG lines of people long for each of the talks. So, you’d have to line up, at least 30-60 minutes, before the thing you wanted to see started. During a talk, the goons were ordered to not let anyone in to them. So, last year I paid, I saw one panel, which I don’t remember anymore. I went to some good parties & got drunk on absinthe. Besides, Vegas is FUCKING HOT in July. This year, I went in May, it was actually cool on two of the three days!

  11. wow, in about 20 posts not one involved a crack about a missing poll option using the words “insensitive clod.” I thought for sure some /.-ers read hackaday. I guess I was wrong.

  12. Folks,

    For the record this is ‘Priest’ from DC and this is me speaking personally as a private citizen and by no means should it be taken to represent the views, opinions, beliefs, or position of Defcon, The Dark Tangent, and/or other staff.

    First, to those who mentioned it, let me personally apologize for the poor time you had at DC9. In my personal opinion DC9 was the low point for many of us, staff and attendee. At that point DC had become, in my mind, more of a rave/party/see-and-be-seen thing as opposed to what it was supposed to, again in my opinion, which is a place for people who consider themselves ‘hackers’ to get together for an exchange of ideas and a chance to meet IRL. It was also the DC where many of us on the staff said to ourselves ‘That’s it I’m done! This is no longer what it once was.’

    From this DT and the senior staff believed that it was time to remake DC and try to bring it back to the way it was in the early days before all the candy ravers, posers, and other assorted noise started showing up. I firmly believe that DT and the staff are committed to bringing DC back to it’s early day roots and away from the ‘Burning Man East’ that many of us felt DC had spiraled down to and that we are doing all we can to make this a reality.

    I also want to apologize to all of you who had to face the lack of space in the popular talks at the last few DC’s as well as the perception of a small but vocal minority that myself and other ‘Security Goon’s’ are a bunch of jack booted megalomaniacal thugs out to stomp all over you.

    Please understand we, as staff, are all unpaid volunteers who have full time jobs/commitments outside of DC and not professional convention planners. We do what we do literally as a labor of love and because of a firm belief and interest in providing a venue for knowledge transfer and a good place to meet and spend time with people whom you only see as letters on your monitor. We do not do this for our own ego’s or self gratification.

    We are trying to do our best to ensure that you, as attendee’s, have the best possible experience you can while at DC. Sometimes though because of either unexpected issues, like the loss of major space and seating for the talks right before the con was to start, or frankly our own mistakes things do not go as well as we plan. We tried to do some things over the last conventions to address the lack of space issues that have become chronic for the more popular talks some were effective and some were not.

    I promise you though that we do try to learn from our mistakes and do our best to fix the things we can. This year we hope that the lessons we have learned from last year and the year before as well as some things we plan to try this year will go a long way to addressing the space and line issues.

    As to the jack boots, megalomania, and stomping we as a whole are not a bunch of sadistic assholes that wake up in the morning gleefully chortling to ourselves about ways to ‘mess up somebody’s day.’ We sometimes do have a staff member who crosses the line and we try to address that problem swiftly. If you do have a problem with how you were treated please come see me or another senior staff member and we will do our best to make sure that we resolve the issue as best we can. Sometimes though, quite frankly, we have to be jerks.

    I personally would rather have you think I am a fascist Nazi bastard for ruining that great stunt you were about to pull involving jumping off the second floor balcony 30 feet into the pool while you were drunk on cheap gin or making you put your clothes back on/stop putting parts of you into parts of another person in pool two than have to call EMS to rush you to the hospital or see you in the back of a Metro squad car in handcuffs.

    Please also remember we are here to try and ensure that as many of you have the best time you can while at DC and that at times this means that some small number of you needs to be asked firmly not to get too far out of line.

    I also believe that we felt that over time the Defcon audience has branched out and matured over time and that we want to be sensitive to the various skill levels, knowledge, and backgrounds of the attendee’s. Because of this we wanted to provide a more holistic multi level experience to all of you. This is why we created the three speaker tracks. I realize that many of you are very knowledgeable in your given area’s of expertise and find it poor form for us to provide such a N00B focus but please do bear in mind that while you may be the best damn (Insert area of expertise here) many are not and have the desire to learn more about it and this is why we put the track system in place. Perhaps you could take time to educate someone else in your area as well as perhaps learn about something that is not directly in your sphere of knowledge as a way to broaden your horizons.

    Thank you all for taking the time to read this and please feel free to approach me any time at DC to provide suggestions on how we can do things better as well as your thoughts and opinions. I promise not to rip your arms off and beat you with them if you do.

    Priest

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