Ajit Pai Cancels Trip To CES Amid Government Shutdown (theverge.com) 79
For the second year in a row, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai will not be attending the annual Consumer Electronics Show. According to Politico Pro, Pai and Commissioner Brendan Carr are canceling their appearances at CES as a consequence of the ongoing partial government shutdown. Last year, Pai canceled due to death threats he received in the aftermath of the net neutrality rollback, which occurred just weeks prior to the conference. The Verge reports: Carr was expected to attend a roundtable session with Federal Trade Commission Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter to discuss regulatory and policy issues involving 5G, privacy and accessibly, along with other topics. Both events have been removed from the CES schedule, but organizers have yet to respond to requests for comment.
As of Thursday afternoon, non-essential FCC employees were furloughed and âoemostâ operations were suspended as Congress battles it out over a funding package for the upcoming fiscal year. While the agency is shut down, consumer complaints will not be heard, consumer protection enforcement actions will be ceased, and licensing services will end until new funding is approved. CES 2018 begins on January 8th and runs through the 11th. Pai was scheduled to speak on opening day at 1:30PM PST.
As of Thursday afternoon, non-essential FCC employees were furloughed and âoemostâ operations were suspended as Congress battles it out over a funding package for the upcoming fiscal year. While the agency is shut down, consumer complaints will not be heard, consumer protection enforcement actions will be ceased, and licensing services will end until new funding is approved. CES 2018 begins on January 8th and runs through the 11th. Pai was scheduled to speak on opening day at 1:30PM PST.
Re: Death threats? (Score:4, Insightful)
Convenient excuse?
I'm sure he could afford to pay his own way. Verizon pays all his bills anyway.
Re: (Score:2)
Politicians and public figures related to both parties receive death threats. Remember, roughly 1 out of 1,000 people have their head screwed on wrong, at least.
Good (Score:1)
The "shutdown" shows what we knew all along - that most of the government is graft and waste.
Re: (Score:1)
Water is overrated, I haven't had a drink all day and I'm still alive!
Air is unnecessary, haven't inhaled in just under a minute and I'm still alive!
probably just scared to go.. (Score:1)
lucky for him, his orange butt-buddy shut down the government, giving him a convenient and timely excuse to stay home and count the bribe money he's collected instead
Re: (Score:2)
Why do you foreigners have so much to say about US politics?
Maybe because historically the US has had so much to say (and do) with other countries politics?
C'mon Slashdot (Score:4, Interesting)
Can we _please_ remove the political slant from this site?
Re: C'mon Slashdot (Score:2, Informative)
We need to remove the political slant from every site. Virtual every bulletin board or comment section gets derailed by some political bullshit now, no matter what TFA was about. I'm beginning to think the goal is both one of brainwashing and simply shutting down open communication.
I can see that it's working well, here. Haven't been on in a long while but comments look dead and comment quality looks far worse than anything I remember, even for Slashdot.
Re: (Score:1)
It's the Fox News slant. Reality doesn't match up with the propaganda, so outlets reporting neutral facts become "slant."
Re: (Score:2)
Can we _please_ remove the political slant from this site?
Could the AC (or indeed any of the mods that moderated parent up) explain to this person how such a bland summary has a political slant? How exactly has your poor sensitive ears been offended this time?
Re: (Score:1)
Do /. editors get a paycheck? (Score:3)
Editor fail.
Re: (Score:2)
This has been an ongoing issue for years. There is not one other site out of billions on the internet with this same problem. Why does it only happen with Slashdot?
Re: (Score:1)
Yeah, don't blame an editor for this. It's a stupid-grade software bug.
If any developer in my team ever encoded a character string into bytes using one character encoding, and then decoded those bytes using a different character encoding, there would be a long and painful lecture about how this is never ever acceptable by any stretch of imagination. Not any more than encoding as xml and decoding as json. As I say, a stupid-level bug.
But on slashdot, they did it and instead of fixing it immediately and with
stage fright (Score:5, Insightful)
he just did not want to get booed off stage.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:stage fright (Score:4, Funny)
Bullshit! (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, because your average consumer can afford to spend $2k on a ticket and hundreds more on food and workshops at the conference itself.
non-essential FCC employees were furloughed (Score:2)
They started with Pai, didn't they? Few people could be less essential right now.
Re: (Score:1)
Cancel! Cancel! (Score:3)
Don't blow the plane up, the package ain't on board!
Good Lord people (Score:2)
Licensing services suspended? (Score:1)
While the agency is shut down, consumer complaints will not be heard, consumer protection enforcement actions will be ceased, and licensing services will end until new funding is approved.
So, now that enforcement, licensing, and spectrum management are shutdown.. until the FCC resumes operation... You or I could just start taking over some local cellular and FM radio broadcast frequencies that traditionally require licensing to use to transmit whatever I want, setup a 100-Watt wideband signal on the
Verizon already blocks streaming services (Score:3)