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El Reg reports
The Internet Engineering Task Force has taken the rare (and possibly costly) decision to relocate an upcoming meeting out of America.
IETF 102, scheduled for mid-2018, was booked for the San Francisco Hilton, but instead will be held in the Fairmont Hotel in Montreal.
The reason, as announced by IETF Administrative Oversight Committee (IAOC) chair Leslie Daigle, is the President Donald Trump administration: American travel restrictions make attendance uncertain.
[...] travel restrictions have been bounced around between the US legal system and the White House, and the Oversight Committee hasn't seen anything to reduce that uncertainty.
[...] it is impossible to know or predict the extent of the restrictions placed on individuals attempting to attend IETF 102 twelve months from now, or the level of uncertainty that will exist, and the impact that will have on the ability for the IETF to hold a successful meeting in the United States at that time. However, the current orientation and actions of the US government provide no basis for expecting conditions at the US border to improve for non-citizens.
[...] if the IETF cannot stage something in San Francisco, it will likely lose any deposit paid to the venue.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Monday July 17 2017, @03:41PM (5 children)
Bzzzt, wrong. The first travel did affect educated, accomplished people with lives and careers in first world countries who just happen to have been born in (or have dual citizenship of) the banned nations. OK, the revised ban eased off on dual nationals, but the fact remains that this haphazardly-introduced and heavily contested travel ban is clouded with chaos and uncertainty. If I was organising an event that involved large numbers of people from all over the world converging on a single place, I think removing the USA from my planning would simply mean one less headache.
Furthermore, if there is anyone in Somalia or Yemen or wherever trying to practise innovative engineering despite the local situation then the world needs to be supporting them, not turning their backs. Maybe there's a Syrian engineer-entrepreneur who needs to hook up with international colleagues to put the finishing touches to an awesome new water-purifier that will save thousands of lives. Could be there's a Sudanese genius looking for help getting a new anti-mosquito technology off the ground, to help protect war-refugees from malaria. These are countries with a great many problems in need of solutions. Engineering provides solutions, whereas travel bans impede them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 17 2017, @05:36PM (3 children)
Compared to the population norms, terrorists are unusually likely to be engineers and engineers are unusually likely to be terrorists.
I doubt we can say for sure why. The obvious guess is that it has something to do with a rigid belief in the "right way". Maybe it is just that engineers can get shit done. Here in the USA, engineers are far more conservative and creationist than scientists are.
People with lives and careers in first-world nations are in fact more dangerous. They understand our weak points. They know how to blend in and generally navigate our society. They don't hate us any less. If anything, the direct exposure to us just makes our supposedly immoral society harder to ignore.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 17 2017, @06:28PM (2 children)
Citation needed
in the USA, engineers are far more conservative and creationist than scientists are
Citation needed
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 17 2017, @11:55PM (1 child)
http://thefederalist.com/2015/06/02/the-liberal-arts-are-dead-long-live-stem/ [thefederalist.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 18 2017, @03:44AM
That's actually not new.
Decades ago, I saw a bunch of those folks in my curriculum.
They had managed to make it into the program but couldn't complete the coursework and never got the sheepskin.
...and most of them had never tinkered with anything in their lives--beyond twisting a knob on a TV.
They weren't there because they had an aptitude or an interest in tech, they'd heard that tech was lucrative.
Heh. My freshman year, we had a guy in the class who all the instructors already knew.
It was his 3rd try at getting through the first years' coursework.
(He didn't make it that time either.)
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 18 2017, @02:04AM
Travelling to the US was already a headache before Trump's Muslim bans. Remember Dmitry Sklyarov [archive.org]?