[nookiemonster]

Drama.exe

There's this thing called sequestration going on that's disrupting the budgets of all the federal agencies.

The feds are cutting budget for ridiculous things like the blue angels.

But they're totally going to be maintaining the budget for hacker cons in Las Vegas.

This is all about street cred for defcon & nothing to do with "taking a break." Jeff Moss is too sophisticated to be throwing away all those relationships. This is a stunt circle jerk.

[jff]

After the GSA stunt a few years ago, you bet conference budgets have been cut. Departments are given a set budget for each conference--if I remember right, the DOE allocates $100k max per conference. Sounds like a lot, but then you see what happened to last year's Supercomputing conference. That's a weeklong conference traditionally attended by many of the DOE's large supercomputing community. $100k does not send many people to a week-long conference. This was enough to cause very notable effects on the conference as a whole; outlets such as The Register even commented on it. I've heard rumors that some companies may not be going this year because without the DOE there, it's just not as valuable for HPC vendors.