[hackerspaces] Sigh -- I'm not helping with Maker Faires this year.

[Al Jigong Billings]

I generally work on the principle of whether something causes harm and minimizing the suffering in the world. I'm not sure contributing to an arm of the DOD is really minimizing harm. 

While we all cause harm unintentionally (and occasionally intentionally), we can choose not to explicitly join ourselves to causes, organizations, etc. who will cause harm. O'Reilly Media and Make are involved with the Mentor program and getting it to fund work in high schools. The synopsis of the Mentor program is as follows:

"The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has embarked on a series of programs aimed at revolutionizing the way defense systems and vehicles are made. Titled Adaptive Vehicle Make, the portfolio has three principal objectives: to dramatically compress development times for complex defense systems such as military air and ground vehicles, to shift the product value chain for such systems toward high-value-added design activities, and to democratize the innovation process. The Manufacturing Experimentation and Outreach (MENTOR) effort is part of the Adaptive Vehicle Make program portfolio and is aimed at engaging high school students in a series of collaborative distributed manufacturing and design experiments. The overarching objective of MENTOR is to develop and motivate a next generation cadre of system designers and manufacturing innovators, and to ensure that high school-age youths are exposed to the principles of modern prize-based design and foundry-style digital ma
nufacturing."

Notice the use of the word "military" there.

Al 

-- 
Al Jigong Billings
http://www.openbuddha.com


On Tuesday, April 3, 2012 at 9:53 AM, Matt Joyce wrote:

> That's just silly. Good and evil are terms relative to a moral
> standpoint. There is no central moral authority and as such no means
> by which to gauge a decision's value on that scale.
> 
> -Matt
> 
> On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 9:51 AM, Sparr <sparr0 at gmail.com (mailto:sparr0 at gmail.com)> wrote:
> > On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 12:44 PM, Pete Prodoehl <raster at gmail.com (mailto:raster at gmail.com)> wrote:
> > > In the world of open source software, if you release something with an open
> > > license, you typically allow everyone to use it. The good guys, the bad
> > > guys, etc.
> > > 
> > 
> > 
> > https://www.google.com/search?q=jsmin+evil

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