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Mitch Altman Parts Ways With Maker Fair Over DARPA Grant
SWroclawski writes "Well known hacker and hackerspace advocate Mitch Altman has decided to temporarily part ways with Maker Faire over their involvement with DARPA (as reported on Twitter and Facebook). This public parting of ways raises the question of what role government, especially the military, should play in working alongside hackers and educators."
That's the problem with most activists. They're all for freedom, just as long as people only use that freedom to agree with them. He wants Maker Faire to accept sponsors, of course, but only those that fit into *his* ideals.
And I bet this guy would go ballistic if someone dared try to tell him what he can and can't build or invent. But now that he's confronted with the possibility of people using *their* freedom to build stuff that *he* doesn't like (for a sponsor that doesn't fit in with *his* vision), suddenly he wants to take his ball and go home.
Also, last time I checked, Maker Faire wasn't forcing anyone to build anything. If you don't want to build stuff with military applications, then you know what--JUST DON'T!
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
The internet was originally called ARPANET! Arpa was the precursor to Darpa. With out government backing the internet would not exist as we know it!
Move on Nothing to see here!
They should take their self righteous ass off of the the Internet too. Darpa has funded many, many things that have gone on to serve the public good.
"This public parting of ways raises the question of what role government, especially the military, should play in working alongside hackers and educators"
Not a particularly good question, however. The government should play whatever role it can, so long as it's not a hindrance. After all, without DARPA where would we be today?
Or to put it another way, instead of being self-righteous about DARPA, maybe he should be glad they're joining up with hackers instead of finding new ways to kill impoverished people in 3rd world nations?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
What do you think DARPA is interested in all this stuff for? Shits and giggles?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
And in a move of supreme irony, he is glady leaving to support Chinese Hackerspaces:
Here's a clue, kiddo - try to find anything of significance in China that doesnt have involvement from the People's Liberation Army. But you got no problem supporting that?
Please by all means boycott all civilian technology every developed out of the military such as THE INTERNET.
Seriously, if anything they should have been more cooperative and helpful. DARPA has all the cool toys. Not to mention they can help you do cool things you cant do otherwise. Rockets, lasers, etc.
And if it doesn't work out, hey, you're in. You now are in a position to affect change and make it run your way, or do max damage (if you so choose).
From what I gather, it was one of those generic DARPA "We want to encourage the engineers of the future!" grants that they hand out for PR more than anything.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
If the DARPA involvement is just to encourage cleverness and the sciences, I don't think he has a leg to stand on (or his principles are WAY different than mine), but if DARPA is having the kids build specific technologies being used for military applications, it might be worth parting ways over it.
At best they want to encourage science education so that maybe they'll have more scientists to choose from to build the weapons of tomorrow. At worst they're staging robotics competitions with obvious and only thinly-veiled combat applications. If you watch videos of these things it's not too unusual to see military brass walking among the competitors in full dress uniform, so the competitors obviously don't give a shit what they're contributing to.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Government Bad... Private Enterprise Good....
Its maybe time to put the failed beliefs aside. Private Enterprise has dug us all into a very neat hole, and separating it from Government is probably one of the few answers that holds any hope of saving this smoking hole that is the remains of our economy. On the other hand DARPA is one of the few things our government has gotten right. The list of truly cool things that DARPA has invested in is nothing less than impressive. We all enjoy the benefits of those things brought into existence as a function of DARPA investments.
Let's say DARPA invests in perfecting the Hammer, because a hammer can bang your enemy up real good. By the way those hammers are great at building houses, mining mineral, shaping metal and forgings, wood working, and sculpting artwork. So that one investment has huge social implications and tremendous collateral value. I worked with a company in 1997, that was lead by a small team of engineers fresh out of MIT. They had developed a processor with a hundred processing units on a three level network, which could be reconfigured to perform a vast variety of task (our use at the time however was signal processing, many simultaneous signal processors and CPUs existing in software operating on a single chip.) DARPA invested several million to help get the technology off the ground, and ultimately Broadcom bought the technology (Cisco had their fingers in it too.) Today's VOIP takeover is the result of that technology, and it would never have happened without DARPA seeing that this made many new interesting things possible (including a single chip synthetic aperture processor for high resolution imaging from directed radar emissions.)
I don't know if there is a Karmic debt for taking money from warriors. I'd prefer to look at the fruit the tree bears and judge it from what it contributes. In this case, DARPA has served us well, and is one of the few government organizations that I would welcome to any group of creators and inventors. This is a fine use of our tax dollars and is one area where government serves us well.
It's DARPA, quite probably the one sub-branch of the US military which has actually improved the human condition. I could list all the research that DARPA has supported over the years, but I suspect I'd be wasting my breath (or fingers as the case may be).
I think a lot of people see it as misplaced self righteousness, maybe?
I'm reminded of a story in recent years about a family who was trying to live some sort of "sustainable" lifestyle or something, and they were all smug about it. They only bought locally grown food and rode bikes and the usual stuff. Meanwhile, they live in a nice home in a major city, and the parents were well paid professionals. The only reason their little experiment works is because everyone *else* is still doing the regular things in the regular manner. The family is riding on the back of a massive support system and claiming to be independent and self sustaining. Not a good analogy, but there it is.
1. electricity becomes widespread, generators invented, hydropower, lights, medical devices, car batteries, etc.
1.a. governments immediately use electricity to torture and execute prisoners, employ it in the holocaust, etc.
2. nuclear physics pushes back our understanding of reality, and discovering that E=>mc*c
2.a. governments immediately use nuclear weapons to murder hundreds of thousands of civilians, cause countless cases of cancer, and start an arms race that , on several occasions, comes within a few hours of having a mass casualty nuclear war that would have been worse than the black plague, aids, the holocaust, the holodomor, and the gulags all combined together.
3. rocketry is invented, promising mankind freedom from the bounds of land or sea travel
3.a. governments immediately use it to murder civilians
4. biomedical knowledge grows by leaps and bounds, with the discovery of ways to detect and manipulate viruses, microbes, etc
4.a. governments immediately use this to set up things like Sigmund Rascher's research lab in Dachau, or Unit 731 in Japan.
5. Scientists like Einstein, Sakharov, and Sagan push for human rights work and plea that the world not blow itself up.
5.a. they are almost completely ignored and called 'fantasticals' for daring to oppose violence and militarism.
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6. someone has the audacity to propose that maybe the hacker community should avoid military funding
6.a. somebody on slashdot calls this person 'anti freedom'.