Maybe, but I have to think that Generals tend to be in their 50s and 60s rather than late teens and early twenties. I'm only approaching 30, but I find that my body isn't quite as good at bouncing back after a bad flight or short night's sleep as it used to be. In twenty more years... I say give the guy his comfortable quarters.
The thing I *Don't* like is that they're using funds that they were explicitly forbidden to use.
I also question how much terrorism danger this country is really in if they figure the counter-terrorism funds can be better used on window dressing. That's why Congress is mad (other than because they were ignored): The military is shooting the cash cow.
Depends on whether their expertise extends beyond the word "expert" in front of their names.
The problem is that many people are introduced as experts that aren't really experts and don't have the background that the term implies. The modern media is great for implying expertise or authority on a given topic without there being any basis for it.
Example: Why interview Pat Robertson on economic issues? People who don't know who Pat Robertson is will assume he's an authority on the topic at hand. Otherwise, why would he be interviewed?
Since when is giving a poor person a job "exploitation"?
These companies are employing workforce at below minimum wage salaries. Why are they allowed to sell products in the US?
What's US minimum wage now? $5 an hour or so? Let's say so to make it easy. Let's say that UK minimum wage is 3 pounds an hour. Assume that the exchange rate is 2 dollars to the pound.
UK minimum wage = 6 US dollars US minimum wage = 2.5 UK pounds
So let's say that a UK business wants to pay a US worker 2.75 pounds per hour. That gets them MORE than US minimum wage ($5.50), and saves the UK company 0.25 pounds per hour. People working at low hourly rates love a 50 cent raise. It's a big deal for them. The UK company saves money, and may even be able to hire another body if they save enough. Should the UK company be barred from selling products in the US or UK just because they're paying less than UK minimum wage?
India could easily set a minimum wage which consulting companies would need to follow. If they set it high enough, they'd make their companies less competitive, and would wind up killing the industry. Either way, as long as the companies are paying enough by LOCAL standards, I fail to see a problem.
This is besides the fact that, if people are willing to work for a given amount, then they need the money. It's worth it to them. That's not exploitation, it's the labor market. No one is whipping them, holding a gun to their heads, or threatening their families if they don't fix your computer.
Rich people for forever have employed butlers, maids, drivers, cooks... Are they exploiting these people or giving them the means to survive? When were you ever employed by someone poorer than you?
As an (white middle-class American) IT manager who managed several outsourced Indian resources, I need to mostly agree with you. The one thing that always amazed me about them was their work ethic. Their software design skills sometimes left a lot to be desired since many were very young, but by God, if you give them something to do you could consider it done.
I think that Indian IT was a little rough when it was just getting started, but it's their most lucrative industry over there now. It's transforming their country, and attracting the best and brightest the country has to offer. The competition there is such that, if you're not in the top of your class, don't expect to get a job. The result is that even the young and inexperienced people are very sharp. Being inexperienced, they might not do things the best way, but they work hard and learn quickly. I've never seen one with a bad attitude, never seen one lose their temper, and have never had to discipline or complain about one.
Add to this the economic aspects, and in many cases, it's a no-brainer. I'm not keen on losing American jobs to Indians, but guys, the fact is that a pretty high percentage of us are high-maintenance whiners who know everything before our first day of work.
It's not business's concern to contribute to the American IT Workers' Charity. They go where they can get the best value for their dollar. You need to out-compete them with the economic odds stacked against you, which means you need to be innovative, hard-working, positive people who add value that can't be found overseas. Does that mean you need to keep your coding to your favorite FOSS app and move into things like designing solutions, creating specs, managing projects, and more high-level work? Possibly. But guys, that's what it means to compete. If your market goes away, find *or create* a new one.
Americans have always been creative and innovative (back off, haters), and I think that's a strength that we have over foreign companies. Let Indian IT firms do the grunt work -- it's their bread and butter. As the lower-end work goes overseas, it improves them. That means we need to improve ourselves and move to the next level that's still at home -- not whine about it.
This is gonna go on forever, and it can only help to spread the wealth and quality of living in the way it's supposed to be spread -- capitalism and trade, not socialism. If you're nimble and keep on improving yourself, you can always stay ahead of the curve. For those who can't, there will always be work here that can't go overseas -- government work, small business who can't afford outsourcing contracts, and people who don't want to deal with the off-hours overseas calls.
As to the topic at hand, if the local employment of X Floridians for Y years was a stipulation of the tax break, then I say fine/tax/sue the hell out of Nielsen. If FL was dumb enough not to specify, then they deserved what they got.
I don't know how this would work specifically (didn't bother to RTFA), but it seems to me that the current model of connecting to application ports is broken from a privacy perspective.
The solution is a hopefully cheaper version of setting up a vpn tunnel and using THAT to connect to the application port. That way all traffic appears to be going to the same port, regardless of service. Because it's encrypted, no DPI can be applied.
Of course, I could just go to that site's web site and see what they advertise, assuming that most people are going there for that purpose. If I'm sniffing the user's connection at their ISP, I could also see if they're connecting to 10-20 other user sites simultaneously, which would look a lot like bittorrent.
The advantage to using end-to-end encryption by default would be plausible deniability. If the site carries both legal and illegal content, then it would be difficult to prove that the user was downloading one or the other by simply inspecting their traffic patterns. Because encryption is used by default, the argument of "Why encrypt if you have nothing to hide" goes out the window.
I hope this made sense. I'm still waiting for the coffee to perk.:-)
I stand corrected. Maybe I just hoped it was true, or simply expected it to be true.
With several banks and government agencies having lost gigs of data recently, it's hard to know who to trust anymore. One would expect the people you trust with your most vital information would take the necessary care, but that obviously isn't the case.
The question is, is it more likely to happen with a mom-n-pop web host, Google, Verizon, Bank of America, or the little credit union in town? The next question is this: Are some places more liable to lose data simply because they go through the effort of off-site backups, where maybe smaller shops don't lose data because it's all on-site? (I mean "lose" in the "Where the hell did that backup tape go?" sense, not "Uh oh, we just lost our only copy.")
I have no idea how this balances out. I guess I just made my assumptions and tried to be reasonably comfortable with them. It's very hard to know who to trust to do their jobs correctly nowadays.
I thought it was the next inevitable development, but now that I think about it, I'm not sure if people want to see every wrinkle, mole, and cesarean scar.
A wise guy once said: "If it exists, there's a fetish for it."
I agree with cayenne8, but not quite for the same reason. I've been using my GMail account for a while now and loving it. There's nothing incriminating in the email, per se, but there probably would be enough to do a bang-up job of identity theft. More than the government, I'm worried about Google misplacing an unencrypted backup tape with my account on it.
The reasons I still use them are that I think the quality and utility outweigh the risk, and because my much-smaller web hosting company is more likely to do something bird-brained than Google is.
Verizon's Fios gives you a battery backup on the ONT. I don't know how long it lasts for, but I doubt there's much current draw to deplete it. That doesn't completely solve the problem, but it does mitigate the risks for relatively short power outages (less than a day or two, I'd think).
One place I worked would use names of the format "OperatingSystemDeptAbbrevRole", IE, W2KBUSFD for a w2k business office front desk system
I also think it's wise to include the production level of the machine. Going with your example, prefix with "P"(roduction), "T"(esting), or "D"(evelopment) to the front, winding up with "PW2KBUSFD", "DW2KBUSFD", and "TW2KBUSFD".
That might not directly apply in every circumstance, but it's great when you get a support call and you can immediately tell whether it's a production issue or some development box that went down.
Heh - I live in a colonial-style house in New Jersey, and the roof is pitched sufficiently that it's pretty scary to walk on. It's not bad when it's dry, but combine that with water, and it's a slip-n-slide-o-fun 30 feet off the ground.
I enjoy a good walk on the wild side as much as anyone else, but that whole falling to my death part, it's just not me. So far I've managed to avoid dying, but I'm at the point in my life where I'll leave the tempting of fate to the youngsters.
Exactly. Arms are only so long. With this, you can stand at one end and clean out the entire stretch of gutters. Think of it this way:
Assume a 40ft stretch of gutters. You might precariously have a 5.5-foot reach per trip up the ladder. Safely, and to make the math easier, figure 5 feet of gutters per trip. That means 8 trips up the ladder per side of the house. 16 trips at two stories per climb is 32 stories -- the equivalent of a moderately-sized skyscraper.
Besides, with less reaching and climbing, it's a hell of a lot safer.
It's more a matter of strategy. Many companies who chase the short-term pay-off do so at the expense of strategic goals that would pay off down the line, but cost them in the short term.
MS always seemed to have a strategy of some form in the past, and it's obviously paid off. The question is whether they'll continue to do so under new leadership, or whether they'll start chasing the quick buck over the sustainability of the revenue stream. This is the idea behind their XBox line, for instance. It's a loser now, but they're hoping to make it pay off. That's strategic. Cutting that off would pay in short term savings, but give them less diversity and cut off a potential revenue stream. (Just an example - don't be too harsh.)
Most companies have room to do both, but it's a balancing act. Moreso, it becomes a matter of corporate culture. If the quick buck becomes the gold standard, the company work ethic suffers. That's when companies really start to slide.
I never claimed he was the first. The point was that these were found *quicker* than if it was solely up to the original authors to find the bugs. "Quicker" is a relative term compared to the alternative. It doesn't mean "first", and it doesn't mean "quick".
That's a good point. I don't claim to be sure of anything except that, had the source not been available, those bugs would probably still exist.
In other words, the lifetime of the bugs is substantially decreased. In closed-source apps, less people can audit it, which necessarily means that there's a smaller pool of nice, cooperative people to find the bug.
The people with a financial incentive will still find exploits like they always do -- open or closed.
I didn't say anything about Microsoft. Obviously there are, but the source is much more difficult to obtain. If the source can't be obtained, auditors must use more difficult types of testing, or just hope that the vendor did their job correctly.
My only point was that Apple would have a much more difficult time auditing, say, Office for Mac, than they would with Ruby due to the requirement for source code agreements or using more arcane methods like blackbox testing or disassembly. The same applies to Photoshop, Flash, or any other 3rd party closed-source app.
The victory here is that Ruby was improved by a 3rd party who had ready access to the source. When the source is available, this will happen much more often than when it's not.
How did open source fail? Someone who wasn't the original author had access to the code and found the bugs. How quickly it's found is a function of how many qualified people are looking at the code. I didn't RTFA, but presumably Drew Yao, a member of the security team, was security auditing the code. This activity would have been much harder to impossible with closed source code.
I'm in the process of being laid off, so I've got some time on my hands.:-) Also, I don't re-read during a reading. I'd rather read the book and then go back and re-read the earlier parts that played into the ending once I know how it fits together.
Sounds like something Ayn Rand would know something about.
I actually went and read Atlas Shrugged last week simply because I've seen it brought up on/. so often -- usually in derogatory terms by people saying things I don't agree with. Given the consistency of those circumstances, I knew it must be a decent read. I wasn't disappointed.
For those that haven't read it, it's basically a 1,000 page fictional book about the interaction of corporation and government, and the socio-economic impact of those interactions. If you're pissed off about this FISA bill and similar paid-for legislation, I'd recommend the book.
This is the opposite of free market. It's companies with good lobbyists using the government as a shield and a weapon.
I don't know about that. Take the most destructive weapon invented so far, the nuclear bomb.
Were the people who invented it evil? As it turns out, Germany wasn't too terribly far from inventing it themselves. Had we not made it first, what would have been the consequences? How many more people would have died when the German army used their own bomb and won the war?
Wars happen, and you want to be on the winning side of them when they do. When your country is ill-equipped to repel invaders, or can't adequately defend allies, all the feel-good "I don't like guns" rhetoric in the world isn't going to stop that army from steamrolling your house.
Unfortunately, when you do work for hire, you don't get to choose the employers' use of the gadget they paid for.
Not to mention the fact that most science, or rather information gleaned from science, can be used to make weapons or otherwise more effectively kill people. Perhaps most science is evil because scientists can't stipulate how the information can be used?
Simple example: Science tells us that the heart is in the upper left quadrant of the chest. This information can be used to guide an attacker to the most effective place to stab someone. Was that the anatomist's intention when he first opened up a human body to learn its parts? Probably not, but he doesn't get to choose. Therefore, anatomy is evil.
Perhaps the botanist, when he documented that a certain flower is poisonous to eat, never intended it to be formulated into a concentrated, potent poison, but there it is. Therefore, botany is evil.
Scientists, you're all working for the destruction of the human race!
Is that the logic? Or maybe science and technology really are neutral, and it's humans who are evil, corrupt beings who misuse tools and information?
Weapons are no different. In the hands of a nation that is typically defensive, their uses will be typically defensive, even if the particular battle situation is offensive. Yes, even if their primary purpose is to kill people. The question is: Which people, and why? Those are questions of politics, not technology.
You must also consider the deterrent effect of advanced weaponry. Why does no one openly attack the US? Because we've got a strong military. If we didn't, would we have had so few conflicts on US soil? Would Mexico or Canada (eh?) have invaded? As it is, no one dares because we have advanced weaponry.
Even if your weapon is used in a defensive mode? Remember that battles -- even attacks -- can be defensive in nature.
Recent events have people strictly thinking of the military as a vehicle of attack, but it's also a defensive organization. Without it, we'd have people flowing across our borders uncontrolled to take jobs mowing lawns, working in construction crews, forming violent gangs in Los Angeles...
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe, but I have to think that Generals tend to be in their 50s and 60s rather than late teens and early twenties. I'm only approaching 30, but I find that my body isn't quite as good at bouncing back after a bad flight or short night's sleep as it used to be. In twenty more years... I say give the guy his comfortable quarters.
The thing I *Don't* like is that they're using funds that they were explicitly forbidden to use.
I also question how much terrorism danger this country is really in if they figure the counter-terrorism funds can be better used on window dressing. That's why Congress is mad (other than because they were ignored): The military is shooting the cash cow.
Depends on whether their expertise extends beyond the word "expert" in front of their names.
The problem is that many people are introduced as experts that aren't really experts and don't have the background that the term implies. The modern media is great for implying expertise or authority on a given topic without there being any basis for it.
Example: Why interview Pat Robertson on economic issues? People who don't know who Pat Robertson is will assume he's an authority on the topic at hand. Otherwise, why would he be interviewed?
Since when is giving a poor person a job "exploitation"?
What's US minimum wage now? $5 an hour or so? Let's say so to make it easy. Let's say that UK minimum wage is 3 pounds an hour. Assume that the exchange rate is 2 dollars to the pound.
UK minimum wage = 6 US dollars
US minimum wage = 2.5 UK pounds
So let's say that a UK business wants to pay a US worker 2.75 pounds per hour. That gets them MORE than US minimum wage ($5.50), and saves the UK company 0.25 pounds per hour. People working at low hourly rates love a 50 cent raise. It's a big deal for them. The UK company saves money, and may even be able to hire another body if they save enough. Should the UK company be barred from selling products in the US or UK just because they're paying less than UK minimum wage?
India could easily set a minimum wage which consulting companies would need to follow. If they set it high enough, they'd make their companies less competitive, and would wind up killing the industry. Either way, as long as the companies are paying enough by LOCAL standards, I fail to see a problem.
This is besides the fact that, if people are willing to work for a given amount, then they need the money. It's worth it to them. That's not exploitation, it's the labor market. No one is whipping them, holding a gun to their heads, or threatening their families if they don't fix your computer.
Rich people for forever have employed butlers, maids, drivers, cooks... Are they exploiting these people or giving them the means to survive? When were you ever employed by someone poorer than you?
As an (white middle-class American) IT manager who managed several outsourced Indian resources, I need to mostly agree with you. The one thing that always amazed me about them was their work ethic. Their software design skills sometimes left a lot to be desired since many were very young, but by God, if you give them something to do you could consider it done.
I think that Indian IT was a little rough when it was just getting started, but it's their most lucrative industry over there now. It's transforming their country, and attracting the best and brightest the country has to offer. The competition there is such that, if you're not in the top of your class, don't expect to get a job. The result is that even the young and inexperienced people are very sharp. Being inexperienced, they might not do things the best way, but they work hard and learn quickly. I've never seen one with a bad attitude, never seen one lose their temper, and have never had to discipline or complain about one.
Add to this the economic aspects, and in many cases, it's a no-brainer. I'm not keen on losing American jobs to Indians, but guys, the fact is that a pretty high percentage of us are high-maintenance whiners who know everything before our first day of work.
It's not business's concern to contribute to the American IT Workers' Charity. They go where they can get the best value for their dollar. You need to out-compete them with the economic odds stacked against you, which means you need to be innovative, hard-working, positive people who add value that can't be found overseas. Does that mean you need to keep your coding to your favorite FOSS app and move into things like designing solutions, creating specs, managing projects, and more high-level work? Possibly. But guys, that's what it means to compete. If your market goes away, find *or create* a new one.
Americans have always been creative and innovative (back off, haters), and I think that's a strength that we have over foreign companies. Let Indian IT firms do the grunt work -- it's their bread and butter. As the lower-end work goes overseas, it improves them. That means we need to improve ourselves and move to the next level that's still at home -- not whine about it.
This is gonna go on forever, and it can only help to spread the wealth and quality of living in the way it's supposed to be spread -- capitalism and trade, not socialism. If you're nimble and keep on improving yourself, you can always stay ahead of the curve. For those who can't, there will always be work here that can't go overseas -- government work, small business who can't afford outsourcing contracts, and people who don't want to deal with the off-hours overseas calls.
As to the topic at hand, if the local employment of X Floridians for Y years was a stipulation of the tax break, then I say fine/tax/sue the hell out of Nielsen. If FL was dumb enough not to specify, then they deserved what they got.
I don't know how this would work specifically (didn't bother to RTFA), but it seems to me that the current model of connecting to application ports is broken from a privacy perspective.
The solution is a hopefully cheaper version of setting up a vpn tunnel and using THAT to connect to the application port. That way all traffic appears to be going to the same port, regardless of service. Because it's encrypted, no DPI can be applied.
Of course, I could just go to that site's web site and see what they advertise, assuming that most people are going there for that purpose. If I'm sniffing the user's connection at their ISP, I could also see if they're connecting to 10-20 other user sites simultaneously, which would look a lot like bittorrent.
The advantage to using end-to-end encryption by default would be plausible deniability. If the site carries both legal and illegal content, then it would be difficult to prove that the user was downloading one or the other by simply inspecting their traffic patterns. Because encryption is used by default, the argument of "Why encrypt if you have nothing to hide" goes out the window.
I hope this made sense. I'm still waiting for the coffee to perk. :-)
I stand corrected. Maybe I just hoped it was true, or simply expected it to be true.
With several banks and government agencies having lost gigs of data recently, it's hard to know who to trust anymore. One would expect the people you trust with your most vital information would take the necessary care, but that obviously isn't the case.
The question is, is it more likely to happen with a mom-n-pop web host, Google, Verizon, Bank of America, or the little credit union in town? The next question is this: Are some places more liable to lose data simply because they go through the effort of off-site backups, where maybe smaller shops don't lose data because it's all on-site? (I mean "lose" in the "Where the hell did that backup tape go?" sense, not "Uh oh, we just lost our only copy.")
I have no idea how this balances out. I guess I just made my assumptions and tried to be reasonably comfortable with them. It's very hard to know who to trust to do their jobs correctly nowadays.
A wise guy once said: "If it exists, there's a fetish for it."
I agree with cayenne8, but not quite for the same reason. I've been using my GMail account for a while now and loving it. There's nothing incriminating in the email, per se, but there probably would be enough to do a bang-up job of identity theft. More than the government, I'm worried about Google misplacing an unencrypted backup tape with my account on it.
The reasons I still use them are that I think the quality and utility outweigh the risk, and because my much-smaller web hosting company is more likely to do something bird-brained than Google is.
Verizon's Fios gives you a battery backup on the ONT. I don't know how long it lasts for, but I doubt there's much current draw to deplete it. That doesn't completely solve the problem, but it does mitigate the risks for relatively short power outages (less than a day or two, I'd think).
I also think it's wise to include the production level of the machine. Going with your example, prefix with "P"(roduction), "T"(esting), or "D"(evelopment) to the front, winding up with "PW2KBUSFD", "DW2KBUSFD", and "TW2KBUSFD".
That might not directly apply in every circumstance, but it's great when you get a support call and you can immediately tell whether it's a production issue or some development box that went down.
Heh - I live in a colonial-style house in New Jersey, and the roof is pitched sufficiently that it's pretty scary to walk on. It's not bad when it's dry, but combine that with water, and it's a slip-n-slide-o-fun 30 feet off the ground.
I enjoy a good walk on the wild side as much as anyone else, but that whole falling to my death part, it's just not me. So far I've managed to avoid dying, but I'm at the point in my life where I'll leave the tempting of fate to the youngsters.
Exactly. Arms are only so long. With this, you can stand at one end and clean out the entire stretch of gutters. Think of it this way:
Assume a 40ft stretch of gutters. You might precariously have a 5.5-foot reach per trip up the ladder. Safely, and to make the math easier, figure 5 feet of gutters per trip. That means 8 trips up the ladder per side of the house. 16 trips at two stories per climb is 32 stories -- the equivalent of a moderately-sized skyscraper.
Besides, with less reaching and climbing, it's a hell of a lot safer.
It's more a matter of strategy. Many companies who chase the short-term pay-off do so at the expense of strategic goals that would pay off down the line, but cost them in the short term.
MS always seemed to have a strategy of some form in the past, and it's obviously paid off. The question is whether they'll continue to do so under new leadership, or whether they'll start chasing the quick buck over the sustainability of the revenue stream. This is the idea behind their XBox line, for instance. It's a loser now, but they're hoping to make it pay off. That's strategic. Cutting that off would pay in short term savings, but give them less diversity and cut off a potential revenue stream. (Just an example - don't be too harsh.)
Most companies have room to do both, but it's a balancing act. Moreso, it becomes a matter of corporate culture. If the quick buck becomes the gold standard, the company work ethic suffers. That's when companies really start to slide.
I never claimed he was the first. The point was that these were found *quicker* than if it was solely up to the original authors to find the bugs. "Quicker" is a relative term compared to the alternative. It doesn't mean "first", and it doesn't mean "quick".
That's a good point. I don't claim to be sure of anything except that, had the source not been available, those bugs would probably still exist.
In other words, the lifetime of the bugs is substantially decreased. In closed-source apps, less people can audit it, which necessarily means that there's a smaller pool of nice, cooperative people to find the bug.
The people with a financial incentive will still find exploits like they always do -- open or closed.
I didn't say anything about Microsoft. Obviously there are, but the source is much more difficult to obtain. If the source can't be obtained, auditors must use more difficult types of testing, or just hope that the vendor did their job correctly.
My only point was that Apple would have a much more difficult time auditing, say, Office for Mac, than they would with Ruby due to the requirement for source code agreements or using more arcane methods like blackbox testing or disassembly. The same applies to Photoshop, Flash, or any other 3rd party closed-source app.
The victory here is that Ruby was improved by a 3rd party who had ready access to the source. When the source is available, this will happen much more often than when it's not.
How did open source fail? Someone who wasn't the original author had access to the code and found the bugs. How quickly it's found is a function of how many qualified people are looking at the code. I didn't RTFA, but presumably Drew Yao, a member of the security team, was security auditing the code. This activity would have been much harder to impossible with closed source code.
I'd say the system worked as advertised here.
I'm in the process of being laid off, so I've got some time on my hands. :-) Also, I don't re-read during a reading. I'd rather read the book and then go back and re-read the earlier parts that played into the ending once I know how it fits together.
Sounds like something Ayn Rand would know something about.
I actually went and read Atlas Shrugged last week simply because I've seen it brought up on /. so often -- usually in derogatory terms by people saying things I don't agree with. Given the consistency of those circumstances, I knew it must be a decent read. I wasn't disappointed.
For those that haven't read it, it's basically a 1,000 page fictional book about the interaction of corporation and government, and the socio-economic impact of those interactions. If you're pissed off about this FISA bill and similar paid-for legislation, I'd recommend the book.
This is the opposite of free market. It's companies with good lobbyists using the government as a shield and a weapon.
I don't know about that. Take the most destructive weapon invented so far, the nuclear bomb.
Were the people who invented it evil? As it turns out, Germany wasn't too terribly far from inventing it themselves. Had we not made it first, what would have been the consequences? How many more people would have died when the German army used their own bomb and won the war?
Wars happen, and you want to be on the winning side of them when they do. When your country is ill-equipped to repel invaders, or can't adequately defend allies, all the feel-good "I don't like guns" rhetoric in the world isn't going to stop that army from steamrolling your house.
Why? Your statement is nothing but accusation based on hyperbole. It says and proves nothing.
Unfortunately, when you do work for hire, you don't get to choose the employers' use of the gadget they paid for.
Not to mention the fact that most science, or rather information gleaned from science, can be used to make weapons or otherwise more effectively kill people. Perhaps most science is evil because scientists can't stipulate how the information can be used?
Simple example: Science tells us that the heart is in the upper left quadrant of the chest. This information can be used to guide an attacker to the most effective place to stab someone. Was that the anatomist's intention when he first opened up a human body to learn its parts? Probably not, but he doesn't get to choose. Therefore, anatomy is evil.
Perhaps the botanist, when he documented that a certain flower is poisonous to eat, never intended it to be formulated into a concentrated, potent poison, but there it is. Therefore, botany is evil.
Scientists, you're all working for the destruction of the human race!
Is that the logic? Or maybe science and technology really are neutral, and it's humans who are evil, corrupt beings who misuse tools and information?
Weapons are no different. In the hands of a nation that is typically defensive, their uses will be typically defensive, even if the particular battle situation is offensive. Yes, even if their primary purpose is to kill people. The question is: Which people, and why? Those are questions of politics, not technology.
You must also consider the deterrent effect of advanced weaponry. Why does no one openly attack the US? Because we've got a strong military. If we didn't, would we have had so few conflicts on US soil? Would Mexico or Canada (eh?) have invaded? As it is, no one dares because we have advanced weaponry.
And what does that prove?
Try being nice to them and treating them as equals. They hate that.
Even if your weapon is used in a defensive mode? Remember that battles -- even attacks -- can be defensive in nature.
Recent events have people strictly thinking of the military as a vehicle of attack, but it's also a defensive organization. Without it, we'd have people flowing across our borders uncontrolled to take jobs mowing lawns, working in construction crews, forming violent gangs in Los Angeles...