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

[Hephaestus]

Mitch/et.al,

I don't understand the repulsion over MakerFaire accepting money from
DARPA. They're also accepting money from you, me, and tens of
thousands of people you agree with and maybe tens of thousands of
people you don't.

If your aversion is to DARPA, and thus you intend to boycott anything
which has received DARPA funding, I encourage you to consider the
scope of technology and science which was directly or indirectly
funded by those same dollars. Boycotting MakerFaire due to the
apparent destructive aim of one of its sponsors is cafeteria pacifism
at best. I could belabor the point with an unending list of technology
and products which we all use on a regular basis that originated with
war money, but any way I can find to phrase it sounds condescending
and that's not at all my intent.

This is simply a case of the government spending tax dollars to
further science and engineering education, I can't protest that. I
find it better to judge Make, and most things for that matter, based
on merit rather than fan-base.

--
Heph

On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 12:31 AM, Andy Isaacson <adi at hexapodia.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 02, 2012 at 11:34:47PM -0700, Glen Jarvis wrote:
>>    The following is an honest question (not a troll). Can you tell me what
>> DARPA does that makes their contribution to Maker Faire bad? I ask because
>> I have this naive view of DARPA from ARPANET (after sputnik was launched, a
>> research agency that brought us the internet).
>>
>>     Could you educate me on the modern evils of DARPA? I feel silly asking.
>> But, I'd rather ask and be educated than not know.
>
> This isn't exactly responsive to your question, but:
>
> http://storify.com/demilit/darpa-and-make-round-up
>
>    "MENTOR is part of DARPA’s Adaptive Vehicle Make (AVM) program, a
>    larger effort to dramatically compress development timelines for
>    future defense vehicles, shift the product value chain toward high
>    valueadded design activities and democratize the innovation process.
>    AVM seeks a “fab-less” approach to design of correct-by-construction
>    cyber-electro-mechanical systems, a foundry-style bitstream
>    programmable manufacturing capability and a crowd-sourcing
>    infrastructure for development of vehicle systems similar to
>    open-source software today."
>
> Also,
>
> http://californiawatch.org/dailyreport/pentagon-taps-students-build-robots-drones-14631
>
> -andy
> _______________________________________________
> Noisebridge-discuss mailing list
> Noisebridge-discuss at lists.noisebridge.net
> https://www.noisebridge.net/mailman/listinfo/noisebridge-discuss