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

[tedward]

Everybody do what you want, of course.  But I'm having a hard time getting
outraged about this.  If I had plans for an awesome Maker Faire booth, I
sure wouldn't cancel them because of this issue.

>From what I understand, DARPA is NOT sponsoring Maker Faire.  Rather,
O'Reilly has gotten a grant from DARPA, under the auspices of the MAKE
brand, to put CNC fabrication equipment in high schools.

Here's an excerpt from the RFP:

*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 manufacturing*...*The end
vision for MENTOR is the development of user-friendly, open-source tools to
enable the utilization of conventional social network media (e.g., Facebook
apps) for the purpose of collaborative distributed design and manufacturing
across hundreds of sites and thousands of users. This capability will be
accompanied by the deployment of an inexpensive, heterogeneous set of
digitally-programmable manufacturing equipment (e.g., 3D printers for
various materials) to 1,000 high schools globally. Prize-based design and
manufacturing challenges would then enable clusters of schools to team and
compete against one another in the development of cyber-electro-mechanical
systems of moderate complexity such as go carts, mobile robots, small
unmanned aircraft, etc*.

[source: https://www.fbo.gov/utils/view?id=b3b86a5d20625cc4a6131148caaf5df7]

Think it this way:  DARPA gets about 3.2G$ a year from congress.  A lot of
that money goes into developing technologies that are actually designed to
help the DoD kill people more efficiently.  Let's say they've awarded
O'Reilly with 1M$ to put MakerBots and laser cutters in High School.
 That's a million dollars that's *not* going to designing more effective
killing machines.  Win!

DARPA isn't doing this out of altruism, of course.  They're doing it
because they perceive that the US is losing it's capability to manufacture
things, and they want to encourage high school kits to get excited about
engineering and manufacturing.  I wish there had been a CNC machine shop in
my high school.  That would have been rad!

There probably aren't a lot of things the DoD does I can support, but this
one thing that they're funding O'Reilly to do  sounds pretty compatible
with my values (except where they suggest using Facebook as a collaboration
tool.  Fuck that).

In any case, if you care about this, I'd suggest you peruse the document
linked above.  Maybe you won't find it so objectionable either.
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