Oculus founder Palmer Luckey is developing border surveillance technology

This. I have never understood why people think that if someone has something means they don't need more of it.

Though I can't speak for Palmer Luckey's intention behind doing this.

Nah, the big 4 Australian banks all make profits in the billions:

http://www.smh.com.au/business/banking-and-finance/big-four-...

According to Luckey, they made some memes that he liked. Maybe they were not racist memes, but I do not know. Maybe Luckey did not know about some of their worse memes. Anyhow, he threw them a chunk of money. We can infer without greater evidence that Luckey is racist simply because he donated to something.

All of that said, the one and only attack on free speech is censorship. Censorship comes in many forms, including the form of shaming people. I think what the alt-right does is dumb, but at the same time, they hide in their own dark corner of the internet and I never have to interact with them so I am fine carrying about my business. Luckey donating to Nimble America had a similar lack of effect on me.

Attempt to maximize some measure of "total freedom" at the expense of some individual freedom, or just let everybody do what they want even if it harms the community?

The fact that a lot of messages aren't is maybe worth some reflection.

There is a clear difference between debating political views and witch hunting though.

People are having to write public apologies for having their own views or engaging in free speech. This is NOT ok in my opinion. People are getting fired or threatened for being Trump supporters. Also not ok IMO.

The clear difference is when it turns from political debate ("free speech") into real-world consequence.

And some things should have consequence. If a person engaged in racial discrimination in the workplace, I would totally fire them. However, if someone supported political candidate of dubious values, its a different ballgame - maybe they support that candidate for their economic policy, who knows. The crazy thing is Luckey is not even a Trump supporter, at least according to his public apology.

This word, I do not think it means what you think it means.

Nobody expects the president to be a genius military strategist, a certified priest, a renowned scientist, a master economist or whatever else. What people do expect is that he seeks out those he trusts most to offer opinions, data and interpretations of data to allow him to make informed decisions he deems best for the country.

To some extent, I think many of his whimsical views are irrelevant and are simply highlighted by media for profitability while others are perhaps overinflated relative to their original form. His actions are all that really matter and the media is covering him so studiously that if he does something truly horrid then it's unlikely to squeak by.

Having said that, there is a very serious danger that the media may have cried wolf too many times and the public may not pay as much attention if they have to cry wolf for real. They've overinflated and misrepresented many issues in every attempt to depopularize or delegitimize Trump, that they may have destroyed some of their potential as an alarm bell service.

A couple years ago if you were to put out a truly fair unbiased survey across the country which asked about the border wall or immigration from that list of countries without trying to force racial or religious interpretations, the results might be surprising in retrospect. After these things became super-topics thrust into the light of the campaign, the media machine went into full swing to convince people that everything about them was horrible.

Many people didn't even know they should have strong opinions about these and if Obama had done them (perhaps more smoothly), it might have just been another day. The trend out there is not to properly inform people on topics, but to instill anger. To some degree, Trump won on that emotional vote by using the same tactics.

What people have felt is that the government was not representing them and a candidate appeared that showed every indication of fighting an uphill battle where both parties and the media were against him. Saying a few unpopular things was not considered enough to be damning, especially when the media had thrown a lot of its credibility out by passing a certain threshold for bias which may have hurt their influence on shaping public opinion.

Now, part of what is keeping all of the controversy alive is that many people feel that Trump is being judged as guilty until proven innocent while at the same time there is parallel information (both fake news and legitimate) that offers reasonable doubt.

There was a time when news and scientific papers were trusted by default, but trust has been sacrificed for agendas and personal or corporate gain. It was never a good thing that they were trusted by default, but it was good that they were less opinion oriented. Now the burden has been placed back on the individual to do their own research, but many do not have the time or are not equipped to do research and the internet offers many counter-productive shortcuts.

I'm not a particularly politically invested person and I completely opt-out of the process. No voting, no donating, no activism, etc. It is however good to see that more people have gained interest in that process, despite how juvenile it may seem on both sides.

I don't know if any of that satisfies your curiosity, but I apologize for it being lengthy. It's easy to give in to the doomsaying that's popular right now, but I don't think Trump even measures on the chart of things to worry about over the next 100-200 years. Technically I guess that's also considered doomsaying. :) Doomed if we do, doomed if we don't.

I'm an American and maybe completely out of the loop but I never saw any news report that WMD was discovered in Iraq. I'm guessing it may have been circulated online but the news I watched never reported it from my memory.

CNN has a bunch of people they pay to come say how great Trump is. That sounds sarcastic, but they really do have several paid commentators that will work backwards and find anything to justify anything.

Today's border cameras are liable to be deployed all over in the future. Watch what you build because it's very hard to un-build things.

He's developing a technological alternative to "full-scale border walls." He also explicitly positions it as a "defense" technology to protect citizens from threats. A substantial amount of the money to be made here is made possible by anti-immigrant hysteria.

I wouldn't want any of my technology preventing people from improving their situation. So yes, in this instance, I would not work on this project.

The implication of your argument is that cameras make borders more secure and therefore it's a good idea to have them. Cameras obviously don't stop people crossing a border physically like a wall would, so the only possible way they'll improve security is by providing evidence of who crossed. Your assertion that "No one's getting deported" is obviously wrong - if that were the case there'd be no need to have the cameras in the first place.

I can deeply respect anyone who would refuse to aid the current government's immigration policies in any way, and I would refuse to do so myself.

That's not what the executive order did.

1) The desire for a "free and open" world, especially without much first-hand experience of the immediate downsides of that.

2) That technologies in this space also directly enable police-state situations, and there are reasons to believe that this is a risk in the future.

3) A privacy-driven dislike for surveillance -- sure, you know who I am when I go through passport control, but I don't want to be tracked in more detail than that.

4) Our existing border security is reasonably functional, and there are better ways to spend the time & money. (Especially as pertains the arguably excessive "border wall".)