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Comment by herewulf | Hacker News Reader

> "Many Microsoft employees don't believe that what we build should be used for waging war"

Someone is lacking in perspective. The modern US military cannot operate without Windows, SharePoint, Exchange, Internet Explorer, Office, and most importantly, PowerPoint. It's both frustrating and sad.

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The modern world is also powered by technologies invented because of various wars. Duct tape / super glue / rockets / radars which led to the microwave over / ..

Wasn't the Internet initially a distributed communication network that would still operate under nuclear attacks?

I don't think it's fair to say 'because of war'.

Many if not all of those could have been discovered in any other circumstances, or equivalents would have been found. I mean that anything we find useful now could have been discovered for their sheer usefulness. War accelerated the process, and prioritised some kind of discoveries, but it's not a source of discovery in itself.

But I think it's fair to say that our current technological progress would at least lag a couple of centuries behind without armed conflict and the resulting need to be faster/more destructive/better protected/better armed/... than your respective enemy.

I see your point, but we had tremendous progress in the last half of the 20th century that was not a consequence of direct armed conflicts.

I agree that political tension and the threat of conflict (in particular the whole Cold War dynamic) helped push a lot of innovations, but it's only tension, not bombing or killing of whole populations (it also happened, but I can't see any huge progress coming directly from that)

> Wasn't the Internet initially a distributed communication network that would still operate under nuclear attacks?

Not really. The original ARPANET [0] didn't connect military command and control systems but four different universities. However, the packet-switching concept that underlies TCP/IP was informed by purely RAND theoretical studies, conducted by Paul Baran [1], that looked at building resilient communications systems.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Baran

While you are technically correct, ARPA and RAND both being military focused research organizations, the parent comment is correct in spirit.

I don't think either of these are directly used in combat situations.

Personally I feel there's a difference between using hard/software for planning and logistics, and directly in combat - I know it might not be logical, but ethics rarely is.

It's definitely not "logical", because while a better gun can give a man advantage over another man, an army gains advantage over other armies via logistics. If you oppose the military as an instrument of violence and death, then it's important to realize that this instrument is built on JP-8 and paper forms and SharePoint, not on guns and ships.

I'm not sure how you're using the term "directly" but I can assure you that those are as necessary and utilized in combat, as hellfire missiles and 5.56 ammunition.

They are general purpose tools though, and you cannot compare them to building a killer robot.

Right, which is the point.

The Hololens and machine learning tools are also general purpose and not comparable killer robots.

I remember reading that the U.S. Army is the single largest installed base for Red Hat Linux. Guess it only covers a little part of the infrastructure.

Red Hat is pretty much the only Linux distro used in military systems. Purpose-built military information systems, like the Distributed Common Ground System (Army/Air Force) and (parts of the) SPY-1D radar system (Navy), generally use Linux for any purpose that does not require hard real-time guarantees.

Of course, they never really used Windows for this purpose at any point; Linux is gradually taking over for Solaris on operator consoles and AIX on the heavy processing machines.

This effort, especially PowerPoint, may have saved many lives by slowing everything down a bit.

To be less blase, that list is far more pencil manufacturer than it is bomb sight manufacturer, whereas holo-lens sales to the military definitely seem bit more like a bomb sight than they do a pencil.

Is it? Did you see the hololens promo of the lift engineer getting augmented reality advice to change components. The amount of deployed specialist equipment that could benefit from that is certainly more pencil than sword.

Saying that the purchase is intended to increase lethality, right at the top of the report, might make me suspect that the army aren't buying these to investigate the great strides they can accomplish in repairing municipal infrastructure.

Though it will admittedly make plenty of jobs for the people that do.

Now it makes sense why those programs can be frustrating to use and can crash often /joke

Anyway, I doubt anyone blames general purpose programs being used by the military. HoloLens is a bit more specialized so I can see the argument.

China's great firewall uses Linux, but it's not like there is an easy or reasonable way to stop them from doing that.

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