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Comment by undoware | Hacker News Reader

Great -- now the fragment of code I wrote for the kernel make s me potentially party to killing.

The long-term ethics of producing open source are fascinating -- you know we're all pretty gross if the NRA is wrong, don't you? About X not killing people, people killing people. 'Cause we brought a whole lot of X, and gave it away, puffed with pride, to people who can name something a 'dreadnought' without it being weird.

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By that measure, one might be complicit in a bombing strike if the aluminum cans they recycle are used to build aircraft, missiles, or other weapons (, much like your code was recycled by the navy contractors).

If we live in a society where any measure of cooperation with others is subject to such a high level of scrutiny, we are all guilty of every moral indiscretion committed by anyone. Individual responsibility is almost a requirement for the complex and interdependent world in which we exist.

Not to mention that if you pay taxes to a government that has a military presence anywhere you're much more directly supporting killing, if you want to look at it that way.

You really should look at it that way. The armed forces are directly representing your democratically expressed will. We should feel responsible, because we are. If the government is not interpreting our will accurately, we need to change the representatives.

But isn't it? Which of the last wars was opposed by the majority of Americans?

The war where we blow up wedding parties full of children. I doubt there is popular support for that. We are responsible for every action, however popular the overall war.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wech_Baghtu_wedding_party_airst...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deh_Bala_wedding_party_airstrik...

But taxes aren't optional. You can't just choose opt out of them because you don't agree with what the money's being spent on. You might as well say you're complicit just by having being born in a country with a military.

DoD employee here - maybe it's just me assuaging my conscience, but I always like to think that in the case of working on software for weapons systems, I've merely helped make them more accurate - I have absolutely no control over what they are aimed at, and that's a bigger problem than I can solve. To put it more succinctly: all Americans are responsible for the leaders they elect, and what they do.

These days, I'm fortunate enough to work on training sims for demining. I'd have to recommend that if you are really concerned about being a potential party to killing, don't worry about it - until you vote. Or maybe even write a letter or do some activism. But the last thing you should do is cripple the tools you make for others to use in some sort of ignoble bid to be moral. That's not moral, it's unprofessional.

As someone who has done DOD work (though not on anything "pointy") I've never felt the need to justify myself in this way. Throughout history, countries have lived and died by the strength of their military.[1] America's global supremacy would not be possible without its military domination, and our standard of living would not be possible if we had to worry about falling under some other power's thumb. Also, while we're at it, we subsidize defense for nearly all the liberal democracies in the world. I feel quite positively about my contributions to all these things.

[1] The study of history is, to a first approximation, the study of war. I am not conceited enough to believe that my generation is the first one that is living outside of history.

Exactly. I worked at a defense contractor for a long time, on language training software. I've never felt the need to defend myself despite having a strong antiwar stance.

We need a strong military - we just need to stop going to war at the drop of a hat.

> But the last thing you should do is cripple the tools you make for others to use in some sort of ignoble bid to be moral. That's not moral, it's unprofessional.

I could just stop making tools.

I don't think I'm okay with making wars a clean, professional thing. It should be brutal and bloody and messy at every stage, so we can't isolate ourselves from what we're doing.

If you're making weapon systems and going "Well, I'm not responsible, I just helped make a technology" and the guy firing them is saying "Well, I'm just following orders and pressing some buttons, I'm not really killing them" and the guy in charge is saying "I'm just implementing what the politicians/people want" (depending on how high up the command), who exactly is left actually carrying the price of it?

No, I think I should do everything I can to make sure that we are forced to viscerally feel the terribleness of war when we decide to wage it - not pretend it's a video game.

>It should be brutal and bloody and messy at every stage, so we can't isolate ourselves from what we're doing.

If you believe that carnality would put a stop to warfare, I think the last couple thousand years of it might disagree with you.

Granted, the sight of carnage can turn the tide of public opinion against a war... that's been the case since World War 1 put an end to the idea of war as a noble game where boys became men. But it's not going to stop wars from being waged, just make the politics of managing them more difficult, and make it more torturous for the soldiers doing the killing. The generals probably aren't going to lose a night of sleep even if people have to hack away at each other with machetes.

I disagree - I think making people more connected to it raises the cost of war for the people who tend to cause them, because of the political capital they have to expend on managing people who can see just how brutal it is, who have friends and relatives who are maimed or don't come home, etc.

My goal it's to End All Wars Forever! (TM), it's to raise the cost of waging wars for a society, so it's something we do less casually.

media also has a hand in sanitizing war. they censor the images so stacks of mangled corpses arent stuck in your head when they should be. unbelievably my fearless leader uses a WWI memorial that reads "never again" to promote new wars every year.

On the other hand, we have twitter, and youtube, and stories do tend to get around the media more often than, perhaps, they would have in Vietnam or even the first Iraq war.

The container design is heavily inspired from Google's Datacenters. This will continue happening and cannot be prevented, even a new license for the Kernel prohibiting a military use won't help. Because they can fork an "old kernel" and continue their secret development on it. It's better to know what the government is doing rather than just trusting on a "license". We've been shown often enough in the past and present that people can't blindly trust a Government's actions and ethics.

Do the containers shield against strong EM fields? Otherwise an enemy could detonate a mini em-/atom-bomb close to the target, in order to destroy their operative computer systems. Is that the reason for the heavy metal casing? In that case they probably also used Fiber cables with the lastest known modulation techniques to get (n-)Terabit/s per container. Maybe they even have radiation shielding [1] to protect from inner and outer radiation. This beast doesn't look like it solely runs on diesel, but on an atom-reactor.

I doubt she has a nuclear plant, actually; there's a Raytheon paper [1] which spends some time talking about the need for fuel efficiency to maximize operational availability, which isn't often a concern for nuclear-powered ships whose rate of fuel "burn" is constant and whose refueling intervals are best measured in years.

[1] https://www.navalengineers.org/SiteCollectionDocuments/2010%...

2 Rolls-Royce Marine Trent-30 gas turbines driving Curtiss-Wright generators[5] and emergency diesel generators, 78 MW (105,000 shp); 2 propellers driven by electric motors

shitty citation - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zumwalt-class_destroyer

Everything in the U.S. fleet except the large aircraft carriers and the submarines burns crappy low-grade diesel fuel. For the submarines, there are major advantages to not having oxygen-requiring engines, and for the aircraft carriers, they want to carry a lot of fuel for aircraft, not themselves. On the other hand nuclear reactors are too expensive to merit putting in ships which don't require them.

That is part of it. The other part is that for smaller ships, you end up having over half the ship manned by sailors who can handle the engine room and reactor. The Navy has enough trouble finding and keeping sailors for their nuclear power program, so they tend to restrict how they use them, otherwise they might end up in the unfortunate situation of needing to allow less qualified candidates through nuclear power school just to keep the fleet running.

Err, any nuclear attack be it "mini" or regular is provocation to nuclear war. The US won't sit back and watch the Chinese blast our navy to bits with airburst nuclear weapons causing EMP. More than likely the US would strike back with nukes.

You don't get to avoid the whole balance of power/MAD card because your nukes were used for EMP only.

> You don't get to avoid the whole balance of power/MAD card because your nukes were used for EMP only.

[citation needed]

Well, for USA there are only two possible kinds of war opponents - guerilla warfare or countries that have also nukes; and you're not that likely to use ships like the one described for Afganistan. The only combat use for the ship is against nuke-capable opponents, and MAD is not an excuse to build military systems that won't function in any serious war with the intended enemies.

Can't you weaponize non-nuclear EMP?

"Do the containers shield against strong EM fields?"

from article: Each EME has its own shock and vibration damping, power protection, water cooling systems, and electromagnetic shielding to prevent interference from the ship's radar and other big radio frequency emitters.

I would imagine that would include EMP given the modern threats and US Navy's general understatement of capabilities.

Straight from the article:

"Each EME has its own shock and vibration damping, power protection, water cooling systems, and electromagnetic shielding to prevent interference from the ship's radar and other big radio frequency emitters."

The military is no stranger to EM hardening their systems. They've been doing it since the cold war after all.

"It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter. " -- Nathaniel Borenstein

That is a horrible approach to take. Eventually you will end up with a DestroyCity, DestroyBuilding, DestroyBridge, ETC procedures. You should create a simple Destroy procedure that can take any valid target.

> Great -- now the fragment of code I wrote for the kernel makes me potentially party to killing.

In much the same way that the food one grew might make one party to killing, should it nourish a killer, sure. But that's a bit of a dorm-room realisation: nothing any of us does can be wholly good or wholly evil; rather, we must each strive to do the most good and the least evil within our ability.

> you know we're all pretty gross if the NRA is wrong, don't you?

And elephants are spherical if ducks are constructed of silicon and finely-shredded buts of the Rubaiyat. Fortunately, the NRA's not wrong: it's not the technology, but the people who wield it, which can be a problem.

Reminds me of JSON’s licence: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4762035

Yeah , FOSS projects should add "The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil." to their licenses ! though it is not clear how one would define evil ;)

And of course IBM's having to get a waiver because of what happened that one time they sold a ton of adding machines to the Nazis...

No worse than a farmer whose produce gets sold further down the chain to the military, or the soup kitchen volunteer who doles out soup to a man who later murders someone.

You're part of a system/society which depends on force to maintain its existence. If you don't like that fact and don't want to be part of that system, stop paying taxes and go live in the woods. After all, your tax money is contributing just as much as your source code to the military.

Maybe there should be an open-source software license with a clause that prevents your inventions from being used in instruments of war and violence.

Such a license would violate Clause 6 of the Open Source Definition (src: http://opensource.org/osd-annotated ), which states that you cannot restrict use based on fields of endeavor. Therefore, you could make the license, but you could not call it open-source.

As an aside, even though it might ruffle some feathers, I don't think it would actually be illegal to do so — right?

Probably not illegal, but whoever does it would be muddying up a term with a clear, established definition.

What if I develop software that allows me to restrict usage of software based on field of endeavour, then I apply an open source license to it?

I'd be pretty annoyed if I couldn't use open source software to defend my home.

One license offered for Phil Rogaway's OCB block-cipher mode explicitly prohibits military use. (although, as I read it, the military could use still open source implementations under the other license)

http://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/ocb/license.htm

That's not your fault, but if you have a bug in there and the ship sips, can they sue you?

Most open source licenses explicitly say that the software is provided with no warranty. IANAL, but I think that's intended to prevent people suing you if they use your code and something goes wrong.

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