From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,630c12e823d1bdf4 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2003-01-10 21:27:16 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!news1.google.com!newsfeed.stanford.edu!news.ems.psu.edu!news.litech.org!news-xfer.cox.net!p01!news2.central.cox.net.POSTED!53ab2750!not-for-mail From: Ted Dennison User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.3a) Gecko/20021212 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Hijacking a Thread was RE: New Ada compiler for .NET References: <1040653133.613605@master.nyc.kbcfp.com> <3e18f3f3_1@news.tm.net.my> <6KwmrO7CZtnj@eisner.encompasserve.org> <1041910244.361888@master.nyc.kbcfp.com> <3E1E5604.5030209@nospam.adrianhoe.com> <1042177570.752923@master.nyc.kbcfp.com> In-Reply-To: <1042177570.752923@master.nyc.kbcfp.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: Date: Sat, 11 Jan 2003 05:27:11 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 68.12.51.201 X-Complaints-To: abuse@cox.net X-Trace: news2.central.cox.net 1042262831 68.12.51.201 (Sat, 11 Jan 2003 00:27:11 EST) NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 11 Jan 2003 00:27:11 EST Organization: Cox Communications Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:32905 Date: 2003-01-11T05:27:11+00:00 List-Id: Hyman Rosen wrote: > Back in engineering school we would occasionally joke about going > to work making bombs after graduation. The issue never really > arose for me since I went into programming, and I've always worked > on stuff that had nothing to do with weapons systems. Not that I > think it would bother me to do so (insert obligatory reference to > Tom Lehrer's song about Werner von Braun :-) Its arisen for me on occasion. I've spent most of my career working on DoD projects. I find most people in DoD work are actually quite conservative politically, which leads me to belive most of us liberals opt out of DoD work at the get-go. I know at least one friend of mine from college did just that. However, a suprising amount of DoD work is more about *saving* lives than taking them. Some of it, like the NASA stuff, is as noble a cause as you can devote your time to. *The* most noble, IMHO, but that's another diatribe for another time. Only twice have I ever felt I couldn't work on something for moral reasons. One was the time I was offered a job by a smartbomb maker. In a way, smarter bombs actually save lives too when compared to the alternative of using larger or more dumb bombs, which is what would happen, make no mistake. But I just didn't feel like devoting a (possibly large) part of my life to helping make bombs. The other actually had nothing to do with the DoD. For a while we (my old group at Martin-Marietta) were considering making a tank simulator for the Chineese army. This was about 2 years after Tienamen. I had a mental image of sitting in the simulator cockpit trying to get the "crunch" sound right when the tank rolls over the head of a protester. No thanks. It so happened that during the massacre I was off work for a while in prepration for my wedding, and had nothing better to do all day than sit and watch everything go down on CNN. With the state of mind I was in after that, it would have been an exeedingly bad idea to put me anywhere near a representative of the Chineese military for about 4 years afterward... My apologies to our Chineese readers for getting their c.l.a. access revoked.