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Comment by pakitan | Hacker News Reader

Looks like an amazing piece of tech, I'd totally work on that if they would let me anywhere near it. Why should I be ashamed of working on something designed to protect a country's border? Yet, I'm probably supposed to feel proud, had I worked for, say, Facebook, whose sole purpose of existing is to waste billions of man-hours a day?

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You don’t understand. Thanks to Facebook, we live in an era after history, in which humans don’t have conflicting interests that must sometimes be resolved through violent confrontation.

tell that to a Trump supporter in Berkeley. While Facebook (IMO) does not force people to waste their time, but much like booze, it doesn't discourage it either. The result of overuse of either is much the same - a wasted life.

Nah bro, I'm pretty sure Francis Fukuyama accomplished that for us.

You say "protect a country's border", I say "potentially kill innocent people without human judgment or intervention". Regardless of your personal stance on the moral / practical utility of national borders, surely there are better and more humane ways to protect a border than to treat anyone who approaches it as expendable machine gun fodder.

I'd much rather work on Facebook, which at least provides some tangible benefit to me as an occasional event organizer in exchange for wasting my time and trying to sell me crap, than this. Hell, I'd work on XKEYSCORE before working on this, and that's an extremely strong statement coming from me.

Can you please read again the wiki article on what the gun's capabilities are and where it's deployed, as I don't think we are talking about the same thing?

First, masses of innocent people don't usually charge at borders of countries with which they are technically at war. Second, this is not a "gun see, gun kill" technology. There are humans involved and I'm pretty sure the level of automation is directly related to the assumed probability of border being attacked. In more peaceful times, it will be almost all manual. In a full fledged war - mostly automated. You can't afford to be sentimental when your country is being invaded.

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