> After months of speculation, it was confirmed yesterday that the Death Star, the Empire’s vaunted, planet-destroying space station, has added a new, state-of-the-art day care center to its already vast array of capabilities. The massive four-room day care center, which, according to Grand Moff Tarkin, will “provide a safe and fun learning environment for tots between the ages of one and four,” has already begun spring enrollment and is expected to be fully operational by June 1.
> ... Last Friday, in the middle of a coloring activity, the planet Alderan was blown up, delighting 23 of the 24 children who witnessed the devastating power of the battle station.
> ... “As a stormtrooper and father of three, I’m very excited about the new day care center,” Death Star citizen Ralph Sedgwick said. “It’s a safe, nurturing environment, one in which my child will learn.”
I'm not at all saying that NSWL is evil. Only that, realistically, even the most quintessential of evil empires must surely not have been evil in every single aspect. A large organization can't work that way.
you may not be evil, but it would be logical to think that your ambitions coincided with a few of the ambitions/priorities of the Naval Surface Warfare Lab.
If a consensus was reached by the public that NSWL does 'evil' things, it'd make logical sense to further investigate the possibility that you do evil things.
DARPA creates lots of things, but one of those things they focus on is weapon advancement and defense. They have a lot of creation under their belt (the internet, various medical advancements, surgical and prosthetic equipment and techniques, etc etc), but their public military image and priority on defense is such that the public has come to the consensus that DARPA is a spooky, evil, lab -- regardless of the good that they've done.
If the public consensus is that a group that Google deals with 'is evil', it'd make logical sense for there to be more pressure on both parties (Google and the involved party) to be as transparent with the public as possible to negate the brooding bad PR -- otherwise that 'bad' image may rub off and affect both parties.
That is, unless, the benefits of the partnership are greater than the disadvantages created by the negative PR generated by the partnership itself.. and I am personally of the opinion that that's the state Google is in now.
> you may not be evil, but it would be logical to think that your ambitions coincided with a few of the ambitions/priorities of the Naval Surface Warfare Lab.
As a threshold matter, I don't think developing new technologies for the purposes of defending the country is "evil." Besides that, perhaps the majority of the military's interests coincide with those of the public as a whole. The technology that helps stabilize injured soldiers in the field so they can be brought back into a hospital also helps people who have been in serious car accidents. The military's need for survivable, distributed, communications infrastructure gave rise to the internet. Its work into reconnaissance and attack drones is giving rise to the delivery drones Amazon is looking to put into the market.
Medicine, logistics, automation, data analysis, communications, etc, are all areas that the military has a huge interest in, but those areas also happen to have extensive, totally innocuous purposes.
