Opposition
At a July 28, 2003 press conference, Senators Byron L. Dorgan (D-ND) and Ron Wyden (D-OR) claimed that PAM would allow trading in such events as coups d'état, assassinations, and terrorist attacks, due to such events appearing on interface pictures on the project website.
They denounced the idea, with Wyden stating, "The idea of a federal betting parlor on atrocities and terrorism is ridiculous and it's grotesque," while Dorgan called it "useless, offensive and unbelievably stupid". Other critics offered similar outrage. Almost immediately afterwards (within less than a day) the Pentagon announced the cancellation of PAM, and by the end of the week John Poindexter, head of the DARPA unit responsible for developing it, had offered his resignation; the PAM had first been proposed & funded in 2001, and Poindexter joined DARPA in December 2002. Robin Hanson writes that Poindexter "actually had little involvement with PAM".
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Famous quotes containing the word opposition:
“Except for poverty, incompatibility, opposition of parents, absence of love on one side and of desire to marry on both, nothing stands in the way of our happy union.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)
“A man with your experience in affairs must have seen cause to appreciate the futility of opposition to the moral sentiment. However feeble the sufferer and however great the oppressor, it is in the nature of things that the blow should recoil upon the aggressor. For God is in the sentiment, and it cannot be withstood.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“It is human agitation, with all the vulgarity of needs small and great, with its flagrant disgust for the police who repress it, it is the agitation of all men ... that alone determines revolutionary mental forms, in opposition to bourgeois mental forms.”
—Georges Bataille (1897–1962)