My brother sent me a link to a (German) article about an automatic cannon killing their own soldiers by mistake. I can't stop thinking how ridiculous that is — that machine was designed to kill people and now that it does people are screaming. So why I am writing this is that we - programmers, software architects, whatever we want to call ourselves - should in no way program software intended to kill people! I cannot really believe that people writing such code had to choose between that and starvation. If we broaden the topic a little I think we IT people should in general think more about the moral aspects and abusability of the code we are writing: There will be no trojans spying on us in the name of a government if we don't write them. There will be no robots shooting at us if we don't program them. We have to say "no" to that, you have to say "no" to that!