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No Cash Prize for Next DARPA Grand Challenge
General Lee's Peking writes to mention an Associated Press article about a sad development in the DARPA Grand Challenge. Because of some new DoD-related legislation, the organization will no longer be able to award the $2 Million prize to grand challenge winners. It's not all bad, though; they still get a trophy. From the article: "The absence of a lucrative cash prize has forced some teams to retool their game plan and others to drop out. Some fear it would be harder to attract corporate sponsors and hurt media coverage of the race, which drew a throng of reporters last year and inspired a PBS documentary. 'The icing on the cake is gone,' said Ivar Schoenmeyr, team leader of California-based Team CyberRider, which is retrofitting a Toyota Prius hybrid."
So much for recovering my development expenses on these ideas:
note: Sharks with Lasers is someone else's idea so I clearly can't try to compete with that one.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Stifling innovation- find out the Congress folks who pushed this legislation through and make sure their staff do a little "constituent services"
Not sure exactly what you mean there, but the Defense budget is the largest it has been in ages, it's perplexing that they'd choose to cut here, unless there's some bizarre (well, not in light of the privatisation of many military services and operations) pressure to keep this in other hands, ahem, those which would prefer to sell goods and services they develop at great expense (and thus need reimbursement) and clearly some bunch of college yahoos couldn't do as well.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The DoD could always offer other forms of remuneration to the winner. Such a awarding contracts for supplies, such as $500 toilet seats and $250 hammers...nyet?
I'll give 10 to 1 odds that this is a result of some asshat policy maker (probably the one that spends all his time playing WoW) changing the rules without actually sitting down to think about the consequences of his shiny new policy... that kind of thing is a LOT more common than someone executing part of a far-reaching-conspiratorial-plan...
Oh god, that woman is John Romero!
Solid Snake's gonna be VERY disappointed...
...wait, what DARPA were we talking about, again?
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
Step 1. Buy Lexus LS460 with autopark
Step 2. Put ls460 backwards at starting line, tell it to park at finish line.
Step 3. Profit.
Business as usual for the military industry.
Yes. The money which is no longer available was prize money, as well as milestone prizes for the track B teams. The difference between track A and track B is that track A gives all its technology to the government at the end (in exchange for $1 million of development money), and track B has no such obligation. The track A funds (contracts rather than prizes) are still fully intact, so all of the track A teams are still in it. What's been cut out is the incentive for track B teams to enter. These are the teams that are NOT giving technology directly to the government, and are using the race as a vehicle for development of technology that can truly benefit the world in ways other than making robot death jeeps. Say, for example, saving hundreds of thousands of lives in traffic accidents every year.
So yes, I would much rather see a portion of the DoD's budget spent encouraging development of revolutionary safety technology for civilian drivers rather than a big contract to a traditional defense contractor for something that directly kills people. (Keep in mind, the funds were not -cut-, DARPA's authority to use them for prizes was simply removed.)
Interesting enough VW have already done it, see:n s_its.html
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2005/04/vw_abando
The VW Lupo is available but it only does 78.4mpg(US). Their development car did much better: 0.89 litres of diesel per 100 kilometres (264 mpg) top speed was still 75mph. but they could not make the commercial version cheaper than $25K
$25M for first family car that gets over 100 mpg at $40,000 price
To be awarded posthumously?
It's easy enough to build such a car. Easy enough that it's been done many times over the past century.
All you have to do to achieve it is give up something else. We can strive for efficiency, but we canna change the laws of physics.
KFG
RTFA - Although DARPA has pulled the award, the current legislation does not bar awards. It moves the authorization level up one position above the DARPA director.
All they now have to do is get permission from their boss.
It appears they have chosen the ignorant route and - instead of getting requested authorization - simply claim they are not allowed
Sounds like typical Government Bureaucrats to me.
Oddly enough, the President doesn't get to decide exactly what obscure sections go into a defense spending law. If he did, you can bet that companies located in districts represented by Congressmen on the appropriations committee wouldn't just happen to get lots of big contracts.
Sure, you can maybe blame him for not vetoing the spending bill, but unless he really cared about this one expenditure, why would you expect him to?
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to take a long shower, because I fell really dirty after actually defending the President. But can you please save your blame of him for the tons of things that are actually his fault?
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
Not sure exactly what you mean there, but the Defense budget is the largest it has been in ages, it's perplexing that they'd choose to cut here
Two things:
That said, the US defense is the smallest it's been in ages and re-equipping three branches of the military is not cheap.
I'm on the Princeton DARPA team, and we're on Track B. The prize money at the end was a nice incentive and certainly garnered attention for the competition, but that's not where the real harm lies. For passing the site visit, there was a prize of $50,000, and for making it to the finals, a $250,000 prize (don't quote me on the amounts, that's just my recollection). These milestone prizes would've gone a long way to offset the financial disparity between Track A teams (who've received substantial DARPA grants) and the Track B teams. We're on a shoestring budget, and that money would've been incredibly useful. Instead, we now have to go the entire distance without a dime from the government.
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http://pave.princeton.edu/
Please do not look at absolute dollar values, they are nonsense. Look at defense spending as a percentage of GDP. The US defense budget is about the same size as it was during the isolationist period leading up to WWI. In terms of percentage, the US spends about 3.8% of its GDP on defense, putting it in the same area of the list as Tanzania.
Keep in mind that a significant percentage of defence support is now performed by private industry, thus increasing the overall budget and the Pentagon does not perform a considerable amount of services itself. it's said to be more efficient, but when the DoD performed its own services the money largely stayed within the department. Further, these large requests of 70 and 80 billion to support the war on terror, are they included in these figures?
Thanks to the neglect of the military under Clinton, the Air Force has ancient aircraft and can't maintain them all because they break so fast, the Navy has too few ships and many of those still in service have entire systems which are inoperable due to neglect, and the Army can no longer rely on unlimited overseas basing, unlimited Navy sealift and unlimited Air Force airlift and so must get rid of all their heavy artillery and heavy tanks to transform to a lighter force.
The Clinton administration hardly neglected the military. Clinton didn't actively seek out conflicts to expend material on, the largest being the Serbia/Bosnia conflict, which he brought NATO in to a significant degree (as it was most member states' own backyard this seems fair.) Clinton prefered diplomatic engagement, building support over unilateral moves. Clinton was more fiscally conservative than his successor.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar