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From Sputnik to the WWW, a History of ARPA
Ian Lamont writes "Next month is the 50th anniversary of the Sputnik launch, but it's not just the start of mankind's exploration of space that should be observed. The 'October surprise' also changed computing forever, thanks to the subsequent creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency. J.C.R. Licklider, the first director of IT research at ARPA, catalyzed the invention of an astonishing array of IT, from computer graphics to microprocessors to the Internet ... and even an early 'electronic office.' However, the long-range vision that Licklider promoted at the agency is allegedly in danger, according to some observers quoted in the article: 'In the early years, ARPA was willing to fund things like artificial intelligence — take five years and see what happens,' [CMU Professor David Farber] says. 'Nobody cared whether you delivered something in six months. It was, "Go and put forth your best effort and see if you can budge the field." Now that's changed. It's more driven by, "What did you do for us this year?"' Former ARPA director Charles M. Herzfeld blames Congress and a new crop of 'wishy-washy' agency heads. DARPA's response: It still is investing heavily in technologies that may take years to come to market, such as universal language translation, realistic agent-based societal simulation environments, and photonic communications in a microprocessor having a theoretical maximum performance of 10 TFLOPS."
Should be not be welcoming our WWW-creating overlords at CERN for that?
-A
Except that they haven't. The DARPA spokesman in the article is right, and the "horizon" for DARPA (and CERDEC) programs are at LEAST 4-5 years out. In fact, some might argue that DARPA spends *TOO MUCH* money these days on pie-in-the-sky research and not enough on things that will directly benefit warfighters or civilians. Perhaps some particular program director is hard-nosed about this stuff, but it's certainly not true of DARPA in general.
Just peruse the list of some of the stuff DARPA is funding for proof of the long horizon:
E pluribus unum
Call the roll of the people who gave us our nuclear weapons. Sure, there were the Harold Ureys and E. O. Lawrences and Richard Feynmans, but a lot of it depended on foreign scientists escaping the European dictatorships. Postwar, the space race was a contest between "our German scientists and their German scientists."
Actually, as a point of historical fact, "German scientists" really didn't do all -that much- in the space race. Within the USA, Von Braun's Jupiter - C and Redstone were both ultimately failures as the ICBMs they were intended to be, soon supplanted by the solid fueled Minuteman. It was Convairs "Atlas" booster that delivered the first Americans into orbit. From there, really, he did some good work on the Saturn V, and it did get us to the moon, but, the really hard parts about the moon were the lunar orbit rendevous, the lander, and the apollo spacecraft itself, and all of those were done by American contracting companies.
On the Soviet side, the space race had scarcely no German help. It was Korolev that was the brain child of all of the early Soviet successes. Had he not died on the table during what should have been a routine operation, it is very likely the Soviets might have finished their own massive N-1, and, while they wouldn't have necessarly been able to put a man on the moon, they could have done some interesting things with it.
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Mexico's literacy rate is 91% (CIA World Factbook). Their poverty rate is 40% (same source). 18% of Mexico's labor force is engaged in agriculture in Mexico.
:-) Seriously, though, the language of the USA is english, if only, ever other immigrant class learned it, and so should mexicans.
Yep, and with a population of 108 million, that's about 11 million illiterate people, and, they are all in the USA!
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