Slashdot Mirror
DARPA Chief Outlines Array of Future Projects
coondoggie writes to tell us that DARPA announced a wide array of new projects in a report to the House Armed Services Committee that they will be funding in the near future. "everything from advanced network and communications implementations to powerful laser and unmanned aircraft development as well as developing techniques to help military personnel survive myriad dangerous situations"
To be fair, it should be noted that the programs will be effective against foreign OR domestic brown people.
In Soviet Russia, bird watches YOU.
You can't send a takedown notice to an already printed newspaper.
*phew* I was worried they'd lost their focus.
I like the chip-scale atomic clock. In fact, with clock speeds of processors going sky-high nowadays, it would be extremely cool if our computer processors gained an atomic clock. Such a clock would come in very handy to synchronize the events going on within a processor chip containing, say, 1000 cores. I envision the number of cores in processors to increase to many thousands within the next decade, and clock speeds increasing to the terahertz. All of this technology will require an atomic clock to keep proper time.
Where is the DARPA Chief's pet project, Code Name... Metal Gear?
No portion of this post may be rebroadcast without the express, written consent of Major League Baseball.
Interesting that that was just modded "troll". I'm curious who exactly I was supposed to be trolling with it.
Brown people
in my country?
It's more likely than you think.
Myriad dangerous situations. I always knew that situations that endangered myriads were bad.
As an avid non-reader of the actual article I must say that this snippet is rather disappointing. I fully expected armor suits at the very least.
At the end of the day, I'd get along with someone with the same cultural values a lot faster than someone of the same race of a different culture.
It's about the culture, stupid.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
...is there a better place on Earth to work than DARPA? I always thought it would be SO cool to go to work every day and look down a list of fantastic toys that people are willing to spend giga-bucks on, and maybe get a chance to decide which ones get built.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Also, remember: Meryl's CODEC frequency is on the back of the disc case.
I'm much more concerned with the fact that chip companies go for what can be made quickly and sold fast, whether or not it's any good. (Hence Intel rushing Itanium into production before it actually worked, Sun adding floating-point very late into the *Sparcs, why multicores never got beyond 4x4s even though single-core processors can go 16-way, why GPUs were so late in the game even though offloading had been mastered decades earlier, why multithreading and deep-pipelining processors were abandoned by Intel, and so on.)
If companies could afford the delay to get things technologically right and then to price them low enough for the market to handle, we'd have seen Moore's Law abandoned by now... for being too conservative. Of course, this isn't realistic. Companies do not have infinite money for research, development, testing and high discounts. And because it's not realistic, it is inevitable that short-cuts will be taken that produce flawed, sub-optimal products, whether or not it's obvious that such products are unnecessary and a distraction.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Just don't make the weapons as idiot-proof, reliable, effective and easy to manufacture as the AK-47, otherwise we won't be the only ones using them.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
"To be fair, it should be noted that the programs will be effective against foreign OR domestic brown people."
Brown... absorbs heat... hmmm. I haven't RTFA, but I'm picturing some sort of giant magnifying glass. Was I close?
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
How about taking your armies and navies and restrict them to US space, allowing them to exist only for defensive purposes?
Please let me know if I'm wrong here, but it seems that as exciting as it might seem to have Darpa working on all this "neat stuff", the reality is its really just a highly inefficient way to stimulate the economy. After all, the real goal of theses projects is simply to inject federal (the publics money) spending into congressional districts and funnel it into private hands, ie. job creation, etc to stimulate the local economies of every congressional district. Unfortunately, there's a tremendous amount of waste and graft. Ultimately this R&D should also lead to advanced consumer products, and it does work that way sometimes, but by and large, its mostly inefficient. It's socialism, but a highly convoluted and inhumane socialism. For example, instead of giving our low skilled under-educated citizens jobs being productive, we remove them from the job market usually by shipping them over seas where they're paid a very low wage to remain under-educated and unproductive. Ironicly, the military industrial complex that helped get us out of the great depression, is about to send us back into another one.
Communications/ISec, Soldiers, Health, Logistics, Command & Control, S2/G2 collection the complete battle field environment is going SF/XF. I wounder, how will the home-front keep up with such an exceptionally high-speed, fast consumption ... USA DoD Military? Well, the world best watch-out now if they are supporting terrorist and enemy combatants.
... someone may run out of bullets or bombs, maybe even food or fuel, then again maybe the virtual collaborative (SL/Twitter/Miro...) academic/office/industry mission and development environment will just happen as needed (not planned).
....
... I wounder what has been and will be started/setup/moved into the Washington DC area? I wounder, could China/Russia/Iran/North Korea ... Terrorist accidentally win a war or great victory by attacking the small packed region of Maryland and North Virgina.
..., even after being attacked twice in NYC ... I am not surprised our borders are still not secure with idiots making totally clueless plans based on politics and vapor-power. Some stuff has been done right, but most for the past ten years has been a royal SNAFU, begging for no one to notice and fear-voting (more will start after the conventions).
Dang, I hope the "Office/Industry Environment" is being improved equally, because if you can't keep the innovation and logistics flow up to speed
SL with Avatar Populated Environment/Experience Simulation/Synergy (APES) would be a good tool for low/average bandwidth collaboration over distances for training, research, development
SL/APES would be better than putting all the prized eggheads/geeks at a single target spot or a meeting.... "Together we die" is being done with many DoD assets being consolidated at various locations (no WWII lessons learned)
Some real dumb things have been done in the USA over the past decade, on the foolish assumption that the USA will never be attacked
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
DARPA has dozens of projects and various different management styles in the several offices.
Nevertheless, the comments about DARPA being about only research and producing a final report are completely at variance with my personal experience with DARPA. In contrast, I like to joke that, under Tether, DARPA is not about research at all. It's more about engineering and assembling existing pieces of research into a working prototype. The Grand Challenge is an excellent example of this. The ultimate success metric is that some part of DoD picks up the work and transitions it into a deployed product.
DARPA staff don't do the research/engineering themselves. They travel the country to search for the leaders in the field, whether university or industry, and pay them. Typically those have 18 months to show preliminary results, or the funding is stopped.
Slashdot readers who think they have a crazy idea that could benefit defence should consider sending a DARPA program manager an 8 page white paper summarizing their idea. It's really exciting working with such intelligent people.
How about: Don't put them in the middle of every civil war or unstable regime that's none of our business in the first place.
Now, where's my grant money?
Have gnu, will travel.
Where is Donald Anderson?