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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"
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?
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DARPA the toilet paper!
DARPA the flamethrower! (the kids love this one)
Similar to the upcoming US election results
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)
"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.
AFAIK, DARPA just funds research projects. People who actually work for DARPA are mostly government administrators. You have to be careful, though. DARPA isn't suppose to fund projects that directly result in any actual products for the military. It's suppose to be far-future advanced research. I was once raked over the coals for pushing for actual commercialization of a DARPA funded project (cheap, reliable, rad-hard-by-design chips). Personally, I prefer to stay clear of DARPA, and instead work on projects funded to actually build something useful for today's military. It might sound fun on slashdot, but I've found DARPA work highly frustrating... but I like building real systems, so it's a matter of preference. With research, you can change the rules at the end and declare success... it's often very political. With real systems, the proof is in the product. There's no faking your way around it.
Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.
Like any true geek, I've often admired boy toys coming out of defense research projects (regardless of which country or organization produced them), for the technical feat or wow-factor. BUT...
At the same time it saddens me to know that so much effort is channeled into (in a sense, wasted) destroying other human beings. A stealth bomber is a magnificent machine, but it's basically a machine meant to go somewhere, destroy things and/or people, and get away undetected. In history there may be times when it seems necessary to do that (or show the capability), but imagine all the good things that could have been done if the budget for its development had been spent elsewhere (like in medical research).
Mankind has developed weapons that fit into a truck, and can kill 100.000 humans in minutes, but at the same time a significant portion of people on this planet doesn't have enough/clean drinking water, even though 2/3 of our planet is covered with water (and it's easy to separate water and salt). We do have a bomb that you can fire with a gun from miles away, and that will steer itself in mid-air using satellite-provided timing signals, to destroy a target much more accurately than before. Yet we still don't have a cheap way to produce solar cells, even though the basic compound is among the most common materials on the planet.
I have no doubt that if you would take any large country's defense budget and spend it on third world economic/technological development, cancer, malaria research or similar, much more human suffering would be prevented than the few terrorists stopped or soldiers saved in wars on foreign soil. Can mankind do it? It looks like not, which is sad knowing that we've wandered around this planet for many thousands of years.
This is probably the #1 reason I would never work on anything high tech, if it has *primarily* a military purpose. In that context, I'd consider sitting around, doing nothing and eating out of my nose a more productive way to spend my time.
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.