Pentagon to Significantly Cut CS Research 408
GabrielF writes "Over the last few decades, DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has funded some of the most successful computer science research projects in history, such as the Internet. However, according to the New York Times, DARPA has recently decided to significantly cut funding of open-ended computer science research projects in favor of projects that will yield short-term military results. Leading computer scientists, such as David Patterson, the head of the ACM are outraged and worried."
Technology (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Technology (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Technology (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Technology (Score:3, Insightful)
to get more bang for the buck -- outsourcing!
We can always rely upon the Chinese and the
Indians (and whoever comes cheapest next) for
the core R&D in CS and IT we will need, right?
The DoD has been in love with outsourcing since
before some Pentagon stuffed shirts decided to
buy uniforms (berets) from the PRC. For example:
(a) they are having problems getting enough
new USA-borne recruits -- solution (1) is to
raise enlistment bonuses and pay (too much $$$);
whi
Re:Technology (Score:5, Insightful)
Not saying there is anything special about this president but next time try to pick one who has friends in industries you want to see funded because thats how this game works.
Re:Technology (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd rather my president have a combatitive relationship with industry than a friendly relationship.
Re:Technology (Score:2)
Re:Technology (Score:5, Insightful)
sigh... (Score:5, Insightful)
as great as this country is, it is sometimes frustrating to be an American
Re:sigh... (Score:5, Insightful)
First, why do you assume that short-term military spending won't help people in the future? It's not at all obvious that having a powerful, technologically advanced military prevents us from helping people in the future. I would hope that the reverse is true, in fact.
Second, do you think there's a compelling reason to believe that in the absence of military research, people would stop killing one another? Isn't it true that (at least in theory) having better, more accurate weapons means that we kill *fewer* people?
Re:sigh... (Score:5, Insightful)
The US already has the most advanced military and by far the largest military spending. Why is such an increase in military research nececessary at this point in time?
Second, do you think there's a compelling reason to believe that in the absence of military research, people would stop killing one another?
Who said anything about the absense of military research. The question is about the purpose of redirecting funds from long term CS research into short-term military spending.
Re:sigh... (Score:3, Insightful)
Mainly because much of what we have is designed to fight a straight up war with the (then) USSR. While that equipment is second to none in a normal fight, as the Iraqi's found out; it's not as well equipped for the future. Many of the thing sthat make it good for the cold war are less useful in urban fighting or fast reaction situation.
Ta
Re:sigh... (Score:3, Insightful)
The US military is currently overstreched doing peacekeeping in two medium-sized countries. "Most advanced military" in the world doesn't necessarily cut it when you're up against several opponents at once and when you have more complex objectives than merely destroying your enemies (crushing Saddam's army was trivial, building a democracy
Re:sigh... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:sigh... (Score:4, Insightful)
Just think for a moment here. If they've got massive multi-million dollar budgets, where is all the research money going?
Re:sigh... (Score:3, Interesting)
I think you're forgetting that a lot goes into this. If a professor gets a grant, he pays the school and his department for hosting him, for his own time, and for post-doc, graduate, and undergraduate students to work on the project. I would guess that the majority of the cost isn't in hardware, but in people's time. Who cares what kind of hardware is available if the project won't help pay your tuition? No money, no students, no research.
Re:sigh... (Score:5, Insightful)
If anything because the "90-99%" of the research is intellectual, it can be argued that more of the money goes to exactly what it is that you want more of.
Plus you now have the problem that as more and more money goes into the corporate sector, fewer and fewer people benefit. While the military's relationship with higher education has always had a little tension, it's the right place for the funding to flow to. If you fund research into advanced data mining techniques using quantum computers at a college, the money goes to creating research that can be used by everyone, including corporations, individuals, and other research institutions. You contribute to the education of more computer science students. If you decide to go elsewhere for your follow-up project, you can take the body of research that was done and go anywhere. By relying on private corporations, all you're doing is subsidizing the CEO's golf club memberships and tying yourself to a single vendor.
If they've got massive multi-million dollar budgets, where is all the research money going?
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say "research." I've never seen an educational institution that was wasteful about it's funding (Maybe Harvard). The professors and grad students are paid wages that nobody in the private sector would accept. They don't have crazy offices or private jets or 100,000 dollar golf club memberships. When was the last time the head of a college recieved a 30 million dollar golden parachute?
If you can't phathom where the research money is going, you are in no position to say that it is being wasted.
DARPA has always been the blue-sky arm of the military funding group, and it has served the country well in that respect. The internet is it's most obvious triumph (which is also comp sci), and that took something like 30 years to catch on. They also funded BSD, nuclear test detection research, and a whole lot else [wikipedia.org]. To say that they're going to fund practical immediate research for making weapons instead is a little silly, we have branches of the military and civillian companies who do this regularly. DARPA, however, funds projects that have a 1 in 100 chance of taking off and changing the world. And DARPA funds hundreds of them.
Re:sigh... (Score:3, Informative)
There is a big difference in initial and iterative costs for physical sciences vs computer science.
For initial startup for CS a university may invest millions on new computer equipment for students to build and test their programs. In physical sciences a university may invest millions on a p
Re:sigh... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say "research." I've never seen an educational institution that was wasteful about it's funding (Maybe Harvard).
Then you've never seen how research happens at a major university. Waste happens *differently* than at major corporations, but it happens in vast amounts, often in the form of wasted time.
At a private company I used to work at, when there was a minor problem with my working environment (too cold), it took a day or two to fix. At a top-rated university, a more serious problem (lights that turn off by themselves every ten minutes) took seven months to fix.
At the same company, security was taken very seriously. When the door to the server room was being repainted, we had a security guard stand there, literally watching paint dry. At the major university, we had five break-ins to our building last semester and yet it's still possible to break in in 15 seconds with nothing more than a newspaper. (The last of those break-ins cost the university about $10,000 in computer equipment, and it took four months to get the computers replaced and running again).
I haven't even started on the amount of time wasted on pointless administrative tasks (e.g. two weeks telling payroll how to do their jobs).
The professors and grad students are paid wages that nobody in the private sector would accept. They don't have crazy offices or private jets or 100,000 dollar golf club memberships.
Professors don't get crazy bonuses, but the top administrators get pretty hefty salaries and bonuses (like a beautiful house on campus). Compensation for administrators is approaching corporate levels.
Plus, universities find lots of ways to sphon off federal grant money. Any major purchase or salary coming from a federal grant gets a ~50% "overhead" charge tacked on--that money goes to the university.
It literally hurts me to see DARPA cut funding to universities (my group took a hit), but I can understand why it's happening.
Re:sigh... (Score:3, Interesting)
Total tangent here, but my father used to work for Hughes Aircraft Company (back when they still existed) and the numbnuts facilities manager of the building in which he worked, in an attempt to "save electricity" and earn some brownnose po
Well... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Well... (Score:5, Funny)
I'll put it in StarCraft terms: you're spending your minerals on upgrading your Zealots, and failing to invest in the pylons and tech structures that would allow you to build a whole frickin' fleet of Protoss Carriers.
Re:Well... (Score:4, Interesting)
It's the people outside the Pentagon pointing out that the money spent on futuristic weapons systems will hurt the ability to find funding for shorter-term but still rather useful projects.
Re:Well... (Score:2)
I've never seen America's entire long-term defense planning reduced down to one sentence about StarCraft.
Apt analogy though.
Behold the zealot rush (Score:3, Funny)
Military Research Solves the Wrong Problems (Score:5, Interesting)
We do occasionally get good things out of it, and it does let bright people develop ideas and technologies that have broader uses, but mostly it develops better and better technology for killing people. Sure, we've gotten communications satellites, and the Internet does things that UUCP-net didn't do. But there's a huge amount of solar energy research that simply didn't get done because the college kids who were good at thermodynamics went to work developing aerospace technology instead. And while that aerospace technology has civilian applications, much more of it is for jumbo jets than for small private aircraft and free-flight navigation that would make air travel more practical and decentralized. (I *still* want my flying car :-)
Some of the agricultural research has been seriously useful. But too much of it has been directed in ways that support big agribusiness quasi-industrial farms instead of family farms, and towards pesticides that enable mass production, toward genetically modifying plants to make them more resistant to pesticides so that they're more practical for pesticide-based farming, and towards monocultures rather than increased diversity. And if you thought software patents were nasty, you should go look at the biological patent explosions of the last 20-30 years.
Medical research seems like it wouldn't have this problem, and while it's nowhere near as bad, it's still a mixed bag. Most medical techniques that are useful on battlefields are useful on other trauma, and more Americans are still killed every year by the side-effects of the War on Drugs than the wars for oil, and far more by car accidents than either one. But government-funded medical research has unfortunate interactions with the FDA's regulation of new drug development - the regulatory barriers make it economically difficult to develop drugs that have less than a billion-dollar market, and the government funding tends to encourage large labs, and make up for some of the regulatory problems by funding universities which can avoid the regulatory barriers rather than fixing the regulatory barriers.
Short-term military-focused research is far more of an interference to the evolution of our economy than long-term mixed-use research. But they're both bad.
excellent. (Score:4, Funny)
It's in serious need... They should get to that.
Re:excellent. (Score:2)
Indeed, it is in serious need. After all, it will only last another 30 years on this system.
Now, how could we get enough money to keep something solvent thirty years from now...hmmm...that seems like a rather long-term goal...hmmm...oh, wait, we could fund something open-ended, as we did with the internet, and start up another economic boom through innovation somewhere down the line, like around ten years from now when the whole system stops resulting in p
Re:excellent. (Score:2)
It doesn't suddenly die in 30 years. It will remain for long after that as long as the egotistic and selfish among us don't kill it.
Re:excellent. (Score:2)
However: after another thirty years, it will no longer be completely solvent, assuming that population and income projections hold true. Up until that point, all social security payments will be made on time. Thus, that's when it no longer is a working system, as the purpose of the system is to make all the payments, not just a few.
zerg (Score:5, Funny)
Re:zerg (Score:2, Insightful)
DARPA funds quite a bit of research that is a long way from becoming technology that we use in our homes. Many papers that I read that are funded by DARPA, I read with the realization that I won't see a practical system do these things for at least 10 years, probably much longer.
That said, there are a few other things to say:
1) The D in DARPA is for defense... many of these projects get into places
Re:zerg (Score:2)
Time for a fed Dept of Information Technology (Score:3, Interesting)
I guess someone important finally watched (Score:5, Funny)
Should I be worried? (Score:3, Insightful)
The biggest area that I see research being useful is in artificial intelligence. There's so much that we;re still trying to comprehend about emergent behaviors. Unfortunately, AI is very much like Fusion. It's only 20 years away (for the next century).
Re:Should I be worried? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Should I be worried? (Score:3, Interesting)
*Ahem* From your own link: The Web can be traced back to a project at CERN in 1989.
CS research is worthless
Didn't say that. I did say that there's not as much value as their used to be. The field is well saturated, and therefore is less likely to be much to be gained through expensive research. And as I also said, there's still research that's valuable, just far less overall.
real progress comes from companies li
Re:Should I be worried? (Score:2)
Anybody in the computing industry who thinks CS research has been stagnent for 20 years is most likely one of those moronic "computer engineers" that's still trying to get their heads around 1980s concepts, and ignoring all the new stuff. The sad state of commercial products today is fair testament to that.
Re:Should I be worried? (Score:2)
- parallel computing and supercomputing
- the Web
- scalable clusters and Internet services
- mobile computing
- breakthroughs in graphics
- breakthroughs in vision
- stunning advancements in computer architecture
- fundamental advances in theory, algorithms, etc.
It's true that the 50s, 60s, and 70s were wonderful in that many concepts were first discovered, but computer science had its greatest impact over the
Re:Should I be worried? (Score:2, Insightful)
Experimented with and designed in the 70's and 80's. Commercially available in the 90's.
- the Web
Experimented with and designed in the 80's. Commercially available in the 90's.
- scalable clusters and Internet services
Experimented with and designed in the 80's. Commercially available in the 90's.
- mobile computing
Commercially available since the 80's. Lowering costs of commercial hardware made mobile devices more popular in the 90's and 00's.
- breakth
Re:Should I be worried? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that it takes 20 years for many fundamental advances to make it into mainstream. So the fundamental research that you claim is not happening? You'll see it in 20 years, when it will be mainstream.
Re:Should I be worried? (Score:3, Interesting)
>>> - breakthroughs in graphics
>
>All designed in the 60's through 80's, but lacking in powerful enough hardware until the late 90's.
Total nonsense. Most of the recent advances---such as fluid sims, deformable objects, motion capture, and the like---were made possible because of better algorithms---i.e., research---rather than any advance in hardware. I can guarantee you running algori
Re:Should I be worried? (Score:4, Insightful)
Inventioning things that aren't apparent and obvious but which are useful and ground breaking is all about funding ideas which usually don't pan out. If your not willing to spend money to try risky ideas then the technology that might have been 20 or 60 years off will NEVER come.
Re:Should I be worried? (Score:2, Insightful)
I understand that quite well. But I'm still not seeing amazing new algorithms that have future potential in many areas. AI seems to be the most promising, with most other areas of research trying to tackle the same sorts of problems without AI.
Beyond AI, I have a very difficult time coming up with CompSci advances in the last decade. The BWT algo, Bayesian Filters, and
Re:Should I be worried? (Score:4, Informative)
How about the entire field of non-supervised machine learning: support vector machines, and training of hidden Markov models? These methods are finding application in everything from spam filtering to speech recognition to genome analysis.
Fusion research... (Score:5, Informative)
No, AI is nothing like fusion. We *don't* know what is required (software-wise) to make a robot alive. We *do* know how to make fusion energy efficient and it was done.
The perception that fusion doesn't work is from the early days of fusion research. Without doing any actual testing, physicists just though if you put the plasma in a magnetic bottle, you get fusion. When they actually done the experiment, they discovered more is going on in the plasma. You can't treat it as a gas. You can't treat it as a liquid. It is kind of a combination of both. Virtually everything in physics with regards to fluid/gas flow, as well as electromagnetism is part of the fusion reactor. Only NOW, after the experiments were done, do we understand WHAT is required to make fusion work and HOW to make it work.
Unlike AI, fusion research has been done. It works. It is here now. All that is needed is money to build a test reactor based on *current* knowledge (no pun intended :), work out final nicks in application of the theory, and then we can build the first commercial fusion reactor.
The obstacle to fusion is not science (or lack thereof), but lack of funding. You see, what people heard in the 60s about fusion, they still think it applies today.
Re:Should I be worried? (Score:3, Interesting)
I haven't seen a commercial product that paid the slightest attention to CompSci foundations in years, leaving them with the sort of saleable "usefulness" that pleases the marketing department, but a bit lacking in the sort of usefulness that "gets shit done."
While I agree with your general complaint, allow me to point something out:All modern computer products are based upon the CompSci foundations laid out by researchers years ago. They don't have to pay much attention to CompSci theory, becaus
it was an odd arrangement (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, this cut in DARPA funding is unlikely to be matched by a commensurate increase in NSF funding, which is the real problem...
Re:it was an odd arrangement (Score:4, Informative)
The problem is that things haven't worked that way in the real world, not for a long time. Since the late '70s there has been an assumption that DARPA will fund the bulk of CS fundamental research. Partly because of that, is has historically been *very* difficult to get a grant approved by the NSF for CS research unless it's very targeted towards the pure end of the research spectrum. Computer architecture (except very low-level engineering), graphics, human-computer interaction, even databases, etc. are all fields that the NSF has been reluctant to fund because by their nature, even the basic research has an "applied" component.
Without an increase in NSF funding, the DARPA cuts are going to devastate many areas of CS research. It's really disheartening.
Re:it was an odd arrangement (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's be frank, there are certain things in basic long term CS research that DARPA is going to be a lot more interested in than the NSF. It makes sense for DARPA, then, to bother to make sure that research is getting done. The best way to make sure that research is getting done is to pay for it.
What sort of research should DARP
This Makes Sense (Score:2, Insightful)
Once we're completely out of Iraq and Afganistan, hopefully they'll put the money back into lo
Re:This Makes Sense (Score:2)
Once we're completely out of Iraq and Afganistan, hopefully they'll put the money back into long
Re:This Makes Sense (Score:2)
Tommy Franks thought we needed more armored Humvees. That isn't hindsight at all, he thought it then and was shut down.
Re:This Makes Sense (Score:2)
And no one questioned we needed them then.
Anytime.
Re:This Makes Sense (Score:2, Insightful)
yeah. good point. I'll start holding my breath now........
Re:This Makes Sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This Makes Sense (Score:5, Insightful)
We can put a pile of high-tech weapons and defense systems in the hands of our troops. It won't make a spit of difference. The issues there are political and social. Decades of killing hasn't made any progress at all. I just gets worse. If we kill people more efficiently that's not very likely to change.
Why do you think there are so many countries that have been terrorized for decadees? Lack of good enough weapons? I would tend to think it runs deeper than that.
This is different from a regular war where you've got a leader of a cohesive nation invading other nations. In that case you can "win". This stuff is based on centuries of internal religious conflict amont the people themselves. It's unlikely we'll make a high enough percentage of the people there happy in the near future.
Ah well. Let's just nuke the whole area and let God sort them out. Because weapons will help. Right?
Cheers.
Pentagon Spending on Weapons to Soar (Score:2, Informative)
Report Says Pentagon Spending on Weapons to Soar
By TIM WEINER
Published: April 1, 2005
A new report by the Government Accountability Office warned yesterday that the costs of the Pentagon's arsenal could soar by hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade.
The Pentagon has said it is building more than 70 major weapons systems at a cost of at least $1.3 trillion. But the Pentagon generally understates the time and money spent on weapons programs by 20 to 50 percent, the new report said.
A survey o
Re:Pentagon Spending on Weapons to Soar (Score:2)
(no, im not serious)
Twilight of the empire (Score:5, Insightful)
As a CS students, I can tell you: finding hack US coders is easy; find qualified US students who can do research is hard. It's like they don't teach math or science in US schools anymore or something. Kids from Greece or China or wherever come over here, and run circles around US students in formal predicate logic, discrete math, and other subjects that Ken and Barbie found too hard. It's no exaggeration to say that over 70% of all research students are foreign--simply because there are not many qualified US students. (It's a different story if we needed literature or communication students--we've got tons of those.)
America is a country where companies don't make anything anymore. Instead, they just own the IP, and outsource the *production* to China/Taiwan/India. Hell, look at Transmeta, also in
US Companies went through a similar cylce of eating-the-seed corn in the 80s. What happened was they got their asses handed to them by Japan, where R&D was focused on basic science, and not the "short term" deliverables. Now, it seems DARPA is going to try to repeat the same experiment in failure.
Don't get me wrong. This is not the last straw for the US R&D system, but merely one more straw in what has to be the last bundle. It's twilight of the empire, folks. If you're young, start learning another language.
A far better solution is to let all students in US institutions work on projects. (If a project is truly classified, then just use one of the many defense contractors.) When foreign students graduate, most of them (not all) want to become US citizens. What better way to recruit new talented citizens for a country? With the *reeeediculous* DARPA restrictions, many of the foreign students I know are going home. They expect (rightly) that in 10-15 years, their countries will dominate in the industries they've trained for.
Re:Twilight of the empire (Score:2)
Re:Twilight of the empire (Score:4, Funny)
Id say were loosing on that front 2
Re:Twilight of the empire (Score:3, Interesting)
Agriculture, entertainment and industry account for a huge chunk of the US economy [doc.gov].
It's twilight of the empire, folks. If you're young, start learning another language.
Half empty, eh?
Re:Twilight of the empire (Score:3, Interesting)
Or do you define 50% of your loans held by
Chinese banks an American success story.
Dude, we're in TRILLIONS of dollars of debt,
the boomers are about to bankrupt the rest of
the budgets.
Japan's got a few problems with banking. We've
got systemic failures.
I suppose you can look at the numbers today,
and say the US is better off. But the US
is better off because the government borrowed
trillions of dollars and pumped it into the
economy. If the Japanese did the same,
Fighting the last war (Score:3, Interesting)
On the plus side, by the time we fight the Mongolian Khanate in 2037 we'll have the best network firewalls in the world. :)
They'll also make a slight name change (Score:3, Insightful)
If they can predict beforehand what a project will yield, then it's not research; it's engineering. So they should change their name from DARPA to DAPA.
Re:They'll also make a slight name change (Score:2)
If you leaf through modern comp-sci disserations and research projects, you'll find that it's unusual for them to say "we really don't know what the hell is going to happen if we try". Instead, they state specific objectives and methods such as improving database performance through reordering lock queues or aggregating transactions that work with shared code or data. It's no less engineering than what DoD likes to see.
so what.. (Score:2)
short sighted (Score:2, Interesting)
My experience of DARPA CS funding (Score:2)
Aside from Xerox's 64 bit MAC address which was shelved as the basis for IP addresses, there was another standard promoted by a group of companies from Apple to Atari to Western Electric/Bell Labs to Packet Cable to Knight-Ridder circa 1982 which consisted of an unsegmented system identifier and object identifier combined in an 64 bit address -- the SID growing
Budget Defecit (Score:3, Insightful)
Does it suck? Sure. But America has shown in elections it doesn't want European-style high taxes to pay for stuff, and when you can't pay for stuff, you can't have stuff.
Blah blah economy blah blah free market forces blah blah alledgedly unpatriotic intellectuals blah blah small government blah blah starve the beast blah blah 9-11 blah blah blah.
Michael
Re:Budget Defecit (Score:2)
CS = Computer Science (Score:2)
Why isn't it an editor's requirement to define every TLA in a headline?
Pure Research (Score:3, Insightful)
Pure research is what makes for major innovations. It's what keeps a nation on top. The fact the the US invented the internet is one of the major reasons that the US is still so dominant in the IT field. If the US keeps funding some open-ended goals, it might manage to stay on top through these recessions due to inventing something the rest of the world just doesn't have. With the way things are now, the US will have trouble competing against India and China if it sticks to the same jobs that everyone else does.
Re:Pure Research (Score:3, Interesting)
Our basic research situation was bad enough 10 years ago that NEC started buying up the scientists from the other labs that were laying them off
Brains at the top (Score:3, Insightful)
What worrys me most is the fact they are diverting the funding into short term yield millitary research project
The 20th centuary can be rememberd for many many things and i think DARPA deserves alot of respect for some of the CS projects it funded , however near totaly ignoring the long term benefits of CS research projects in favour of short term gains will just lead to problems further down the line
I was angry enough when the US gouvernemt decided to halt funding to Stem-cell research and other things , now here is another nail.
This Totally Makes Sense... (Score:5, Funny)
To GabrielF or the /. editor (Score:3, Insightful)
Outraged? Perhaps you may be outraged, but you slander individuals when you attribute them for saying things they did not say. Nowhere in the article did I read that anyone was outraged.
The military has decided not to put as much money into basic CS research as they did in the past. "Basic CS research" means theoretical research. By its nature, that means the Pentagon cannot turn around in 3 years and produce a tangible return on its investment. How dare those officials decide to not spend money that's not directly related to killing people or keeping personnel from getting killed! How dare those officials prevent foreign enemies from directly profiting from US funded military research! Why not attack your private sector employer? Most of them have been cutting back funding on basic research.
It certainly is unfortunate. But if you think basic CS research is critical to the US's well being (or more likely, your well being), bitch out your congressman for not funding research, not the military for doing its job. (Good for you for getting a CS degree, but the world does not owe you a living.)
Re:To GabrielF or the /. editor (Score:3, Interesting)
Budget cut aphorism (Score:3, Insightful)
> Patterson, the head of the ACM are outraged and
> worried.
Everyone who's budget is cut is outraged and worried.
--
Toby
Makes sense.... (Score:2, Insightful)
The US is at war. Get used to it.
If you don't like the strings that are attached with the money, don't accept the money. Theo didn't, which is fine, and his posse whined about it somewhat, which is annoying but also fine.
Besides, given how much stuff DoD is buying COTS, it looks like private industry and academia can handle 'pure' research anyway, and if you're gonna fi
Re:Makes sense.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's see is it Eastasia or Eurasia. Which enemy is it again? I forget. Who is it that when defeated we can declare peace and not just always move though continual war?
Anyway, as a side note for those people asking, "What has darpa research done for us recently?" Well, keep in mind that when academic research into the original internet protocols and such was in progress you could have asked the same thing, not knowing what was coming. Also realize that the skill set
Experience of a Governement Contractor (Score:5, Insightful)
The Government seems fed up with Computers. They need them, they need them incredibly badly, but they can't seem to get exactly what they want. This goes for both contract work and research work. I'll adress it in two parts.
For Research Work: Two major factors are at work here. First is the rule of 80/20. We can do 80 percent of what DARPA (or whatever they're named this week) wants, but that last 20% ("Now make it distributed!" or "Now make it fault tolerant!" or "Now make it cryptographically secure!") needed to make the system usable is really really hard. Lots of research projects have hit dead ends. You expect this to happen in research, of course, but still...
Also, I always got the vibe that DARPA was more than slightly pissed off with us Open Sourcing everything left and right. Maybe it was just us they seemed cross at (and by cross I mean grants and funding tended to shift away from projects with lots of open source offerings), but I've heard other folks doing research mention this too.
I mean, you can easily get the impression that the Government has an attitude of, "You're supposed to be working for us!" Every time a group open sources DARPA-funded stuff (or the components of it, which is usually the case), other people benefit from the research. This may leave a sour taste in the mouth of the accountants over there.
For Contract Work: The US Government's policy is horribly broken. "Cost Plus" contracts may have been great in the 50's for jets and stuff, but we're reaching the point with computer systems and software where we're proving that Design Up Front does not work for large projects.
But, the various millitary branches have so much CYA (Cover Your Ass) paperwork, precedent and process that they cannot disentangle themselves. It's a really bad situation for them, because they have to adapt or die, and they're dying. This is not to say that the Army or Air Force will "go out of business," it's that projects... multi-billion dollar projects... are failing every year now. New projects, huge projects that even a lightweight process would need hundreds of people to deal with, are starting at costs that are so low they'd barely turn a profit for a contractor, because the Army/Navy/Air Force expects to fail.
What I think the Government really needs to do is become more tech-savvy in general. They need to start paying top dollar to hire the best engineers. No more of this "We Give Good Benefits" junk. The Government needs to have its own research groups and they need to be driven by results, technical excellence, and they need to have open-ended budgets (that are limited by results).
1rst sign of sun setting on american empire.... (Score:3, Insightful)
There's hope (Score:3, Informative)
I've spoken with a sponsor in the Office of Naval Research (ONR). He said that that they're starting to realize the weakness of this approach, and expect to ramp-up longer term research investments in the next few years.
Perhaps the same thing will happen with DARPA-funded research in a while.
Penny wise, pound foolish (Score:3, Informative)
Just outsource the work to India (Score:3, Funny)
Re:free registration blah blah blah (Score:2)
Government Officials state that this was the same justification for war with Iraq, and opposed to allowing UN inspections which were working to continue.
no reg. link (Score:3, Informative)
People! When you submit a link to the NYT use the New York Times Link Generator [blogspace.com]!
Better Formating (Score:3, Informative)
April 1 - The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency at the Pentagon - which has long underwritten open-ended "blue sky" research by the nation's best computer scientists - is sharply cutting such spending at universities, researchers say, in favor of financing more classified work and narrowly defined projects that promise a more immediate payoff.
Hundreds of research projects supported by the agency, known as Darpa, have paid off handsomely in recent decades, leading not only to new weapons, but to c
Software Reliability Crisis & DARPA (Score:3, Interesting)
In a way, DARPA is right to cut funding to academia. Over the last forty years, scientists have made a complete mess of programming. We now have a world full of incompatible operating systems and programming languages, a veritable tower of Babel. Yet, software is as failure prone as ever. Software disaster stories are now making the evening news on a regular basis. Does
Does decent formatting mean nothing to you? (Score:4, Informative)
You moderators ought to be ashamed of yourselves.
Re:Does decent formatting mean nothing to you? (Score:2, Funny)
DEAR GOD I KNOW
Cause slashdot moderation is the most important thing in your daily lives.
ASHAMED. COMPLETELY ASHAMED.
AShamed - Feeling inferior, inadequate, or embarrassed
You should feel inferior.
Inadequate!
EMBARRASSED!
Re:Does decent formatting mean nothing to you? (Score:4, Insightful)
Modding a post up again is easier than looking for a post that hasn't been modded yet. "Me too" mods don't take thought, and that's why they're so popular. Finding the unspotted nuggets of gold hidden in the dross is much more rewarding, but it does take work and that's why most moderators never even try. If they did, we'd have less posts modded to +5, and a lot more at +2 and +3.
Re:My question... (Score:3, Insightful)
And how many people will post arguements that are entirely nonsensical.
They aren't cutting the cost. They are redirecting it.
AND!
I assure you that this funding is no where near the funding of the Iraqi war.
Which had nothing to do with 9/11.
So
Facts about Iraq and Al Qaeda (Score:2, Interesting)
2. To where did Ramzi Yousef flee after the first WTC attack? Iraq.
3. Where did Zarqawi go to hide after he got chased out of Afghanistan after 9/11/2001? Iraq.
In what country is Salman Pak [google.com], a training camp where teams of four or five terrorists were taught to hijack civilian airliners with small knives? Iraq.
Go ahead, keep fooling yourself that there was no connection between Saddam
Re:Facts about Iraq and Al Qaeda (Score:2)
Not this Hoax again, I love you neocons and your relentless pursuit of the muddying of the waters.
If you throw enough bullshit at an arguement it becomes a wash eh?
Pathetic.
Re:My question... (Score:2, Insightful)
So you would give up your child's life to secure Fallujah?
So you condone lies as justification for the poorer class of America to go fight for what you deem important.
Social Security and Medicare cannot come before security.
Not only should it come before security, WHAT ABOUT THE IRAQ WAR IS SECURITY?
The security of the USA and the world has been better now that Saddam is in jail and a free democratic government in Iraq is formed.
Wrong, the security of the US is
Re:God Protect Us (Score:3, Insightful)