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"

keep proper time

[rice_burners_suck]

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.

Re:For a nerdy, tech-loving toy freak...

[smilindog2000]

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.

efficacy

[theminionofgozer]

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.