OT: The Truth About DARPA

Hi All,

I am on the downslope of disillusionment regarding the truth of US- Government-funded research. I could pick any from a broad array of such insitutions and tell you of utterly-perplexing interactions I have had with them, but I decided to focus on DARPA, since, as we know, they were the original financial supporters of the Internet, it is claimed, and I do research with Internet protocols.

I am beginning to think, no matter how truthful the claim of support is, it was probably more luck than anything. Bob Kahn et al probably squeeze out a solution by the Grace of God, and others beyond him had to fight massive intransigence and political battles to help IPv4 survive. I say this after experiences over the last 5.5 months interacting with them and other US agencies. They claim to want breakthrough technology that is "high-impact", "revolutionary", "moderate-to-high risk". And they spend enormous amounts of money supposedly funding such research each year. They issue solicitations on the the SBIR/STTR programs. They have Broad Agency Announcements. They accept unsolicitied proposals. They employ Ph.d's whose bio's indicate deep experience in their respective areas of governance. And they have those cool demos on the Military Channel.

Looking at all this, you would think that, if they had been searching for the solution to X for 15 years, and someone came to them and offered tangile proof of S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z, they would be enthralled.

NOT!!!!

It is a bit hard to explain the experience, in mere words, so I have created this fictitious dialogue which is similar to the kind I have had.

Researcher: "Hello?"

DARPA: "Hi, yes, I am here."

Researcher: "Hi, I was told to contact you regarding research I have been doing for 15 years. I am aware of your SBIR/STTR, BAA's, etc...but I am contacting you directly to preempt problems that might occur if I follow those paths."

DARPA: "Ok, I am listening."

Researcher: "I noticed that much of your research involves getting away from steam engines. For example, you have 7 outstanding solicitations on alternative to steam alone, not to mention 11 others on reducing rust ."

DARPA: "Yes, that's true."

Researcher: "What if I told you that I had a machine that not only solved that rust problem you have with the steam, etc., but also validated your current push toward petrol-based fuel, in an engine that actually runs. I call it an internal combustion engine."

DARPA: "Uh...not sure what you mean. This is a research organization, you do realize?"

Researcher: "Yes, I know. I do research in engines, the same kind you do and write about each year. Now I know that you have spent $ 225US million in this area already, and...uh...you do not yet have what it is you want. I would like to have the opportunity to give you those things, plus a few extra, like something I call a fuel injector. Then there are oxygen sensors, overhead-cam, etc."

DARPA: "Overhead what? You realize..we are are under a a federal mandate to do fundamental research only?"

Researcher: "Yes."

DARPA: "We do research in advanced engine systems."

Researcher: "Yes."

DARPA: "And my group does research, in particular, in non-steam engines that should provide advanced capabilities in the next 15-20 years for the warfighter..."

Researcher: "Yes, I know."

DARPA: "So how can I help you?"

Researcher: "Well, I would like to demonstrate to you solutions to some of the problems you have."

DARPA: "Have you seen our web site? Why don't you go and read our solicitations...they are located at WWW-DOT..."

Researcher: "Yes, yes, I have read them, all of them, several times each."

(Researcher pauses for a moment, goes to web page of Program Manager he is talking to, reads his bio, discovers that PM did Ph.D on governors in steam engine. Presumes that if research can speak intelligently about governors for 2-3 minutes, that will break the current impasse and mental disconnect)

Researcher: "I was just reading your bio. I see you did your Ph.D. on governors. Was that challenging?"

DARPA:: "Yes, quite challenging."

Researcher: "You must have had problems achieving correct control loop with the analog components you had."

(dialogue continues, Researcher eventually convinces PM of merit of electronic control of feedback, etc, and that Researcher is at least experienced with fundamentals of feedback.)

Researcher: "So you can see that, if you had not only that, but other fixes, including a fuel that can actually be extracted from petrol which I call 'gasoline', that could be of some benefit to your research efforts."

DARPA: "Look, it's obivous that you have a lot of interest in this area, but I am not sure you have reached the right organization. We do fundamental research here. Maybe you could sell your product to a steam engine company. We actually have a few of them on contract now. We also have SBIR, STTR, and unsolicited proposals. Have you tried SBIR?"

Researcher: "Well, not yet. I noticed that your SBIR solicitations focus on a relatively small problem, like an improved ventilator, or wood pulverizers, etc. There does not seem to be anything for an entire engine. My worry is that..if I were to write about an entire engine, there might be a bit of conceptual disconnect with the PM managing the solicitation...as the program managers are expecting proposals for narrowly focused problems.."

DARPA: "Well, I don't know what to tell you. These are the programs we have available. If you had something that addressed and immediate need of ours, then perhaps there would be something I could do, but nothing you have said so far has convinced me of that."

Researcher: "Allow me to approach this from a different angle, if you will. I am reading here, this article in Big Bad Important Defense Industry Magazine. There is a Navy Admiral claiming that the greatest advance in military technology would be a not-yet-explored type of engine, perhaps running on fuel that 'derives from oil', and that $5.6US billion is being allocated over next 10 years to DARPA to pursue this technology. So I guess I am saying that, I can help you achieve that, if you will allow me a chance."

DARPA: (impatiently) "What is it exactly that you want?"

Researcher: "I would like the opportunity to demonstrate to you, the vision in that article realized, in a rough form, rough because I do not have the luxury to get all the components perfect, but certainly enough to move forward to a more thorough review. It actually runs..burns fuel..I even have something called a catalytic converter for reducing emissions. I would like whoever is interested in seeing it done, whether that be you, or one of your colleagues, to allow me

15 minutes to show you, via over the Internet." (of course, Internet would not be ready yet..but you get the idea).

DARPA: "We *DON'T DO DEMOS! We do research!!!!"

So this has been my experience, more or less, with the US Federal governement regarding funded research. :))

Yours might be different. Contradictions and concurrences welcome.

Note of course, that what I offered DARPA was not so advanced as I imply using the analogy above, but certainly enough to warrant a look, IMO.

-Le Chaud Lapin-

Reply to
Le Chaud Lapin
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I can sympathize with you. I have friend that always worked to solve a problem and found that many organizations are set up to get funding, spend all the money while doing just enough -Research- to get the second tier funding. Then repeat. Ya, "We *DON'T DO DEMOS! We do research!!!!" Mike

Reply to
amdx

Haven't worked with that particular institution, but my experiences are much the same.

Now, it's important to realize that 'research' means that one does *not* know what one is doing. If you do, it's not research. Just trace back to some of the greatest researchers in hitory:

- Newton did not know what the outcome of his investigations would be, that anecdotal day he got hit by an apple.

- Einstein did not know what the outcome of his inquiries would be, that day he walked along the canals, watchig waves coming off barges.

Unfortunately, there are only so many Newtons and Einsteins, who push the envelope on behalf of mankind, in this world. And there are only so many places the envelope can be pushed at any given time.

So if we relax the expectation just a *tiny* bit; that one should not push *Mankind's* envelope, but rather the *personal* envelope, then 'research' is a far less daunting task. But again, if you have already skilled people onboard, research is still not easy: Individual researchers need to keep up with state-of-the-art. Expensive. Takes time.

However, having stepped down from Mankind level of ambitions, it's an obvious corollary that if one hires people who have no skills at all, then 'research' is fast, easy, and can be done within schedules and inside budgets: 'Researchers' only have to read standard textbooks. And write mediocre papers in obscure journals.

In the end: The goal of the research institutions is to find and hire the people who knows the least about what they are supposed to be doing. That's true 'research'.

Oh well.

Rune

Reply to
Rune Allnor

-- snip -->

Because any government program is, perforce, run by bureaucrats, and bureaucrats (a) never get fired for saying "no", and (b) often get fired for saying "yes".

The advantage (and I think it's there, and I think it's worth it) to government-sponsored research isn't what they say it is, but it is none the less manifold: it provides a pool of frustrated talent ready to jump ship to productive private projects, it provides a pool of mediocre researchers to teach university classes, it occasionally actually results in some real advance that would never happen ever with funding from the steam-engine companies, it indirectly funds companies like The Math Works and efforts like open-source development, and more.

But as you so admirably point out, it doesn't meet it's _stated_ goal.

--
www.wescottdesign.com
Reply to
Tim Wescott

DARPA is actually a pretty good outfit. I've worked on DARPA projects at various times over the years, and the following have always been true:

(1) The program managers are good technical people who Get It. (2) The goals are insanely ambitious, but some reasonable fraction of them actually get met.

I've never had an engineering manager who was able to get the same level of commitment out of his people that DARPA gets from its grantees.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal
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Reply to
Phil Hobbs

Nice analysis!

It reminds me of the type of projects where program managers get frustrated because someone is hoping to do research in a fundamental field of science, and the Senators are angry because the scientist cannot pend down the exact instant and exact cost, +/- $50,000, of the cost of the research.

Manage those monkeys!

-Le Chaud Lapin-

Reply to
Le Chaud Lapin

You prayed in the wrong pew. If you have a credible idea for research and experiment, talk to DARPA. If you have a solution, seek venture capital.

Jerry

--
Engineering is the art of making what you want from things you can get.
¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯
Reply to
Jerry Avins

Well, I have to disagree here, not so much with #1, but definitely #2. The fraction in my field is horrifically small.

I work in computer networking. After an embarrassingly long time thinking in this space, I know where all the pieces of the puzzle are, if not exactly how they should all be shaped. DARPA has already spent $11US billion of a $37US billion program trying to solve problems in this area:

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...most of which are solvable by a team of less than 10 people, IMO. They are over budget $2.3 billion.

Yes, they get it. They get the problem. But that does not mean they get the solution. In my experience, if you call up a DARPA PM, who has been trying to find a way to purify water for past 25 years, and declare to him that you have a machine called a distiller, that is far beyond the cloth-sieve method, and will get rid of ~all~ the sediment, as well as other impurities, he will ~not~ jump for joy and say, "Oh my God, we've spent $250 million already trying to do this....your claims sound a bit outrageous, but it's ovbious from our conversation that have deep insight into this space....do you have a demo we can see...?"

Instead, he will say something like...

"Well...it's June, and I already have several contractors working on the water purification problem, and distillers is not a part of the solution, and if you can show us how your new technology can make the holes of the purifying cloth significantly smaller, reducing the average particle side of the sediment that permeates the cloth, I might have something for you. Also, if your stuff is really that good, I would strongly suggest a prime contractor, who will take your work, see how it fits into our existing programs, and feed it back to us. They have to sign N.D.A's, so you don't have to worry about the big, massive, $15 billion-dollar-company eating you alive and stealing your distiller, even though it is a problem everyone in the purified water space has been seeking and wanting for more than a decade. Otherwise, I have nothing to offer you."

Depends on the predisposition of the engineers.

I think one should make a distinction between people who are prone to think versus those who are prone to do. Thinkers think. Doers do. More or less. So, for example, at my last Fortune 500 employer, there was not one person in my entire group of 60 who was prone to think, the kind of thinking where you would be put in a room with a stack of blank paper and pens and told to come out with the answer or else. Most people seem to abhor that situation. They are uncomfortable with the idea that there is no crank to turn, no buttons to push, that the path to the solution is entirely unspecified and indefinite, that the solution, *if* it is found, will essentially have been synthesized out of thin air. So it's no surprise that they must be motivated to be creative.

By contrast, there are other people who would grab the pen and paper with great satisfaction, and ask to be left alone an extra hour per workday, so as to do a good job and generate a good solution. Ironically, the uncertainty and risk of failure that causes such most discomfort in the first group is a major part of what provides satisfaction for the 2nd group.

So big difference in these two types.

The problem with DARPA is that they have managed to institutionalize creativity. They profess to support the second kind of person, but in reality, they give all the money to the first kind, and because it is so rare to encounter the first kind, they have no mechanism, no office, no procedure, to accommodate them. It is also an unfortunate fact of human nature that, when the solution is finally found, s/he who found it is well-regarded, so the first kind group, through nature process, endeavor to create an environment where it appears that the soulution is not coming from the second group, but from the first group, or at the very least, that the second group could not have possibly been successful without the first group. The victim is the thing itself...the solution. It is delayed, sometimes by decades, because the problem solver must struggle through a minefield of all that is destestable of human nature.

The reason it appears that what I am writing is wrong (because, after all, we do have missiles and lasers), has to do with the sheer amount of money available.

If, in a group of 1000 "researchers", there are 17 of the second kind and 983 of the first kind, and DARPA spends $1US billion on the problem, that would mean that 17 of those would still get their $1US million each, more than sufficient to produce the result if left unfettered [which is not the case, but...]. Then, DARPA gets the result, the academy sees the result, the industry sees the result, the public sees the result, Congress sees the result, and everyone presumes the program must be effective, because it produces results. Somewhere, buried in all this, is some poor bastard of a scientist, who is 100% certain that the spacecraft will explode if the O-rings are not fixed, but the other 983 tag-alongs refute him, until it actually explodes, at which point the whole process repeats itself.

If there is any doubt that this is how it is, I suggest the following experiment, which I just did 1 hour ago with a different US Gov organization:

Find a problem that DARPA has been trying to solve for 10+ years and has spent at least $100US million trying to solve. Call the PM of the program and claim that you have most of the solution worked out. Watch what happens.

The PM will not have a technical conversation with you about the problems in the slightest. Instead, he will say something like, "We have large contractors working on that. I will put you int touch with a couple of them so you get in bed with one of them. It is the only reasonable way you will get any money from us in a relatively short period of time." (within a few months).

-Le Chaud Lapin-

Reply to
Le Chaud Lapin

Look: if you have a good idea, ask DARPA to help you instantiate it. If you have a good method, develop it commercially. DARPA doesn't do demos, startup venture capitalists do.

Jerry

--
Engineering is the art of making what you want from things you can get.
¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯
Reply to
Jerry Avins

What programs have you worked on, and what were the actual problems? You have lots of metaphors but not a lot of details.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal
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Reply to
Phil Hobbs

Most other countries on this planet don't have anything that comes even close to DARPA but they wish they had.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/
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Reply to
Joerg

.

ts

ue:

I have yet to work on any actual DARPA programs. I never get past the front gate, although, in all fairness, they have their unsolicited proposals program, which would be ideal in theory, if not for the 2+ year delay and large risk of rejection. Based on my experiences so far, I have no doubt that I would be rejected.

As far as the actual problem, broadly, it's computer networking. I have been thinking about computer networks/distributed systems for so long now, I think I know what the issues are and where all the pieces should go. This includes problems of security, mobility, naming, numbering, addressing, large-scale multicast, access control, auto- configuration, etc. There is an issue with performance of modular reduction in signing operation of asymmetric crypto that I have no generalized solution for, but neither does anyone else (that I know of). As for the rest, I think I would do OK under scrutiny by a panel of experts.

With respect to DARPA, the number of programs they have funded and will fund relative to computer networking is simply huge.

Here are a few at DARPA's Strategic Technology Office:

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Here is another with DARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office :

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Ironically, Bob Kahn both worked at IPTO in younger years, and later became its director:

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One might ask, "What does it mean to solve the 'computer networking problem'?"

IMO, it would be partially solved if one:

Created a system, whereby a 1 million nodes communicate, each containing multiple network adapters of various kinds and speed,

990,000 of which are mobile, using a mismatch of independent signing/ veiling of data, where 500,000 of which received multicast stream from one laptop computer over continuously topilogically-optimal paths, itself mobile, supplying voice and video, using links that are owned by political adversary, where there is access control to various resource in the network that 60-year-old with moderate computer literacy can configure, understand, and be certain of its correctness; and took 20-year-old college student 1 month to write using a free compiler downloaded off the Internet.

This is what US Department of Defense would like but does not have. It is also what pretty much everyone in the field of computer networking wants, but puts together with patchwork on an ad-hoc basis.

I asked NSF if I made a proposal for a clean-slate stack that would provide solutions to the problems above (the modular reduction issue not withstanding), and whether my proposal would be rejected. After some back-and-forth, I was told, "NSF does not 'buy' the clean slate protocol stack effort.", so yes, I would be rejected. However, there is another application which I offered, which cannot possibily exist without a clean-slate protocol stack, which, strangely, they expressed interest in, not seeing the necessity of one to have the other.

In any case, a search on Google seems to indicate that they do, indeed, like the idea of clean-slate:

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...to the tune of $300US million in one case:

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Of course, some of the $300 million would be used for new networking hardware from Cisco and friends, but NSF still plans to fund basic research.

So NSF likes clean slate protoocl stacks, just not from a USENET nut who thinks he might have some insight.

Finally, for those of you with DSP background, you might find the following amusing. Back in 1997, the Joint Tactical Radio System program was created by DoD to basically eliminate incompatibility between DoD's various 30+ radios:

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It turned out to be a disaster. It's 2009, and they stil do not have it. DoD actually threatened Boeing with a stop work order back in 2005 because U.S. Senate and even DoD's own people were getting tired of playing games:

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One of the reasons it has been a disaster is that someone got the idea that if you used software defined radios, all the various radio systems will work together in "harmony". Of course this is false. Saying "work together" is meaningless. There is a big difference between using SDR to get sloppy voice from one walkie-talkie mic to another walkie-talkie speaker, and a full-blown packetized network with inter-adapter frames guarded by low BER and CRC's. It took about

3-4 years for this to sink in the minds of the generals at toop, and be generally accepted. After it became accepted, everyone was in a really bad mood, and decided to start over, but September 11th came. Now we have two wars, and DoD was forced to shell out $11 billion total until 2006 to use, yet again, old radios, and enormous unexpected costs [they thought they would be using networked radios by now]. The Government Accountability Office has been saying for years that DoD is getting duped by the contractors who manufacture the radios, but DoD won't listen. Also, somoeone or some group of people has convinced DoD that COTS components are bad because the security is "weaker" if you use Wi-Fi versus military frequencies. The highest frequency they are allowed is < 2GHz, btw.

At present, DoD/DARPA/NRL/AFRL/etc. have no better solutions to the security, mobility, etc. problems than anyone else. A lot of people are really angry that we are 12 years into the program, and the most that they have is a semi-stable repository of code for SDR's. But the grand vision of interoperability using network-centric technology...they are no where near that.

So that's my beef at this point. I am waiting to see whether DoD will allow a demonstration of my technology or relegate me to the kook pot.

So far, NSF has repeatedly reminded me that they only do advanced, fundamental research, implying that I have no idea what that is bases on my conversations with them.

-Le Chaud Lapin-

Reply to
Le Chaud Lapin

About a month ago, I asked a PM if one of their active contractors had made the same claims I was making about computer networking, and wanted opportunity for a demo to prove it, would they get it, and he said,

"Most likely, yes."

-Le Chaud Lapin-

Reply to
Le Chaud Lapin

In other words, they'd believe them but not you.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal
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Reply to
Phil Hobbs

Well, if you want money to improve, develop and/or build your gadget then write it up as research..even if you have worn that road out to a frazzle and built an automated self-guiding highway nearby. Talk only about the things they know and do; say you need $200K for research assistants to just compile past research and $2,000,000 to do what they "want" namely rut the road deeper. Then spend some on those research assistants to CYA and the rest on what *you* need; sell the result to that Navy Admiral. Learn how to lie, like those in Congress etc.

Reply to
Robert Baer

DARPA has done some very useful promotion of compound semiconductors.

John

Reply to
John Larkin

Did you chose "wrong" agency?

since, as we

Did you chose "wrong" agency because you selected on "wrong" criterium [choice of singular *INTENTIONAL*]

Elsewhere in thread OP wrote: > I work in computer networking. After an embarrassingly long time > thinking in this space, I know where all the pieces of the puzzle are, > if not exactly how they should all be shaped.

and

Are you trying too much a shotgun loaded with buckshot approach, hoping...?

Is there a *PARTICULAR* command within army, navy, air force, marines that your proposed solution could be deemed "mission critical"?

Would your approach expedite mission of CIA, FBI ... ?

Would your approach affect costs of a government agency so that GAO would be contact point?

Would your approach benefit civilian agencies such as NOAA, NASA, NIH? These are paths that might have LOCAL ("all politics are local") impact.

Reply to
Richard Owlett

et

r
n

:)) Thanks for the laugh.

I was recently told by someone who signs the checks in another part of DoD that DoD can occasionally become victims of their own contractors. The contractors know how to play the game well, and even though it is likely that the contractor will not produce, the choices are limited because the contractor will cry foul, and if contractor is really important to DoD...

-Le Chaud Lapin-

Reply to
Le Chaud Lapin

.
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I don't think that DARPA doesn't run the JTRS program office. I'm almost certain that the PEO is managed out of OSD.

Reply to
stanp

I have contacted several major ones (DARPA, NSF, Army, Navy, Air Force, NIST, few national labs, etc.)

e,

.?

Not intentionally. I never expected to engage the US Government. I was expecting to follow the commercial path only, and if something came later with DoD, fine. If not, fine. But the synergy was too great to ignore.

The problems that DoD are trying to solve, as well as many other government agencies, are actually the same 10 problems, roughly, recycyled, just like building an internal combustion engine in age of steam engine would involve solving the same N problems, recycled, whatever N is. As big a challenge it seems to "normalized TCP/IP", it's really not (the mod reduction performance issue notwithstanding). A full-blown engine, network protocol stack in this case, that addresses these 10 major networking problems simultaneously, might be roughly 1MB of compiled C++ code on a typical Windows box. This excludes a configuration GUI.

The reason that so much research money is being wasted is, IMO, precisely because no one has taken a wholistic approach. Typically they will attack mobility, or mulitcast, or security, or access control, or routing, or some other issue individually, and incrementally. They strive for backward compatibility when backward compatibility is entirely inappropriate. IMO, it is far easier to step back and survey the entire field at once. After all, we at lesat know the answer to the question of whether there will be more than 10,000 computers in the world. The answer is YES! We also know a lot of other things now. We have massively poweful tools at our disposal, like compiler toolchains that can handle a million lines of code and not miss a step. We have UNICODE, good ciphers, fast data structures, real multi-threading, lightning fast network adapters, storage space, etc. We have a lot to work with to get it right.

Yes, there are several on the DARPA STO page:

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Then there is Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS):

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...where I could help above the link layer. They have other issues below link layer.

NIST has an entire department working on Public Key Infrastructures which I think I could help with:

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NSF is trying to give $300 million to

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not to find the solution but to build a new "mini-lab-Internet-thingy" to find the solution, which is a bit weird, if you think about it, because it implies that the existing Internet is not good enough as a lab. I strongly disagree. With the exception of multicast, and maybe a few miscellaneous problems with RF-assisted fast hand-over during mobility, there is no reason to spend even $1 million on new hardware. Also, if you look at the vision of GENI, the fallacy of approach will reveal itself - they are proposing to build a shared experimental facility that allows simultaneous experimentation by dispersed and disjoint groups of researchers, which of course requires some type of security and access control. So their position is circuitous - they are claiming they need the facility, to solve a group of problems, the solution of which will more or less be required to create the facility:

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There is the Military Network Protocol for DARPA:

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Essentially, what they want is to be able to give preference to the "fat pipe" entering/exiting a military based based on rank, so that lieutenant doing video chat or whatever would be booted by a colonel needing that pipe. This problem is best solved by first solving the identity problem. These guys actually said that the solution does not necessarily have to be compatible with TCP/IP, so you would think that my clean-slate stack would intrigue them. Not so.

Yes, Homeland Security too, I believe.

I talked to GAO several times. They generally in agreement that JTRS, in particular, is a massive exercise in waste (several US billion). They seemed powerless to do anything about it beyond writing (objective) papers, one of which caused Senate appropriations committee to insist on a gross overhaul of its management.

NOAA and NASA yes, not sure about NIH, although if NIH is trying to solve the "personal medical records" problem, that gets back to the identity problem, and maybe file system problem, so in that case yes.

I think the relevance is there. But you would be suprised at the nature of the conversations I have with program managers supposedly looking for solutions to these problems.

I was told yesterday by a DARPA funding rep that my apprehension about letting an existing DoD contractor at as an intermediary between me and DoD is warranted despite what DARPA PM's say about the contractor being "good guys". Her exact words were, "...at least you're not naive."

A program manager at DARPA also once said, "Beware of contrators on the West Coast. Some of them are hawkish."

An Air Force rep said yesterday,

"Yes, you're right. There is no facility in the entire US government, where if someone had a truly revoltionary breakthrough, you'd be able to demonstrate it without going through these issues. I talked to a gentleman earlier who I think has deep insight into an extreme form of computing, but I have no way to help him. What we really need is an organization where people who have demonstrable work to be able to prove it, without interference by bureaucracy or especially by prime contractors, maybe something like an internal brain bench that does nothing but evaluate new ideas all day. We have too many rules, really."

So, OTOH, everyone seems to know the game, yet simultaneously encourage it, which, in all fairness, I believe is necessary given that the system has been fouled by self-interests (large prime contractors who ride on the innovation of little people, for example).

The ultimate victim is the end-result itself and massive amounts of taxpayer money.

-Le Chaud Lapin-

Reply to
Le Chaud Lapin

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