DARPA deals with cutting edge technology. Like the first packet switching network, telepathic spies, and cars that can drive themselves.

By 1975 ARPANET was no longer cutting edge pure R&D but rather a growing production system. As such control & funding of ARPANET was transfered to the Defense Communication Agency. No matter how massively sucessful ARPANET was (or could have been) DARPA was never going to fund it forever. That isn't how DARPA works. It is a incubator for technology. Those technologies are either abandoned (like telepathic spies) or move on to production systems (like APRANET).

Similarly today DARPA is doing research into autonomous vehicles. However someday when those vehicles are in production DARPA will move on to other projects.

I grant you research into telepathic spies wasn't the most productive but is a misnomer to say DARPA abandoned ARPANET.

ARPANET remained functional until 1990 (although by 1983 the military nodes had broken away to form the isolated MilNET).

It was the first, and being first, was best,
but now we lay it down to ever rest.
Now pause with me a moment, shed some tears.
For auld lang syne, for love, for years and years
of faithful service, duty done, I weep.
Lay down thy packet, now, O friend, and sleep.

  -- Requiem of the ARPANET

The point is the liquid can be both actively deployed and passively used to mark fluid.

Also a hybrid system could be used. Imagine a safe which contains liquid between layers of glass on inside of safe. Drilling the safe, cracks layer and releases mist over property in safe and person stealing it.

Nothing is foolproof it is just another layer in a layered defense.

Because Alarms don't follow thieves.

Defense in depth. I doubt any company is going to remove their CCTV and alarms but this provides yet another layer of defense. This layer also follows the theif & stolen property. Better yet use them in conjuction. Tag property w/ the marker and also have mister which goes off when alarm sounds.

It is all about defense in depth.

As DNA technology gets cheaper and more advanced who knows in 20-30 years Police dept might have a device they swab the marker, put it on a slide and in ten minutes it comes back w/ a code which can be used to lookup the owner/purchaser of the liquid.

This is little more than billions of serial numbers in liquid solution. Why is current property tagged w/ serial numbers and property logs kept? To aid in recovery and assist in criminal conviction. This is just a liquid owner number which happens to be difficult to remove completely. Get 99.9% of it oops there are still millions of owner ID on your tools, clothes, car, etc.

Nobody except you is claiming it is an "auto win" button for crime and property recovery.

You spraying someone elses property is stupid because you don't have chain of evidence indicating you legally own said property.

It is the combination of property records + marking liquid + company w/ high level of trust (if smart water company trust is worthless so is the product) that increases likelihood of recovery.

Sometimes it isn't even about criminal charges. Stolen property ends up in pawn shops all the time missing the serial number. Now if it has been sprayed w/ DNA tagged liquid then one can verify the owner of the property and return it.

Invoice + police record + smart DNA tag record + stolen property w/ smart DNA tag = pretty good chance that is the original owner.

vs
Stolen property missing serial number = never recovered/returned.

Crime rates in US are at 30 year low. So what is this about crime is too high?

Perception due to 24/7 media exposure is that crime rates are high. Then again reality doesn't really care about perception.

Irony
Definition: Someone bashing DARPA on the internet, a global network that grew out of the ARPANET project funded by DARPA.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET

Hey cheer up Mr. Smith you will be the first man on mars. The bad news is you will die on impact when your capsule crashes into the planet at 40 times the speed of sound. Budgets cuts and all that we can't afford to slow you down, or bring the supplies needed for you to survive and return. Nobody every said making history was going to be easy.

Also we haven't really explored the moon. Frozen water likely exists in craters which are continually in shadow. Water = oxygen & hydrogen.

If Columbus had explored as much as we have explored the moon he would have landed, collected few seashells, walked around on the beech a little bit, took some sketches of the inland areas then returned home and never came back.

No AMD makes Radeon. ATI was acquired. Accept this thing called reality. AMD kept the brand seperate a while (despite ATI not actually existing) because is was worth more as a separate brand. Times change. As AMD gets more and more into hybrid APU it makes less sense to have a separate fake company name on some (but not all) of its video cards.

The line between CPU & GPU will become very blury over the next decade. AMD wants you to know they make it all. Dedicated CPU, dedicated GPU, low power APU, integrated graphics, medium power APU coupled w/ a dedicated GPU, etc. All made by AMD and all play nice together. I am sure you can see how that is more valuable from a branding standpoint. Given ATI has existed as a brand name only for nearly 3 years now it makes sense to retire it.

If your old bank gets acquried by a new bank and eventually the name changes do you still keep calling it by the old name a decade later just to be an ass and confuse people.

"This is a First Union dammit. It was a First Union when I was born, and it will be a First Union when I die. I don't give a damn that the brand name changed 9 years ago."

Yeah I don't get it.

Open Office is fine for some stuff but when it chokes on VBA most business aren't going to adopt it.

Our company (despite the objections of many) tried and it was a nightmare. Lots of excel docs for reports all had to be redone, sometimes finding a replacement functionality was difficult or time consuming. Later the company realized that many of our partners continued to use MS Office w/ xlsm files. Ooops. We had to start saying "please send it without VBA macros". Some did, most didn't. No way to read those except w/ Office. So the company bought a few licenses. After 18 months of pretending it would work they ended up purchasing new licenses for Office.

Still some people will go "LALALALALA Open Office is just as good". The zealots don't realize that sticker price isn't everything. If it was then there would only be one car in the US and it would be Hyundai Accent ($10,760 retail). The $500 the company "saved" by not purchasing Office likely wasted as much as $5,000 in productivity for some employees. I spent hours getting stuff to work in OO when it already worked fine in MS Office.

There is no free lunch. TCO and productivity is what matters and even with a $0 license OO still has cost.

Anyways now it is a 50/50 split between troll and flamebait.

and it still wouldn't handle complex VBA no matter how many times you install it.

Open Office is a toy. If you want to manually do a spreadsheet for home budget, or send mom a letter sure use Open Office however (so far) open office lacks the necessary functionality to replace MS Office.

When one consider that Office is $400 - $500 per license it is "half off".

Also I think it is more aimed at small business.

Fortune 500 can drop $500 a license per user no big deal.

A startup could preserve capital by paying $72 per year.

I use iDrive. Not sure if there is a better service.

iDrive deletes deleted files from the backup also however it has an option to turn off automatic sync (which I do). When you manually sync it warns you of deleted files and asks what to do.

So if I accidentally delete a file I can restore local copy from the archive rather than delete archive to match local.

Sadly if you turn on auto-sync it won't warn or propt you (working very similar to carbonite except the "grace period" is 30 days).

I don't know if there is a better solution than I drive. It just happened to be what I used and it works for what I need.

I fail. I will fix my own mistake.

Hard drive companies often use term platter ambiguously.

A platter has two sides thus can two surfaces to access data from.

Sometimes they will refer to a disc as 4 platter meaning 4 physical platter and 8 surfaces. Sometimes as 4 platters meaning 4 surfaces and 2 platters.

2.5" drives tend to be 1 or 2 platters (up to 4 surfaces & heads).

3.5" drives tend to be 2 to 4 platters (up to 8 surfaces & heads). 5 platters & 10 heads aren't very common anymore.

Still this drive does appear to have the highest density of any physical disk so far.

3TB = / 8 heads-surfaces = 375GB per surface.

375GB * 8 / 4 square inches on 3.5"* drive = min areal density of 750Gb/in^2.**

* 3.5" drive actually have 3" platter roughly 4 square inches of surface area when you exclude the spindle.

** Areal density is likely higher due to short stroking and manufacture marketing rounding drive size to an expected size. i.e. no selling 3.27GB drives. However at a min it is 75Gb/i2 density.

In theory but not so much practice.

2.5" drives can hold 3 platters. Most 2.5" drives are 2 or 3 platters.

3.5" drives "CAN" hold up to 5 platters however yields tend to be poor, failure rates higher, and a 5 platter 1TB drive will be outperformed by a 3 platter 1TB drive (higher density). Thus in reality most 3.5" drives contain 2 or 3 platters.