I went through this at one company where software was installed to allow the managers to monitor the Windows desktop of any employee. My manager came running over to remind me that I shouldn't be looking at Amazon on company's time. And then he saw that I had a breakfast burrito from the roach coach in my hand, which meant I was on my break and could damn well look at Amazon. I told him to bugger off.
This was easily defeated because the company next door had an opened wireless access point. We just browsed the Internet on our PDA's (this was ten years ago). Needless to say, with management like this, the company went bankrupt.
You can deliver more wireless bandwidth to users. Are you willing to pay big bucks to upgrade the backend equipment (i.e., routers and switches) for more bandwidth?
*crickets*
Why compare Sega to Atari? Atari itself doesnt exist, its just a name, its been bought and resold, reused by new companies so many times. No serious original Atari IP remains.
The original Atari disappeared in the 1980's.
French-based Infogrames bought Hasbro Interactive that owned the Atari IP and renamed itself Atari in the 2000's. I worked at the "new" Atari for six years, splitting my time between being a tester and a lead tester. They tried to "converge" with licensed Hollywood properties (i.e., "Enter The Matrix"), gone broke during the dot com bust, and sold all the studios that they paid two to four times what they were really worth. Today they are recycling games from the old Atari IP as mobile games.
Meh...
No, they fund things that have a military application, some of which are interesting. But it's not like the good old days, when they'd fund things that were interesting, regardless of military value.
If you're going to go around reading Wikipedia pages, you may as well finish reading them before citing them.
Here's what the very same Wikipedia page says, one paragraph after the one you quoted:
The ARPANET incorporated distributed computation (and frequent re-computation) of routing tables. This was a major contribution to the good survivability that the ARPANET had, in the face of significant destruction - even by a nuclear attack. Such auto-routing was technically quite challenging to construct at the time. The fact that it was incorporated into the early ARPANET made many believe that this had been a design goal.
The ARPANET was in fact designed to survive subordinate-network losses, but the principal reason was that the switching nodes and network links were unreliable, even without any nuclear attacks. About the resource scarcity that spurred the creation of the ARPANET, Charles Herzfeld, ARPA Director (1965â"1967), said:
The ARPANET was not started to create a Command and Control System that would survive a nuclear attack, as many now claim. To build such a system was, clearly, a major military need, but it was not ARPA's mission to do this; in fact, we would have been severely criticized had we tried.
Which agrees nicely with what I said in my earlier comment.
You then went on to say:
Also nobody was talking about WHY DARPA funded it.But it's good to know in your universe that's the only place with money.
No, they weren't the only place with money. But ARPA was founded in 1958, and it wasn't until 1973 that they were required to only spend money on defense-related projects. Before that, they had a habit of giving money to all sorts of interesting projects. JCR Licklider, an obscure, yet tremendously important person in computing history, wanted to build computer networks and was a higher-up at ARPA in the 60's. His successor was Ivan Sutherland, who should need no introduction, and Sutherland brought in Bob Taylor, who finally got a network funded and built. Since you like Wikipedia, here's a passage from Taylor's entry:
Among the computer projects that ARPA supported was time-sharing, in which many users could work at terminals to share a single large computer. Users could work interactively instead of using punched cards or punched tape in a batch processing style. Taylor's office in the Pentagon had a terminal connected to time-sharing at MIT, a terminal connected to the Berkeley Timesharing System at the University of California at Berkeley, and a third terminal to the System Development Corporation in Santa Monica, California. He noticed each system developed a community of users, but was isolated from the other communities.
Taylor hoped to build a computer network to connect the ARPA-sponsored projects together, if nothing else to let him communicate to all of them through one terminal.
When ARPA got out of the business of spending money on interesting work, the National Science Foundation was supposed to pick up the slack, but this never happened. While I can understand how some people might cast aspersions on projects that used military funding, even if they're not meant for military applications, the money spends well enough.
The initial internet was meant to be a military communication system that could operate when large numbers of links were destroyed.
No it wasn't; that's just an urban legend. The ARPAnet was a way of allowing researchers to share resources. Thus, a user in San Francisco could use a computer in Los Angeles, and wouldn't even need a new, dedicated terminal to do it. Its resilience has more to do with the poor state of telecommunications at the time demanding it, and certain design features that allowed for a useful combination of efficiency and flexibility.
As for why it was funded by DARPA, that was where there was money.
They probably have gluten-free lunches there though.
FTFY
Is the problem that we don't have the submersible technology, or robotic technology to do the finishing work, or is there something else I'm missing?
Some drunk driving a motorboat with the anchor dragging above the ocean floor will latch on to above ocean floor tunnel, causing a massive leak and/or damaging the boat. This is why it's better to build the tunnel in bedrock.
All seems condemned in the long run to approximate a state akin to Gaussian noise. -- James Martin
