I bought one of the 11.6" Samsungs last Christmas. It's the machine I take to work/on travel, etc. I also use it like my wife does her iPad -- downstairs in front of the TV, up in the bedroom before bed, etc. For me, it's small, decent to type on and has no fans. I had an iPad at work and a hand-me-down Kindle Fire, but tablets are useless without a keyboard, and then you've essentially got a chromebook. I have a desktop running Slackware 14.1, and until a few weeks ago a big ol' Dell Precision laptop running Crunchbang. I could put something else on the chromebook, but why? I'm all-in on the google services. At $250 it was a convenience I could afford.

This is even more true this year, when the departments were trying to save every dollar to cut the summer furlough as short as possible. If you're in the war business, you want to save some until the end of the year in case you need to, I don't know, bomb Syria just before year's end. Full disclosure: I work for one of the commands in this business.

Really? Not using any night vision? No tanks? No radios, no sensors, no gas masks or MREs or uniforms or tents or mortars or... You get the idea. They all come from military R&D. Look up RDECOM (where I work) and i's subordinate RD&E centers and labs.

The Army's already working things to work in GPS-denied environments. Here's a story. Full disclosure, I work at the Army's R&D command.

These things tend to make their way into industry, but it'll take a while. ARO funding university work is usually a first step in the process, but at the end, if it works out, it gets transitioned to industry in one form or fashion. For example, flexible display research started out with Army funding and there was a consortium with universities and industry. Here's a story. You can see they started working on it in '04, the article is from '08 and they're not at Best Buy just yet. Full disclosure: The Army Research Office is part of the Army Research Lab, which is part of the command I work in, the Research, Development and Engineering Command. We taxpayers fund a lot of research.

I know it might seem trifling, but we are still engaged in active combat operations halfway around the world. If we still had a draft I think you'd be acutely aware of that.
And if you look into technology that transitions from Defense into the civilian economy, you'll find quite a bit. Right now we have defense employees working on quantum teleportation, neural computing chips, all kinds of power and energy technologies and so on. Companies come in, or start up, and do good business making products and services off things the government paid for. ENIAC was an Army program to figure out artillery azimuths. GPS, the internet, etc. It still goes on all the time.

I work for a DoD R&D organization, and this is very true. We create a lot and we do it well and relatively cheaply.

" Though, even SS isn't so bad, since, in theory, it is already paid for."
Your largess is stunning.
On another note, social security becomes a de facto retirement plan because the economy needs people to spend pretty much all their damn money to fuel the ever-upward corporate spiral. Then government raids the social security pot to pay for the other side of the ever-upward spiral. The problem is we can't settle for a sustainable reality. If you owned a company employing 10, 20 or 30 thousand people turning $500 million in profits with a solid outlook for that to continue -- but not grow -- for the next 50 years, Wall Street would ignore you. It's all about potential for growth, not actual performance. Then they tie executive pay to stock performance and boom! Stupidity is mandatory.

Just because it's DARPA doesn't mean government employees don't do the work. I work at the Army's RD&E command, and we have people who do research for DARPA or run their projects. I'm not at work, so I can't be sure, but we have a CRADA (cooperative R&D agreement) with UDel, so I'm guessing we're involved in this. And our Communication-Electronics center does work in solar, as does our research lab. So don't bet that no government folks are working on this or responsible for it. It's not unusual for our CRADA partners to publish their results and neglect to mention the contributions of the Army folks involved. Again, not sure in this case, but I really wish I had a magic HTML stamp so I could mark every story done by a university or industry touting something they've done that relies on something that started with the Army.

True about the lack of planes, obviously. I was speaking more generically, which always gets me in trouble.

As I've noted elsewhere, it's complicated, much more complicated than you're representing it here. Nobody else researches specific areas that the military has to. Elsewhere I used the under-body explosion example, but there are many others. Let's say, RPGs. They hit a vehicle in a very specific way. Who is going to research materials and construction methods to best defend occupants against RPG strikes? Who is going to have a person on staff with a doctorate who is a, if not the, world expert on uniforms and how they interact with the human body, equipment, vehicles, etc.? Only the Army (with benefit to the other services, of course).

I'm not saying earmarks don't happen. It's not my area (I do public affairs for the Army RD&E command, not budget), so I couldn't say without doing some research that I'm not going to do on a Thursday night while on vacation. However, we have several systems set up to respond to requests from the field, requests from doctrine writers (who write how the Army should work, hence what capabilities it will need), and others. We even take troop designs and get them manufactured. We now have a shop in Afghanistan where soldiers can pull up and get things made for a specific purpose. And we have guys researching things that might be needed 10 or 20 years from now.

Not sure where you're getting your numbers, but the Army RD&E command has thousands of engineers. I work in the command, but I'm not working this week so I can't quote a good number. However, the usual statistic we put out is something like more than 10,000 scientists and engineers.

Not true. Air superiority keeps them on the ground. Weapons superiority keeps them out of a lot of force-on-force engagements. If we showed up with similar technology, they'd take us on more directly. But the obvious answers are not available to them, so they improvise. Full disclosure: I work for the Army.

Just one example. There are others, but I'm not at work to have easy access to anything. Power and energy in general is a major push for the Army, and they've worked on hydrogen, solar, better batteries, etc. Full disclosure: I work for the Army R&D command in public affairs.

Full disclosure: I do public affairs for the Army Research, Development and Engineering Command.

I can't speak for the other services, but the Army created RDECOM about 8 years ago to make RD&E work better for Soldiers. One big task is having what they call a balanced portfolio that spans basic research through engineering work. The command has more than 16,000 people, more than 10,000 of them civilian engineers or scientists. A lot of smart people put a lot of thought into this. It is not transparent, even to me, for a lot of reasons. Some of it is secret, but some of it is just so particular to the military, or even one part of the Army. For example, under-body explosions. There's a lot of research into head-on collisions, etc., but who else would need to study how to protect people from an under-body explosion? And how transparent is that, and should that be, to people outside the military? And who else is going to work on a material that might be suitable for that kind of thing? And how, pre-Iraq/Afghanistan, do you see that coming as the next big threat or design a research program that can respond to something like that which no one sees coming?

Which is not to say none of our research transfers into the civilian economy, for example flexible display technology, robotics and nanotechnology. We're working on moving our basic overview onto the web, but it shows we have more than 1,000 partnerships of one kind or another with everything from universities and foreign defense agencies to individual researchers and at least one time two guys in a garage.

As it happens, the Army just finished another study on how RD&E should work. The results should be out soon and may mean some level of reorganization. Stay tuned if you're interested.