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DARPA barely counts as military.

• eveningcoffee 11y ago
  Yes but the main motivation was to have a network that would sustain nuclear strike.
  • linker3000 11y ago
    That's supposedly an urban myth... From Wikipedia: In A Brief History of the Internet, the Internet Society denies that ARPANET was designed to survive a nuclear attack: It was from the RAND study that the false rumor started, claiming that the ARPANET was somehow related to building a network resistant to nuclear war. This was never true of the ARPANET; only the unrelated RAND study on secure voice considered nuclear war. However, the later work on Internetting did emphasize robustness and survivability, including the capability to withstand losses of large portions of the underlying networks.
• akiselev 11y ago
  Bullshit, DARPA/ARPA is as much military as a freaking nuclear warhead. In his speach introducing ARPA, Eisenhower made it extremely clear that its purpose was to cary out research that maintained technological superiority over enemies of the United States ("enemies" is his word). The "Defence" part was only added later for political reasons. You don't even have to try hard to see the evidence: DARPA is unique among ALL OTHER government agencies because it is military backed and at the cutting edge of defense research. DARPA has at most 300 employees overlooking a budget of $3 billion (an order of magnitude more "revenue" per employee than Apple) because 90+% of employees are project managers who have a maximum term limit of four years. The only DARPA employee that I know of that worked for the agency twice did so 25 years after his first term. Each of these managers oversees one or more projects worth anywhere between $1 million and $25 million and are advised by an individual scientific board (whose members can stay longer than four years to maintain some continuity). Dnot get me wrong, I am a firm believer that DARPA is one of the greatest examples of what humans can achieve when they are given the ability to create, rebel, and dream beyond the current capabilities of engineering, but let's not kid ourselves. DARPA primary purpose has always been death and destruction. (Case in point: DARPA's currently most funded project is a scram jet based nuclear warhead that can hit any spot in the world within an hour of launching from the continental United States) We're just lucky that cooperation is so much more profitable than mutually assured destruction.
  • maaku 11y ago
    Hope that rant made you feel better.