At 8:07 PM -0800 5/21/97, Willaim H. Geiger III wrote:
In <v03007807afa968fc0dbe@[207.167.93.63]>, on 05/21/97 at 09:16 PM, Tim May <tcmay@got.net> said:
(My spies within LLL tell me of desperate efforts to find alternative funding sources, e.g., the "Extreme UV" project. Ultimately, hopeless. A government lab which loses its main raison d'etre cannot reconfigure itself as a "think tank" for private industry. Gimme a break.)
"think" and "government" should never be used in the same paragraph. I was laughing so hard at the prospects of government drones trying to compete in the private sector I pulled a muscle.
Believe it. I suspect the "we can help you" program Kent Crispin is working on (some form of key recovery) is just such a program. When we hire people to design and build H-bombs and they instead collect their paychecks by working on "key recovery" schemes for Big Brother, something is drastically amiss. (I'm surprised no whistle-blowing journalists are picking up on this story.) Lowell Wood's O-Group (or W-Group...I don't have my papers handy) tried this some years back, as did the "laser pantography" group. Laser pantography was one of those technologies the trendy science magazines, like "Science '86" and "High Technology" once gushed over as being TEOSVASWKI (The End Of Silicon Valley As We Know It). Not very surprisingly, laser pantography is nowhere to be seen. And there was the attempted commercialization of LLL's (alleged) CAD tools. Silvar-Lisco was the name I recall from those days, c. 1984-86, though I may be confusing it with another of the late-lamented CAD companies. And the S-1 supercomputer project, using all of the above-named G-job technologies. None of these "commercialization" efforts went anywhere, nor was it ever appropriate for taxpayer-funded labs to enter into competition with privately-funded enterprises like Cadence, Daisy, Cray, etc. To be sure, LLL and LANL do pretty nice jobs of making hydrogen bombs. Now that H-bombs are passe, "remediation" is one way they're seeking contracts to survive. (Remediation of nuclear waste and existing weapons.) And things like the Extreme UV project. Look for an announcement soon. Hey, it's seemingly a good idea for these national labs, paid for by the taxpayers, to "do work for industry." However, a moment's thought will point out the problems implicit in such deals: if they do the Extreme UV work for Intel, say, what about TI and Motorola?. And an even better thing to tell them is this: "You did your work well. The Cold War is over. No job lasts forever, not in Detroit, not in Seattle, and not in Livermore. Thank you, and good luck in the private sector. Your work here is done." --Tim May There's something wrong when I'm a felon under an increasing number of laws. Only one response to the key grabbers is warranted: "Death to Tyrants!" ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^1398269 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."