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Spinrad's estimate may be conservative. Corporations and national research organizations around the world are now spending billions of dollars to harness the new optical technology. The first fruits of their efforts are already apparent in such conveniences as fiber-optic telephone lines, laser printers, hot-selling compact disc players, credit cards bearing holograms, and laser price-tag scanners in supermarkets. Says Thomas Hartwick, head of TRW's Electro-Optics Research Center, near Los Angeles: "Every area that light touches will see technology advance by several generations...
...optical technology is moving rapidly into place. Communications companies have started to lay new transoceanic cables that can compete handily with space satellites. Fiber-optic links are allowing far-flung corporations to install networks of private video hookups and connect office buildings into a new kind of "optical city." Optical technology is providing sensitive nerve endings for devices like smoke detectors and blood analyzers. Meanwhile, scientists in the U.S., Western Europe and Japan are pushing hard toward a still much-in-the-future optical computer that uses photons rather than electrons for number-crunching efficiency. The massively powerful optical brain...
...mile border with Mexico, gateway for much of the rest. The smugglers they are up against have almost unlimited funds. "They can afford to lease an entire ranch for one drop," says Marion Hambrick of the Drug Enforcement Administration in Houston. They can also buy the best equipment: advanced fiber boats that elude radar, scuba-diving gear, "voice privacy" scrambler radios and single-sideband transmitters, which are hard to intercept, and light planes that are often faster and have better radar than Customs' planes. Firearms too: gun battles between feds and smugglers have erupted all along the Mexican border...
Since 1980, farmers have struggled against shrinking markets, debts, tumbling land values and overproduction. Farmers in the Southeast have been robbed of their thin cash flow by capricious weather. Elsewhere, America's gigantic agricultural machine heaps up more grain and fiber than the world can digest. U.S. taxpayers foot the bill...
...exporter of some important food products. Still there seemed to be more than enough business to go around. In the U.S., agricultural exports hit an all-time high, and net farm income came close to one, in 1981. This was no coincidence: one calculation shows that the food and fiber grown on two of every five acres under cultivation in the U.S. is sold abroad...