oh, i certainly won't argue with your point, that it really took the private sector to make these technologies into real game changers. my only point was that much of the real blue-sky research that proceeded the entry of the entrepreneurs preceeded their entry by at least a decade. industry research labs are generally much more narrowly focussed on things we'd generally call r&d, research with a shorter 5 year timeframe. an exception, in the past, was bell labs (which you cite implicitly in your reference to unix). xerox parc was another, where so many great things happened. those places are long gone. the only comparable might be microsoft research, but that's hardly targeted to "pure research". maybe google, but that's still more targeted to business enhancement rather than the really high-risk/high-payoff research projects.
yeah, japanese fifth-generation project was misguided. so was star wars, from the same period, at least as a technology initiative.
the only thing i can really put my finger on right now, that sort of has the same feel as those game changers, coming out of gov't sponsored pure research is everything that's come out of the human genome project. that has really blossomed and what we now know about the genome has produced lots of information. but nothing that entrepreneurs have really taken and run away with yet. it "feels like" we're gearing up to do the same thing with green technology, maybe even if oil prices continue to crater. but that also feels more like a "man on the moon" project, rather than a "put a PC in every office" project. at least in the near term.
"Computer networks of computers set up to talk to each other, including entire canonical network computing environment, such as ethernet and unix, had been invented and explored long before self-aggradizing fools like Al Gore came on the scene."
exactly my point! this was all funded by DARPA. pure research. in the 80's, university computer science departments all had internet access and lots of folks became depended on e-mail, all the students playing networked games, etc. we didn't need gore. all we needed was AOL and Compuserve and so forth, and things took off. but by that point it was a well developed technology, because of continued gov funding for two decades, going back to the 70s.
"planning and reasearch into the unknown is intrinsicly speculative, do you really want bureacrats engaged in speculations with your money?"
yes, i do, but in the manner that they're now involved. even venture captial has a much shorter timeframe than the pure research funded by NIH and NSF and the department of energy and DARPA (defense advanced research projects). but note, its not always "the government" deciding what directions to pursue. that's the role of peer review. nevertheless, we have always had gov initiatives that direct research towards important "grand challenges". weather modelling was one of them, and look at what we get now, with the kind of prediction we get for hurricanes, for example. there's a whole lot of research into fluid dynamics and high-performance computing that underlie that. gps, cdma, yadda yadda yadda. a whole host of things that probably would never have gotten off the ground if gov did not provide the initial funding, since few investors have the patience to promise to continue investing in the same line of research for 5 or 10 or 20 years - however long it takes to get some answers. if there's no promise of continued funding, you're just not gonna get people devoting their careers to working on those problems.
"or more detrimental by subsequently destroying the careers of men like Alan Turing."
indeed! if you live in calif, vote no on prop 8!
