"exactly my point! this was all funded by DARPA. pure research."
And that would be a misconception. Computers that talked to each other long pre-dated DARPA. Depending on the definition of what a "Modem" is, modem has been in existence in the 1950's, 40's and 20's! The urban myth of DARPA being responsible for network computer is as silly as the urban myth of NASA bringing us plastics . . . when in fact, Henry Ford was using plastics for upholstery in his cars in the 1920's. A bunch of government employees reinvented the wheel, and their bureacratic overlords with too much time on their hands had to rewrite history in order to justify their own agencies' funding. That's where the typical public education history comes from.
"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."
That must be why nobody goes to college any more, because 5, 10, or 20-year time horizon would just be too far off to contemplate for the private mind. Comes to think of it, the US government must have been behind Toyota Prius. All the talks of government funding hybrid research for the big-three and cutting off the Japanese in the early 1990's were just lies; there was actually a clandestine CIA project that siphoned every penny that the big-three got for hybrid research and dumped it all in Toyota's account; that's how hybrids got off the ground. Tongue firmly in cheek, of course.
The truth is that, if I had accompanied Steve Jobs on his trip to the Xerox Parc, I probably would have dismissed the Graphic User Interface as worthless waste of processing power and too slow to be practical; you would too. That was my response back in 1989 looking at Windows 3.0 running on a 286 computer, speaking as someone who had a few years of formal education in computer science at the time! Most people would have completely missed emergin opportunites; that's what makes those opportunities so profitable for those who recognize them for what they are. The political process is a terrible way of discovering what's worth researching. The steam engine must have been discovered and rediscovered more than half a dozen times in human history before it finally powered industrial revolution as we knew it. Interesting research ideas that, when rediscovered many many years later, have the potential of bringing a new dimension of prosperity to human life are probably a dime a dozen every day. Most are forgotten or never left the thinker's desk because there is a lack of capital to bring those ideas to fruition; capital is not just randomly printed money but real power to move people and machinery in a certain purposeful pursuit. That's what makes it all the more tragic when capital resources are taxed away and destroyed on unprofitable pursuits motivated by politics and collective dumbness. We'd probably be far more advanced in space research if not for the NASA boondongle moonshot and subseuquent bottomless pit called the space shuttle.
