Your argument that the internet would not be born if not for government is a little like saying the computer industry would never have had the funds to evolve beyond the punch-card stage if not for the Nazis buying a ton of those machines to run their concentration camps.
not at all. its the argument that no single company has the resources and talent and capital to install a global shared resource, and that the government can, or at least speed up the process. look at the speed at which the internet has taken over communications versus the years and legal wrangling necessary for the evolution of telephone. telephone began as something distributed, the market realized that monopoly was required for true universal access, and then that monopoly was counterproductive to its further development.
The super-computing example you cited shows the folly of government sponsorship.
which folly was only exposed through government-sponsored research, much at the national labs. that's where the major supercomputers based on commodity clusters are. and that's where the world's largest true supercomputers - ibm's blue gene and computers from tera (formerly cray) are still essential. that doesn't mean that commodity clusters won't eventually win, but they're not a replacement for supercomputers everywhere. otherwise, the gov wouldn't be providing the lifeline to sgi and others to keep them producing the technology that's still needed.
Peer-review is not substitute for real market competition.
indeed. it can not be. because ideas with a payoff that is decades away can not compete in the free market. that's the point i've been trying to make over and over. the free market has its place, certainly. but pure research would not be funded by it.
How else do you explain more funding for aids than for cancer and heart disease combined?
aids is communicable and tractable. heart disease has great preventative treatment: lifestyle change. cancer is likely to be immensely intractable: there are so many different kinds of cancers with different causes. but here we come back to government sponsorship, cuz screening for various cancers and susceptibility comes directly from work on the human genome. and yes, private companies took up that work and improved on it significantly. but it happened only because the government launched the project and provided the initial funding, a sort of man-on-the-moon effort. and relatively cheap!
When each of the latter kills an order of magnitude more people every year than the former?
yes, and there is great motivation in the market to support reserach in those areas, because the payoff is obvious and large. aids largely affects poor countries in africa.
we know what causes cancer. transcription errors in copying DNA. it happens every day to everyone. you live long enough, and it will happen in the wrong spot in the wrong gene and poof, cancer. do we know how we will cure it? do we know where the answer will come from? scientific discovery rarely comes so directly. so much of it is serendipity. scientist X is studying clams and finds a genetic modification with this property and scientist Y reads that and sees how it explains something seen in gerbils and scientist Z recognizes that this pathway in gerbils resembles something in chimp pathway could be modified by the stem cell therapy that she has been studying. if scientist Y hadn't received continued funding for studying rats, the whole chain of events is broken. and without a steady source of funding, why would scientist Y spend his life studying gerbils? sexual gratification?
If you want public funding, you are guaranteed to have wrong priorities and waste. . . because the clowns spending someone else' money pilfered at gun point have to cater to the lowest denominator emotional issues. It's marketting not science.
so you are claiming that all univeristy research and all research from the national labs is wasted. and i contend, on the contrary, that virtually every advance in technology and medicine during the last century has had its start in exactly these places, with perhaps the sole exception being bell labs and xerox parc.
i think if you trace back each of these examples of market forces winning out in the end, you'll find that they all begin somewhere with an essential piece that was government funded.
BTW, building a rocket that can go to the moon if it doesn't blow up on launch or on the way is considerably less complicated than building an automated production line that turns out reliable hybrid cars profitably. The Russians, and soon the Chinese and Indians, can all do the former, but not the latter.
the issues are completely different. to quote some professor from berkeley, i think: "the first time you do something it’s science. the second time it’s engineering. a third time it’s just being a technician." i'm talking about the scientists. you're talking about the technicians.
