The internet expanded very slowly while managed by the government under APARNET, then grew extremely rapidly when freed of government management; the existing physical telephone network in the 90's helped too.
pace gore.
the key word here is grow. not initiate, grow. i don't dispute that free market forces are great to exploit results from basic research. but we would not have what we have now if not for government involvement. its easy to see what we would have had: an outgrowth of AOL and Compuserve, big old private networks with mutually inconsistent standards, etc.
IBM's blue-whatever and Cray's "super computers" have been using arrays of garden variety commercial microprocessors for a decade and half now.
no, they have not. blue gene, for example, uses powerPC's with extra stuff. kinda like the Cell, but predates the cell. think of leveraging some bits of commodity CPUs and then adding extra hardware for doing things like fast networking. Tera is much more unique.
It's not entirely clear the government involvement is beneficial to the industry or to the society
its not? i think you're forgetting that an enormous fraction of this supercomputing capability is used in research and design of weapons systems. those applications don't hit the front page, of course, since all the work is classified. but there you have it. sure, you could do data mining on some big old cluster. but that's just a piece of it.
"Science did not exist before the late 19th century. People didn't even know how to dream, think, or light fire before the big government came along to help them. Private benefectors next existed."
private patronage is better than government-sponsored, peer-reviewed research? i think you're getting carried away by your principles and not recognizing that there are better ways to allocate resources than those that come from free market competition. if we returned to a patronage system, our universities would crumble, faculty would scatter to industry and the chinese would eat our lunch. and of that i am 100% certain.
are your principles so overwhelming that you'd be willing to see us enter a new dark age just to achieve them? look at the hole greenspan dug for himself by his belief in self-regulating free markets.
So taking money from citizens at gun point to research for a disease that primarily affect somewhere else is laudable now? Wow, I'm really impressed by the Sage King.
not at gunpoint. by consent. social contract, representative government. if you'd prefer something else, why do you remain in the u.s.? this is how we have agreed to govern ourselves.
So which national lab came up with i4004, the very first silicon microprocessor?
no, that was the first integrated (1-chip) microprocessor, not the first microprocessor using silicon technology.
Which national lab came up with cisco routers?
cisco came out of government sponsored research at stanford. 3com came out of research at xerox parc.
Which national lab came up with Motronics and dynamic stability control that cleared up the air and save lives from spin-outs?
i don't know this area. don't try to tell me that there is no basic research in control theory, because i know better.
Which national lab came up with RoundUp? Which national lab came up with ATM machine the credit card (on which our economy has been floating for two decades now, LOL).
i have no idea what roundup is. the atm machine has nothing to do with science.
who is responsible for accurate weather prediction? for precision bombing? for almost all the advances in robotics, now used on assembly lines? who is responsible for funding CDMA research? (what CDMA brings to the table is much more than what you suggested in a previous post. it has to do with how much data can be stuffed into transmissions.) GPS? (try triangulating your position from cell-phone towers when you're out in rural america.) satellite technology of all sorts? magnetic resonance imaging?
you can't get around the basic fact that few companies do basic research. again, the only exceptions are the now defunct bell labs and the long defunct xerox parc. everything from the computer revolution comes from there, or from academia. (and your previous example of unix from bell labs has an extra twist: unix would never have taken off if bell labs hadn't handed the sources over to berkeley, which in turn distributed it to the world. which in turn has become BSD unix. which in turn has contributed the entire network stack to Windows and the entire operating system to Apple. (cuz that's what's sitting under Mac OS X.)
it shouldn't be hard to grasp the concept that Alan Turing had his idea even before the government hired him or would have come up with it anyway in private employment, and he probably would have come up with even greater ideas if not for his life being ruined by the government.
really? who was going to pay alan turing to study stored program computers? who, at that time, had enough money and vision to dump it all into such an outlandish project?
your point is easily proved false: the fact that alan turing DID come up with his ideas with government funding BEFORE anyone in the private sector beat him to it says clearly that government funding can be more efficient at achieving high-risk high-payoff goals.
