"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. "
That's complete rubbish. Do you go to hardware stores and find 1/4" screws and sockets made by different mfrs always not fitting with each other? I use network equipment from several different makers, they inter-operate quite well together, much better than the typical paper work incompatibilty between different government departments. Standards can emerge quite handily in a competitive market place; it happens all the time without government intervention.
"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."
The "extra stuff" is market-speak. Think about the cost of semiconductor mask making . . . it would make absolutely no sense to make a few thousand high performance chips on their own unique design; some minor varients, sure like the few million Xeon processors made each generation, but nothing radically different from off the shelf designs.
"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."
Back to the Nazis enabled computer industry with their punchcard machine purchase argument again, I see. Weapon systems do not require "supercomputing"; after all, it is not real time simulation. The argument used to be something about real-time flight simulation for military pilot training . . . then it turned out that what the military husbanded for three decades was surpassed by the competing duo of ATI and nVidia in 18 months, back in the late 1990's; after that, the military bought flight simulation processors off the market shelves.
"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."
So your solution is to copy the Chinese and soviet-style government sponsored research labs. Brilliant idea . . . Not!
"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."
Government intervention was where the dark age came from (over-taxation in order to support the bread and circus social safety-net). Greenspan was the biggest government interventionist of his time when he fixed the price of the most important commodity: money. His price fixing on interest rate (down to 1% nominal) was the big reason behind the credit bubble. Oh, ya, your beloved government prevention of run-on-the-bank played a big part too in inducing market participants into all sorts of risky deals.
"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."
Who are "we"? The United States was the result of secession from the British virtual representation system that demanded a 3% stamp tax. The last time some Americans tried to secede, they were forced back in literally at gun point. The reason was import tax favored by the North, and rejected by the South. Taxation is quite impossible without gunpoint; without gunpoint, it's call voluntary contribution.
"no, that was the first integrated (1-chip) microprocessor, not the first microprocessor using silicon technology."
So which national lab invented the i4004? Arguably the most important invention in the second half of 20th century.
"cisco came out of government sponsored research at stanford."
No more than computers came out of Nazi concentration camp system because Nazis hired IBM to do the tabulation. The last time I checked Standford was a private university. Cisco was founded by a couple guys at Standford CS department, which also happened to have some government contracts, among many private funding sources, not the least of which was university endowment and tuition payment.
"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? "
Ingenuity of the respective inventors, and the market's ability to reward the promising leads with disproportional resources compared to their competitors. Why do you think none of those inventions that transformed the people's living standards came out the Soviet Union or China or India? They certainly did not lack government sponsored research. They graduated several times as many scientists and engineers as the US did.
"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? "
The same people who would indulged in all sorts of other outlandish projects shortly after WWII was over. For a start, why wouldn't IBM be interested? After all the company made enormous strides in storage technology shortly after WWII was over.
"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."
Alan Turing was part of all the sharp brains that the government rounded up during WWII. The private sector simply had all the brilliant minds taken from it, and vast resources confiscated from it in order to fund the effort of killing fellow human beings in another country. By your logic, if not for governmen draft, there wouldn't be able-bodied men . . . after all the rejects in the civilian life during the war were not as fit as the drafted soldiers.
