A have a few points to make :) First, I was arguing that the "copycatting" could be considered "normal science", where we have scientists finding a technique t

A have a few points to make :) First, I was arguing that the "copycatting" could be considered "normal science", where we have scientists finding a technique that works and trying to learn as much as they can, for example breeding fruit flies. I quote copycatting before because each entrepreneur has different ideas about 1. the problem 2. the market 3. the technical approach, etc and could perhaps be seen as an experiment. As we learn more about those 3 areas above things progress until the next new big wave of innovation comes through. For example, you could consider the web 1 to web2.0 as a "scientific revolution", there was a radical change in what was expected, the problems being solved, and the techniques to do it. As for NASA, it's been crippled by bureaucracy and politics; and one could question if they ever had the systems engineering experience that tout as the majority of their Appolo and other groundbreaking systems were contracted out and had simple interfaces. The space shuttle was a giant boondoggle that hampered space research. Nasa will continue to innovate through the JPL and unmanned exploration - where science is done. As for pure research, google now provides world class machine translation for free and continues to do research in that field at a scale that would be difficult for an academic lab to achieve. Mobile is a game changer in the 3rd world - it allows poor farmers to understand market prices and integrate with the rest of the world. Social seems like it has/is radically altering society - it'll be interesting to see how it plays out. Lastly, I agree we need pure research and I support it, I personally prefer applied, but I think that we've barely scratched the surface of how computers/internet can improve the world (with our current technical and scientific understanding). And we're opening up whole new avenues of study - complexity science, computational social science, web science, etc.