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... and who do you think funded those CS departments? It's all by grants, a lot of which is from the defense department, who has a lot of money to invest in hi

... and who do you think funded those CS departments? It's all by grants, a lot of which is from the defense department, who has a lot of money to invest in high risk, high return, long-running projects with practical outcomes. Saying 'some other network would have evolved' is a cop-out: clearly that would have happened, but it would have happened later and that could have cost us in terms of competitiveness. Same argument for GPS, except even more likely given the heavy investment in infrastructure needed to even get a basic implementation running. Also the 80's are not the 60's, it's ridiculous to think that the networking technologies were not influenced heavily by the work funded by the military ... hell the only reason killer apps could be created was because the technology was so pervasive that it made sense to write them. And GPS, self-driving cars, and ARPANET are only what I came up with offhand because I was too lazy to check. Add ENIAC and radar to that list, both of which were developed specifically for military purposes but (obviously) later had wide-ranging practical civilian applications.

drzaiusapelord 14y ago
>It's all by grants, a lot of which is from the defense department, A lot? Some? Very little? Unless you have some backup here, the whole "HERP DERP EVERYTHING IMPORTANT IS FINANCED BY THE DOD" is wearing pretty thin.
- lchengify 14y ago
  In 2010, 227 million over 5 years: http://www.defense.gov/releases/release.aspx?releaseid=13717 http://www.defense.gov/releases/release.aspx?releaseid=13717 Also I didn't say everything important, I said a lot. In hindsight, I don't think anyone thinks funding ARPANET or ENIAC was a bad idea...
  - drzaiusapelord 14y ago
    Yeah but whats the context? How much of that directly to programs like we're talking about vs money via tuition, fees, etc. I think this is really impossible to quantify, but from a rational POV we can look at countries with small defense spending and see that they have healthy univerisities and healthy economies as well as healthy technological advances (again my example of the early french 'internet'). Tim Berners Lee was not only NOT an American but not funded by the DoD. His www application is what got the ball rolling. The network or protocol didn't matter, we can run http over anything. Same with Linus Torvalds, another non-American non-DOD funded star. We were sitting on nice networking tehcnology and wondering when Joe Public would see the wisdom of anything other than AOL and dialup (two very American things). It took a an Englishman at CERN and a Finnish student to give us WWW on Linux. Whats the Finnish defense budget look like? A big bloaty DoD and the war on brown people is not a requirement for technological progress. If anything, it holds us back.
    - lchengify 14y ago
      > A big bloaty DoD and the war on brown people is not a requirement for technological progress. If anything, it holds us back. You're confusing procurement costs with R&D. Lumping all military spending together is ignoring the subtleties as to why and how the money is used: http://www.thecollaredsheep.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/death-and-taxes-2010.jpg http://www.thecollaredsheep.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/d... * Tim Berners Lee got the ball rolling on www decades after the ARPANET investment, that doesn't help your point. * The English have large military R&D spending, given their GDP, and always have.

drzaiusapelord 14y ago

>It's all by grants, a lot of which is from the defense department, A lot? Some? Very little? Unless you have some backup here, the whole "HERP DERP EVERYTHING IMPORTANT IS FINANCED BY THE DOD" is wearing pretty thin.

lchengify 14y ago
In 2010, 227 million over 5 years: http://www.defense.gov/releases/release.aspx?releaseid=13717 http://www.defense.gov/releases/release.aspx?releaseid=13717 Also I didn't say everything important, I said a lot. In hindsight, I don't think anyone thinks funding ARPANET or ENIAC was a bad idea...
- drzaiusapelord 14y ago
  Yeah but whats the context? How much of that directly to programs like we're talking about vs money via tuition, fees, etc. I think this is really impossible to quantify, but from a rational POV we can look at countries with small defense spending and see that they have healthy univerisities and healthy economies as well as healthy technological advances (again my example of the early french 'internet'). Tim Berners Lee was not only NOT an American but not funded by the DoD. His www application is what got the ball rolling. The network or protocol didn't matter, we can run http over anything. Same with Linus Torvalds, another non-American non-DOD funded star. We were sitting on nice networking tehcnology and wondering when Joe Public would see the wisdom of anything other than AOL and dialup (two very American things). It took a an Englishman at CERN and a Finnish student to give us WWW on Linux. Whats the Finnish defense budget look like? A big bloaty DoD and the war on brown people is not a requirement for technological progress. If anything, it holds us back.
  - lchengify 14y ago
    > A big bloaty DoD and the war on brown people is not a requirement for technological progress. If anything, it holds us back. You're confusing procurement costs with R&D. Lumping all military spending together is ignoring the subtleties as to why and how the money is used: http://www.thecollaredsheep.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/death-and-taxes-2010.jpg http://www.thecollaredsheep.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/d... * Tim Berners Lee got the ball rolling on www decades after the ARPANET investment, that doesn't help your point. * The English have large military R&D spending, given their GDP, and always have.