4 ms·

>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

>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 15y 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 15y 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 15y 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.

lchengify 15y 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 15y 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 15y 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.