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> Public funding for science is frozen or being cut, private R&D labs are shuttering their doors, and companies are increasingly concerned with quarterly resul
by freyrs3 13y ago
> Public funding for science is frozen or being cut, private R&D labs are shuttering their doors, and companies are increasingly concerned with quarterly results at the expense of long term research.
It's ironic that Silicon Valley owes most of it's existence to investments by the DoD and ARPA. Most of the technology we use in the electronics industry today would not exist except for all the public money that was poured into semiconductor research. Slashing public funding, especially of fundamental research, is one of the worst things we could probably do for our economy's future.
- arkonaut 13y agoWhy is this ironic?
- rosser 13y agoPossibly because of the staunchly anti-government, private-industry-can-always-do-it-better attitude that's nearly endemic in the SV tech scene?
- _sh 13y agoIt's OK, the silicon valley companies and other private sector institutions who have benefited so much from investment by the DoD and ARPA are ready to address any investment shortfall to the sciences, right? I mean, investing in a startup that has a value proposition based on real scientific research is the same as investing in the research in the first place. Am I right?
- freyrs3 13y ago> investing in a startup that has a value proposition based on real scientific research is the same as investing in the research in the first place Not necessarily, if invest in science you're investing in the lab producing publishable results, without the constraint of bringing a product to market. The two don't necessarily overlap.
- _delirium 13y agoI read his/her comment as sarcastically implying that that wasn't the case. :)
- WalterBright 13y agoThe transistor invention was privately funded.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- cowsandmilk 13y agoThe semiconductor material used by Bardain, Brattain, and Shockley for their Nobel Prize work at Bell Labs was developed by researchers at Purdue University under a grant funded by the National Defense Research Council. Their developments were hardly independent of publicly funded research.
- jlgreco 13y agoIf you want to play this game, you can go back even further and find that they built on work done by privately funded individuals during the Victorian Era and during the Enlightenment. Go back even further and you'll find that much (but by no means all) of the wealth that funded that was acquired thanks to Feudalism. I therefore credit feudalism for the creation of the transistor.
- anaccountonhn 13y agoYou seem to have misunderstood the comment, (the sibling comments should help explain, or maybe some light reading about the invention of the transistor).
- jlgreco 13y agoI have no idea what you are getting at. I am familiar with the invention of the transistor, and understand the comment I was replying to completely. Furthermore, there are no sibling comments to my comment.... What I am guessing went wrong here is that you are unfamiliar with sarcasm, so I'll help you out: I don't actually credit Feudalism with the invention of the transistor.
- notdrunkatall 13y agoIf that public money were not poured into semiconductor research, would humanity have simply forgotten about it? I think not.