>and because it's private-sector tech oriented toward products that mostly don't matter but might make a few individuals rich That's better than most governmen

>and because it's private-sector tech oriented toward products that mostly don't matter but might make a few individuals rich That's better than most government research lab projects (in CS) that mostly don't matter and rarely produce anything that the private sector or academia in Universities hasn't already done. In CS the government research labs are where the washed up post-docs go that couldn't get a tenure-track position and didn't pass interview for a large company with a decent internal research group (e.g. Google, IBM, etc).