Can't wait for this publicly funded research to make some private corporation billions!
If anything, we should be doing more of this... create dedicated academic R&D funding streams by taxing established or dying industries in order to publicly explore new fields, and use X Prize-style programs or NASA's COTS/CRS programs to incentivize private commercialization. America needs jobs, what's better than creating new industries?
Plus, public investment in R&D has a good track record. This study from 1980 [1] indicates a $17 return over 18 years for every $1 invested in NASA - 1700% ROI. Returns depend on programs and the administration in office, but similar numbers can be obtained from other programs (NOAA and agricultural, military and medical research, etc). R&D is speculative, but most programs do much better than breaking even.
Versus the taxpayer-funded I.P. being licensed to all parties in the country that funded it with the big corporations being forced to compete on better implementations delivered faster to customers. Big players can try to make billions, small players can innovate on top of same I.P. without a lawsuit, and individuals can even attempt to homebrew their own without a lawsuit.
The stuff that DARPA gets right is building stealth planes and prosthetics, arpa-net was a one-off exception in their history.
Mars Andreesen started off working on an NSF grant at NCSA. One of those things Al Gore encouraged (when people misquote him as inventing the internet)
Edit: also why web browsers are free. Netscape had to compete with a free browser.
Seriously, it's a graph processor. Graph analysis is basically the entire job of a modern intelligence agency.
There's a cold-war level arms race going on in cybersecurity. Russia embarrassed us with their sophisticated cyberwarfare capability in the last election -- they were able to infiltrate both campaigns AND the FBI (they used false information to manipulate Comey into making a statement -- which required them to know how conflicted he was over interference in the Clinton e-mail thing), and undoubtedly were behind the news cycles in the months before the election.
Better/more condensed graph analysis capability, at the scale that the three-letter-agencies use it? That's a strategic advantage. You can bet the Russians are working on something similar. If they haven't already -- throughout the cold war they tended to push the frontier of technology faster than the US, but had trouble mobilizing that advantage because communism was so damn inefficient.
Sidenote: Comey strongly implied (damn near said it really) in his testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee yesterday that this did not actually happen and the news articles were way off. Makes you wonder what did actually happen.
I missed this exchange in the livestream, relevant bit: "BURR: Were there other things that contributed to that that you can describe in an open session?
COMEY: There were other things that contributed to that. One significant item I can’t, I know the committee’s been briefed on. There’s been some public accounts of it, which are nonsense, but I understand the committee’s been briefed on the classified facts."
We obviously don't know what the classified facts are. This also seems to be in reference to the announcements in late summer vs the disclosure right before the election which I haven't found anything in the transcript about.
Full Transcript: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/08/us/politics/senate-hearin... (Aside: linking to NY times because it was slightly less ad heavy than other sites I could find. Couldn't find a single one without auto-play video...)
Source?
I'm still unclear how "sophisticated" these attacks were. Per the unclassified information, all I've heard mentioned is:
1. social media manipulation
2. traditional media manipulation (RT)
3. email spearphishing
None of the above strikes me as particularly sophisticated, even if it's potentially effective. (I don't know if it was effective or not in the case of the election.)
Of course, I have no idea what the classified information says regarding any of this.
What? Not so good idea anymore? It's funny how ironic and shortsighted these HN commies are.
The hilarious part is that you don't appear to be complaining about the government funding of research part.
So we're reaching the conclusion that a capitalist economy combined with a functional government allocating resources to projects that hold the promise of long term potential but not short term financial gains is a good system? That both capitalism and government activity play important roles that each is better at filling than the other?
And we're also realizing that a debate which reduces to 'capitalist vs communist' is idiotic? Wow. I'm proud of us.