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Pentagon to Significantly Cut CS Research
GabrielF writes "Over the last few decades, DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has funded some of the most successful computer science research projects in history, such as the Internet. However, according to the New York Times, DARPA has recently decided to significantly cut funding of open-ended computer science research projects in favor of projects that will yield short-term military results. Leading computer scientists, such as David Patterson, the head of the ACM are outraged and worried."
Since the whole .COM bust, technology has been slow moving. Doesn't come as a surprise funding will be cut on such either. Pretty sad unfortunately, but just look at the slowdown in any research, new products and innovation.
I am not surprised but this is kind of sad. Lets stop open ended research that may help people in the future... instead we will spend that money on killing people in the short term.
as great as this country is, it is sometimes frustrating to be an American
Obama is a twitter sock puppet
While this does royally suck, we cannot forgot DARPA is a defense agency after all. And in the modern, "Make war, not talk" times of the current administration, this was almost forseeable.
This means they are going to use this money instead of fund the radically out of control social security right?
It's in serious need... They should get to that.
http://use.perl.org
Great! We didn't want to compete w/ India anyway...
[o]_O
I believe strongly that the feds should consolidate their IT into a department of Technology or IT. I know that the NIH (HHS), the NSF, the DoD and the DOE commonly fund IT research, but it often doesn't fit into their missions. Our gov't should support Technology development and infrastructure just like it supports health (HHS), transportation (DoT), Energy (DoE), Science (NSF), security (HS) and defense (DoD). Who is going to build the next public cyberinfrastructure if it isn't appropriate for the other departments?
Laboratree - Scientific collaboration based on OpenSocial.
all 3 Terminator movies in a row and clued in after a night of hard thinking that "Skynet v0.8" was too suspiciouly named to continue to v1.0.
The problem is that Computer Science hasn't advanced much since the 80's. All the core concepts have been long established, and precious little groundbreaking research has emerged. I hate to say it, but most of the valuable work being done today is at the commercial level. i.e. Building upon the CompSci foundations to create useful, real world products.
:-) Not that I begrudge the AI research. It's fascinating stuff and deserves to be done. Just don't expect any sort of immediate results.
The biggest area that I see research being useful is in artificial intelligence. There's so much that we;re still trying to comprehend about emergent behaviors. Unfortunately, AI is very much like Fusion. It's only 20 years away (for the next century).
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Basic CS research ought to be funded, IMO, but there's no reason completely open-ended CS research should be funded by DARPA---that's what the National Science Foundation is for.
Of course, this cut in DARPA funding is unlikely to be matched by a commensurate increase in NSF funding, which is the real problem...
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
While it sucks for the CS people in the Pentagon, it just makes sense right now to divert money to things that will benefit the troops in Afganistan and Iraq. I'm sure that some of the CS projects help soliders on the ground, but as we know, 95% of IT projects aren't completed on time. So why not deliver better weapons, vehicles, body armor, and other technology that has the capability of saving lives right now.
Once we're completely out of Iraq and Afganistan, hopefully they'll put the money back into long term research.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
Report Says Pentagon Spending on Weapons to Soar
By TIM WEINER
Published: April 1, 2005
A new report by the Government Accountability Office warned yesterday that the costs of the Pentagon's arsenal could soar by hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade.
The Pentagon has said it is building more than 70 major weapons systems at a cost of at least $1.3 trillion. But the Pentagon generally understates the time and money spent on weapons programs by 20 to 50 percent, the new report said.
A survey of 26 major weapons systems showed cost overruns of $42.7 billion, or 41.9 percent, in their research and development phase.
Last year, the overall projected cost for those same 26 systems rose $68.6 billion, or 14.3 percent, to $548.9 billion, from $480.3 billion in the last 12 months.
A wider assessment of 54 major weapons systems showed that a majority are costing more and taking longer to develop than planned.
While Defense Department officials questioned details of some assessments of the major weapons systems, they did not dispute the report's overall conclusions.
The Government Accountability Office, the nonpartisan budget watchdog for Congress, singled out several programs.
The research and development costs for the Army's Future Combat Systems, a program to build 18 sets of networked weapons and military robots for 15 combat brigades, have increased 51 percent in the last year, the report said. Army officials say the program could cost as much as $145 billion, or $53 billion more than first advertised.
The Joint Strike Fighter program, which is supposed to build 2,458 planes for the Air Force, the Navy, the Marine Corps and American allies, will cost $244.8 billion, or about $99.6 million for each aircraft, the accountability office reported this month. Four years ago, the program was supposed to cost $183.6 billion for 2,866 planes, or about $64 million for each.
The F-22 fighter jet program will cost $63.8 billion for 178 aircraft, or more than $356 million a plane, the office reported earlier this month. Twenty years ago, when the program began, the Air Force planned to buy about 760 F-22's at $35 million each.
A set of five surveillance satellites, called the Space-Based Infrared System-High, will cost $9.9 billion, not $3.9 billion as originally planned eight years ago, an increase of $1.2 billion a satellite, according to the new report.
The report also pointed to a Navy missile called the Extended Range Guided Munition. The program began seven years ago. Still in the test phase, it has cost $598.4 million. Seven years ago, it was supposed to produce thousands of weapons at a cost of $45,000 each. Today the price per missile is estimated at $191,000.
The watchdog agency, in scores of reports produced since the end of the cold war, has consistently explained why so many weapons cost so much more than promised.
"Performance shortfalls, schedule delays and cost increases," the office has said, are "the logical consequences" of the weapons-buying culture.
Congress and the Pentagon "create incentives for pushing programs and encouraging undue optimism, parochialism and other compromises of good judgment," according to the office. In that culture, "persistent performance problems, cost growth, schedule slippage," and other failures "cannot all be attributed to errors, lack of expertise or unforeseeable events."
They are instead "embedded as the undesirable, but apparently acceptable, consequence of the process," the office has said. "These problems persist not because they are overlooked or underregulated, but because they enable more programs to survive and thus more needs to be met."
David A. Walker, the comptroller general of the United States, who oversees the accountability office, told Congress in testimony submitted with the report yesterday that that the traditional "buy it before you try it" practices that have pervaded the weapons-buying culture ar
So the gist is that DARPA wants to fund companies, and not universities. And when they do fund .edus, they have outrageous
restrictions, like requiring all help on
a project be US citizens.
/. news today: they
are switching to a pure IP model. Exactly what
makes use sure that this model is sane for a country? Production capacity is not very mobile, but intellectual talent does not have to stay put in the US. The engineers who invent the IP can just as easily be located (and will soon be born, educated, and working entirely) overseas.
As a CS students, I can tell you: finding hack US coders is easy; find qualified US students who can do research is hard. It's like they don't teach math or science in US schools anymore or something. Kids from Greece or China or wherever come over here, and run circles around US students in formal predicate logic, discrete math, and other subjects that Ken and Barbie found too hard. It's no exaggeration to say that over 70% of all research students are foreign--simply because there are not many qualified US students. (It's a different story if we needed literature or communication students--we've got tons of those.)
America is a country where companies don't make anything anymore. Instead, they just own the IP, and outsource the *production* to China/Taiwan/India. Hell, look at Transmeta, also in
US Companies went through a similar cylce of eating-the-seed corn in the 80s. What happened was they got their asses handed to them by Japan, where R&D was focused on basic science, and not the "short term" deliverables. Now, it seems DARPA is going to try to repeat the same experiment in failure.
Don't get me wrong. This is not the last straw for the US R&D system, but merely one more straw in what has to be the last bundle. It's twilight of the empire, folks. If you're young, start learning another language.
A far better solution is to let all students in US institutions work on projects. (If a project is truly classified, then just use one of the many defense contractors.) When foreign students graduate, most of them (not all) want to become US citizens. What better way to recruit new talented citizens for a country? With the *reeeediculous* DARPA restrictions, many of the foreign students I know are going home. They expect (rightly) that in 10-15 years, their countries will dominate in the industries they've trained for.
On the plus side, by the time we fight the Mongolian Khanate in 2037 we'll have the best network firewalls in the world. :)
Stop learning! Only you can prevent esoterrorism.
... in favor of projects that will yield short-term military results.
If they can predict beforehand what a project will yield, then it's not research; it's engineering. So they should change their name from DARPA to DAPA.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Here's a link a link where no registration is required.
People! When you submit a link to the NYT use the New York Times Link Generator!
We don't need the military to drive computer innovation..we're doing fine.
This reminds me of the time the patent office was closed in the 19th century because someone proclaimed that everything that could be invented, had been invented. This is very short signed. The number of advances from DARPA research is quite impressive. Many top CS schools get quite a bit of money from DARPA. I don't know how they'll make up this shortfall. Of all the things to cut from the government budget, this is one of the worst. I'm not going to mention the B-word but how many stupid decisions is this administration going to make. How about we cut some of the congressional perks? Or any of the other 9000 things the federal government wastes on every year. Software is one of our few exporting industries, and now we are cutting its funding too. Not the end of the world, but still not a good thing.
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
So here's my question: how many Slashdot users are going to whine here about DARPA not giving out enough research money and then wander over to DailyKos and whine there about how the Bush administration has brought about the largest budget deficits in US history?
And how many people will post arguements that are entirely nonsensical.
They aren't cutting the cost. They are redirecting it.
AND!
I assure you that this funding is no where near the funding of the Iraqi war.
Which had nothing to do with 9/11.
So Bush made a choice to attack Iraq, gave us justification that at best was terrible intelligence and at worst was a bold faced lie.
Free money doesn't come without a cost to something else.
Exactly, The cost of the Iraq war is not only lives, but could fund social security and medicare quite nicely.
http://use.perl.org
In these times of budget shortfalls and spiralling national debt, money has to be saved somewhere. Things with unknown results a long way in the future are an obvious target.
Does it suck? Sure. But America has shown in elections it doesn't want European-style high taxes to pay for stuff, and when you can't pay for stuff, you can't have stuff.
Blah blah economy blah blah free market forces blah blah alledgedly unpatriotic intellectuals blah blah small government blah blah starve the beast blah blah 9-11 blah blah blah.
Michael
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
Without even DARPA funding pure research, the US will really be screwed. AT&T, while it was a monopoly, had enough money that it did a lot of rather open ended research. That's gone. XEROX had the PARC for a while. That's gone. We got wonderful benefits from all the research they did for the space program, and now that's nearly gone.
Pure research is what makes for major innovations. It's what keeps a nation on top. The fact the the US invented the internet is one of the major reasons that the US is still so dominant in the IT field. If the US keeps funding some open-ended goals, it might manage to stay on top through these recessions due to inventing something the rest of the world just doesn't have. With the way things are now, the US will have trouble competing against India and China if it sticks to the same jobs that everyone else does.
This is another moronic desicions i have seen come from the current US administration in the field of scientific research. ... Which given the current administrations track record is not a positive sign for world peace . .
What worrys me most is the fact they are diverting the funding into short term yield millitary research project
The 20th centuary can be rememberd for many many things and i think DARPA deserves alot of respect for some of the CS projects it funded , however near totaly ignoring the long term benefits of CS research projects in favour of short term gains will just lead to problems further down the line
I was angry enough when the US gouvernemt decided to halt funding to Stem-cell research and other things , now here is another nail.
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
With advances in communications technology, our Defense Department can outsource this sort of research to universities in countries where the cost is much lower. Countries like Iran, Yemen and North Korea are on the forefront of nuclear defense research, and would be happy to accept our funds for these sorts of purposes.
The CB App. What's your 20?
2. To where did Ramzi Yousef flee after the first WTC attack? Iraq.
3. Where did Zarqawi go to hide after he got chased out of Afghanistan after 9/11/2001? Iraq.
In what country is Salman Pak, a training camp where teams of four or five terrorists were taught to hijack civilian airliners with small knives? Iraq.
Go ahead, keep fooling yourself that there was no connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. Just because Al Qaeda is based on fanatical Islam doesn't mean someone like Saddam Hussein couldn't use them.
Outraged? Perhaps you may be outraged, but you slander individuals when you attribute them for saying things they did not say. Nowhere in the article did I read that anyone was outraged.
The military has decided not to put as much money into basic CS research as they did in the past. "Basic CS research" means theoretical research. By its nature, that means the Pentagon cannot turn around in 3 years and produce a tangible return on its investment. How dare those officials decide to not spend money that's not directly related to killing people or keeping personnel from getting killed! How dare those officials prevent foreign enemies from directly profiting from US funded military research! Why not attack your private sector employer? Most of them have been cutting back funding on basic research.
It certainly is unfortunate. But if you think basic CS research is critical to the US's well being (or more likely, your well being), bitch out your congressman for not funding research, not the military for doing its job. (Good for you for getting a CS degree, but the world does not owe you a living.)
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
April 1 - The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency at the Pentagon - which has long underwritten open-ended "blue sky" research by the nation's best computer scientists - is sharply cutting such spending at universities, researchers say, in favor of financing more classified work and narrowly defined projects that promise a more immediate payoff.
Hundreds of research projects supported by the agency, known as Darpa, have paid off handsomely in recent decades, leading not only to new weapons, but to commercial technologies from the personal computer to the Internet. The agency has devoted hundreds of millions of dollars to basic software research, too, including work that led to such recent advances as the Web search technologies that Google and others have introduced.
The shift away from basic research is alarming many leading computer scientists and electrical engineers, who warn that there will be long-term consequences for the nation's economy. They are accusing the Pentagon of reining in an agency that has played a crucial role in fostering America's lead in computer and communications technologies.
"I'm worried and depressed," said David Patterson, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley who is president of the Association of Computing Machinery, an industry and academic trade group. "I think there will be great technologies that won't be there down the road when we need them."
University researchers, usually reluctant to speak out, have started quietly challenging the agency's new approach. They assert that Darpa has shifted a lot more work in recent years to military contractors, adopted a focus on short-term projects while cutting support for basic research, classified formerly open projects as secret and placed new restrictions on sharing information.
This week, in responding to a query from the staff of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Darpa officials acknowledged for the first time a shift in focus. They revealed that within a relatively steady budget for computer science research that rose slightly from $546 million in 2001 to $583 million last year, the portion going to university researchers has fallen from $214 million to $123 million.
The agency cited a number of reasons for the decline: increased reliance on corporate research; a need for more classified projects since 9/11; Congress's decision to end controversial projects like Total Information Awareness because of privacy fears; and the shift of some basic research to advanced weapons systems development.
In Silicon Valley, executives are also starting to worry about the consequences of Darpa's stinting on basic research in computer science.
"This has been a phenomenal system for harnessing intellectual horsepower for the country," said David L. Tennenhouse, a former Darpa official who is now director of research for Intel. "We should be careful how we tinker with it."
University scientists assert that the changes go even further than what Darpa has disclosed. As financing has dipped, the remaining research grants come with yet more restrictions, they say, often tightly linked to specific "deliverables" that discourage exploration and serendipitous discoveries.
Many grants also limit the use of graduate students to those who hold American citizenship, a rule that hits hard in computer science, where many researchers are foreign.
The shift at Darpa has been noted not just by those researchers directly involved in computing technologies, but by those in other fields supported by the agency.
"I can see they are after deliverables, but the unfortunate thing is that basic research gets squeezed out in the process," said Wolfgang Porod, director of the Center for Nano Sc
wot no sig
Modding up to 5 a 15-second cut and paste post is simply ridiculous.
You moderators ought to be ashamed of yourselves.
Hopelessly pedantic since 1963.
> Leading computer scientists, such as David
> Patterson, the head of the ACM are outraged and
> worried.
Everyone who's budget is cut is outraged and worried.
--
Toby
... When you're not at war, keep your techies on the payroll doing whatever will keep 'em interested, but when you're at war, refocus.
The US is at war. Get used to it.
If you don't like the strings that are attached with the money, don't accept the money. Theo didn't, which is fine, and his posse whined about it somewhat, which is annoying but also fine.
Besides, given how much stuff DoD is buying COTS, it looks like private industry and academia can handle 'pure' research anyway, and if you're gonna fight a number of wars, give away tax cuts for the rich and free viagra for the elderly, you gotta find the money somewhere...
The cost has been worth the rewards.
So you would give up your child's life to secure Fallujah?
So you condone lies as justification for the poorer class of America to go fight for what you deem important.
Social Security and Medicare cannot come before security.
Not only should it come before security, WHAT ABOUT THE IRAQ WAR IS SECURITY?
The security of the USA and the world has been better now that Saddam is in jail and a free democratic government in Iraq is formed.
Wrong, the security of the US is obviously worse because of this. You are completely wrong.
The dominoes are falling in the Middle East, and draining the swamp in Iraq will prove to be one of the most brilliant moves ever.
That's why Bush only takes credit for it when who comes into power fits his agenda.
http://use.perl.org
So, I program for Lockheed, and therefore for the Air Force directly, and I can tell you the kind of feedback we've been getting. I can also tell about the kind of feedback we got when I was hanging around the Computer Security groups at UCSB's graduate labs.
The Government seems fed up with Computers. They need them, they need them incredibly badly, but they can't seem to get exactly what they want. This goes for both contract work and research work. I'll adress it in two parts.
For Research Work: Two major factors are at work here. First is the rule of 80/20. We can do 80 percent of what DARPA (or whatever they're named this week) wants, but that last 20% ("Now make it distributed!" or "Now make it fault tolerant!" or "Now make it cryptographically secure!") needed to make the system usable is really really hard. Lots of research projects have hit dead ends. You expect this to happen in research, of course, but still...
Also, I always got the vibe that DARPA was more than slightly pissed off with us Open Sourcing everything left and right. Maybe it was just us they seemed cross at (and by cross I mean grants and funding tended to shift away from projects with lots of open source offerings), but I've heard other folks doing research mention this too.
I mean, you can easily get the impression that the Government has an attitude of, "You're supposed to be working for us!" Every time a group open sources DARPA-funded stuff (or the components of it, which is usually the case), other people benefit from the research. This may leave a sour taste in the mouth of the accountants over there.
For Contract Work: The US Government's policy is horribly broken. "Cost Plus" contracts may have been great in the 50's for jets and stuff, but we're reaching the point with computer systems and software where we're proving that Design Up Front does not work for large projects.
But, the various millitary branches have so much CYA (Cover Your Ass) paperwork, precedent and process that they cannot disentangle themselves. It's a really bad situation for them, because they have to adapt or die, and they're dying. This is not to say that the Army or Air Force will "go out of business," it's that projects... multi-billion dollar projects... are failing every year now. New projects, huge projects that even a lightweight process would need hundreds of people to deal with, are starting at costs that are so low they'd barely turn a profit for a contractor, because the Army/Navy/Air Force expects to fail.
What I think the Government really needs to do is become more tech-savvy in general. They need to start paying top dollar to hire the best engineers. No more of this "We Give Good Benefits" junk. The Government needs to have its own research groups and they need to be driven by results, technical excellence, and they need to have open-ended budgets (that are limited by results).
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
No, AI is nothing like fusion. We *don't* know what is required (software-wise) to make a robot alive. We *do* know how to make fusion energy efficient and it was done.
The perception that fusion doesn't work is from the early days of fusion research. Without doing any actual testing, physicists just though if you put the plasma in a magnetic bottle, you get fusion. When they actually done the experiment, they discovered more is going on in the plasma. You can't treat it as a gas. You can't treat it as a liquid. It is kind of a combination of both. Virtually everything in physics with regards to fluid/gas flow, as well as electromagnetism is part of the fusion reactor. Only NOW, after the experiments were done, do we understand WHAT is required to make fusion work and HOW to make it work.
Unlike AI, fusion research has been done. It works. It is here now. All that is needed is money to build a test reactor based on *current* knowledge (no pun intended :), work out final nicks in application of the theory, and then we can build the first commercial fusion reactor.
The obstacle to fusion is not science (or lack thereof), but lack of funding. You see, what people heard in the 60s about fusion, they still think it applies today.
I like CS professors, but there's something damned precious about someone who seems to actually believe that the government should just give him/her money without asking for any deliverable. And, if the government somehow cuts off the stream of money, they have a right to bitch about it.
When you see changes in govenment funding of high-tech research like this, you can go back in history of ther super powers, for instance, this mirrors the gradual wind-down and collapse of the british empire. The british empire had the biggest high-tech navy in the early 20th century and the competitive pressures brought on by other competing super powers of the day, and the pressures of fighting the first world war was too much to sustain this empire. The first things to go when an empire is winding down, is the government funding for basic science and applied sciences (both of which are big requirements of military industrial complexes). The fact that a lot of high tech that a country needs to grow its future can only be funded by govenment (industry is too short sighted in most western countries because their profit models don't support such long term thinking). It can be seen that the asian countries (in this century) will eclipse the United State and the western world in economic growth in high-tech such as biotech, nanotech and the development of super AI's etc, all of which will have massive applications in future computer and keeping people perpetually young (ie: biotech developments in stem cell research and making of custom stem cells from scratch and nanotech). Of course, all these technologies can have military applications too (so we will find better ways of blowing eache other up (boring)). If you cut back on basic research, you lose the long-term (25 year or more) race to stay ahead of the technological curve.
The U.S. Navy has for a while been working under this new model: focus on short-term-beneficial research rather than the longer-term stuff. (This applies to all Naval research, not just computer science.)
I've spoken with a sponsor in the Office of Naval Research (ONR). He said that that they're starting to realize the weakness of this approach, and expect to ramp-up longer term research investments in the next few years.
Perhaps the same thing will happen with DARPA-funded research in a while.
I don't see how VP Cheney will allow this to happen. Without DARPA doing basic research, the Internet would not exist as we know it. And without the Internet, no eBay. And without eBay, our economy would truly be in the dumps.
"I can see they are after deliverables, but the unfortunate thing is that basic research gets squeezed out in the process," said Wolfgang
In a way, DARPA is right to cut funding to academia. Over the last forty years, scientists have made a complete mess of programming. We now have a world full of incompatible operating systems and programming languages, a veritable tower of Babel. Yet, software is as failure prone as ever. Software disaster stories are now making the evening news on a regular basis. Does academia take the blame, even partially? Don't count on it. They've invented every excuse in the book, from "there is no silver bullet" to "we don't have enough funding." It's sickening.
I say, unless the computer science community gets off its spoiled collective ass and comes up with a solution to the software reliability problem, it deserves to get its funding decreased. Drastically.
I'd always try to get Protoss carriers as fast as possible, but usually I got wiped out first by a zealot rush. Maybe your analogy is more apt than you realize.
It's actually $2B, just in 2004 alone, to the superstition mills which are "faith based" according to Pope Bush's criteria. The "news" is that the top 10 states got 40% of the money, or $1B. Grants, paid with tax money, while Bush cuts "reality" based programs like education, veterans contracts, etc - and now computer science.
--
make install -not war
We do occasionally get good things out of it, and it does let bright people develop ideas and technologies that have broader uses, but mostly it develops better and better technology for killing people. Sure, we've gotten communications satellites, and the Internet does things that UUCP-net didn't do. But there's a huge amount of solar energy research that simply didn't get done because the college kids who were good at thermodynamics went to work developing aerospace technology instead. And while that aerospace technology has civilian applications, much more of it is for jumbo jets than for small private aircraft and free-flight navigation that would make air travel more practical and decentralized. (I *still* want my flying car :-)
Some of the agricultural research has been seriously useful. But too much of it has been directed in ways that support big agribusiness quasi-industrial farms instead of family farms, and towards pesticides that enable mass production, toward genetically modifying plants to make them more resistant to pesticides so that they're more practical for pesticide-based farming, and towards monocultures rather than increased diversity. And if you thought software patents were nasty, you should go look at the biological patent explosions of the last 20-30 years.
Medical research seems like it wouldn't have this problem, and while it's nowhere near as bad, it's still a mixed bag. Most medical techniques that are useful on battlefields are useful on other trauma, and more Americans are still killed every year by the side-effects of the War on Drugs than the wars for oil, and far more by car accidents than either one. But government-funded medical research has unfortunate interactions with the FDA's regulation of new drug development - the regulatory barriers make it economically difficult to develop drugs that have less than a billion-dollar market, and the government funding tends to encourage large labs, and make up for some of the regulatory problems by funding universities which can avoid the regulatory barriers rather than fixing the regulatory barriers.
Short-term military-focused research is far more of an interference to the evolution of our economy than long-term mixed-use research. But they're both bad.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
If we just outsource the work to India, the budget cuts can be absorbed without loss in productivity.
Vote for Pedro
How about Google and Akamai? Both were---to the extent of my knowledge---basic research that turned out to be immensely useful. Both are now woven deeply into the fabric of the internet---I'm pretty sure you've used both today---and neither is all that old.
That you don't know about research results doesn't mean they're not there.