On several ocassions the Lord commanded the Israelites to destroy every man woman and child in a city.
So? He also made these supposed "thou shalt not kill" type laws, and he's the judge at the end of the road. If you have a real missive from god, you're allowed to break his rules.
On at least one ocassion (I'm not a Biblical scholar) Saul was even commanded to kill all of the animals in a city.
The bible has nothing to say on the topic of the needless killing of animals. This isn't a sin even without a missive.
Saul got in trouble because he decided that instead of destroying perfectly good animals that he would use them as sacrifices.
You're missing the point of that story, which was that God was pissed that Saul sacrificed animals to someone other than Him. It's that whole thou shalt not worship others before me thing. He's a jealous god. No three-ways.
Perhaps you should have quoted the New Testament.
Haughty is a tone best suited to those who're right.
Because current LCD pixels require six lead lines, and we can't make lead lines small enough to shrink the pixels any further. The article phrases this badly: it's not that pixels can't be made smaller. It's that TFT LCD pixels' lead lines take all of the available current space, and there is no current technique on the horizon to solve this. Other monitor types do not have this particular problem; this is peculiar to LCD and OLED.
but my understanding is that VGA says nothing about the size of the display, only the number of pixels (you can display VGA resolution of 640 x 480 on a 10" screen or a 30" screen, and its still VGA).... yeah.
So isn't the whole term "half VGA screen" kinda dumb? Or is it just me?
It's just you. VGA is 640x480. Half-VGA is either 320x480 (many PDAs) or 640x240 (a few PDAs, blackberry-like devices).
Half refers to pixel count in one direction, not physical size. That the screens tend to reflect a normal monitor aspect ratio halved is a reflection of wanting to keep square pixels (which may sound silly, unless you're old enough to remember the pain in the ass which was drawing circles on non-square pixel screens like CGA and EGA. Algorithms slow down *lots* when they're stretching things.)
This is true in a more literal sense than you might have intended: both IE and pre-Mozilla Netscape were based on the Mosaic codebase, as to which both of their info boxes attest.
I wonder if its just because MS came up with the idea? (AFAIK)
MS did not come up with RFC 833. Yes, MHTML is just an implementation of HTML E-Mail using a file container instead of a mail container for the MIME archive. As far as why nobody else supports it, because it's a pain in the ass to implement, and Mozilla is community driven, meaning nobody feels like it. The primary bug for MTHML support, 18764, is almost seven years old.
Whereas everyone's going to suggest that the reason to want away from PDF is because Microsoft wants its death grip on the release format, I want to take a different kind of stand.
What's wrong with PDF? Everything.
Besides requiring a slow, crash-prone plugin, failing to respect whatever random UI changes I've made to my browser, and generally behaving like a near-dead Yugo, besides transmitting ridiculously overlarge binaries, besides having a plugin with ridiculous and inappropriate caching behavior, besides that I can't read it on my palm pilot, and besides that the plugin attempts to impose a second UI in space left over from the first UI, leaving me with about a half a postage stamp to actually read documents in?
It doesn't keep control focus when you swap away from the document.
Yeah, that's really my biggest problem with PDF. I have to keep clicking to use my lousy little scroll wheel. And that one annoyance is why I've been pushing inside irc.mozilla.org #mozillazine for MTHML so hard.
PDF blows. Single-file-delivery HTML would be the future, if anyone would just fucking implement it in Mozilla and Opera.
It's been more than a hundred years since each of these issues were settled by American law, by a lawsuit issued by Coca Cola against Pepsi and a lawsuit issued by Channel against a now-defunct perfume maker. Neither scents nor flavors may enjoy any form of legal protection more complex than a trade secret.
The pressurized rooms go in both directions. The best runners train at high altitude, sea leevel, and low altitude, in order to stress their lungs and to be able to handle oxygen-rich environments as well as oxygen-poor. This is one of the reasons why specifically Kenyans and Jamaicans have such good runners, as there's ready access to running paths that go from sea-level to extreme height in a single run.
The difference is that unlike all who went before, corporations claim ownership of the ideas.
Um. Maybe I'm missing something here. Since when did universities not own what their students did? The discussion was between corporate research and public academic research.
Besides, it's temporary monopoly, not ownership. So the corporation gets to charge for it for twenty years to make its investment back. In the long run, why's that such a problem? Either the public pays for it and gets it immediately, or a private interest pays for it and the public gets it soon.
Conversely, if one can "own" pieces of scientific data
One cannot. Patents do not (currently) cover data in any way, though there's a really scary question about the copyrighting of databases - currently not possible, but the Supreme Court is being boneheaded lately.
Patents cover a method, nothing more.
then corporations are abusing the priviledge of public information to achieve essentially a theft.
This doesn't make any sense. If the corporation is discovering the knowledge, then putting it into the public domain by patenting it (instead of making it a trade secret,) then how are they not donating directly to the public, again?
Your example of an immigrant is a fallacy
Your argument would make it a falsehood, not a fallacy, though I don't see exactly what part of my argument relies on any claims made by the immigrant, and thusly also reject your argument. Please don't use the word fallacy again until you know what it means; it does not mean "incorrect end to a deductive tree" as you have used it.
Actually, they're both copies of the first 1/3 of Kennywood's Steel Phantom, which has been since dismantled and remade as Phantom's Revenge. The Steel Phantom is possibly the craziest coaster I've ever been on, and I'm a recovering coaster fanatic (travelling to go ride rides, etc.)
You may have been there a bunch of times, but I lived there briefly, and parent poster is correct - that entire state, both the half that thinks it's NYC and the half that thinks it's Philadelphia call it Great Adventure.
But be sure to tell the natives how they talk, some more. It's amusing to the rest of us.
It's worth pointing out that the "patent" listed at the end of the article is fairly obviously bogus. Not only is it a patent for a technology which has existed for more than 20 years, and which already exists in three portable pure-gaming handhelds (the N-Gage, the GP32 with expansion pack, and the WonderSwan Advance,) but it doesn't even look remotely like a real US patent application.
Also, whoever made that patent application isn't much of a researcher. In adding random information to the patent to try to make it look real, they stuck the screen's color depth onto the document (which wouldn't be there in a real patent application.) Amusingly, they claim 56 colors, which is true of the GBC, not the GBA.
Nintendojo obviously isn't checking their materials very well.
What? What new hardware? I read the entire story, and the only mention I see of new hardware is the EECuber guy saying they'll add a microphone, which is silly, because the DS has been known to have a microphone for almost a year, and one lonely guy talking about some new chip to enable wireless in the DS, which is silly, because the DS has been known to do native wireless for more than a year.
Unless you think that buying a peripheral somehow adds hardware to the host?
Yeah, Just so you're aware, Flash is actually well-standardized, and because there's a single canonical viewer, one of its great advantages is that you don't have to play vendor control games. Arguably, for complex layout, Flash is easier to work with than HTML, specifically because it is so singly standardized and implemented.
Now, I can't stand to work with it, so please don't think that I'm advocating it. But, Flash was publically standardized and released to the public for reimplementation in the middle of the lifespan of Flash 4. That's the reason for projects like Ming, and for Macromedia's competitors like Adobe to have begun to include the flash format in their own products all at the same time.
As far as open standard things that can do what Flash can do which browser vendors are implementing - other than Flash (which satisfies your criteria,) it's called SVG, and it's about halfway there. You guys haven't rushed to it at all, hence browser vendors' lackluster support. It's been around since 2001.
As far as working in Firefox but not in Mozilla, son, I hate to be the first to break it to you, but they're built from the same codebase.
I'd love to see an example of that; it defies what the Mozilla project seems to be. Did you bother to report it in Bugzilla? Did you tell anyone at irc.mozilla.org #mozillazine about it? Look, it's one thing not wanting to fix it yourself, but if the impossible is occurring, you might at least tell the project about it? I mean, trapsing through bugzilla there appears to be no such bug, and so the only person you have to blame for this not being fixed is yourself.
Anyway, when any one of you guys has to write a container, deal with polymorphism, handle large scale architectures, deal with interfaces across applications, write libraries for static or dynamic linking, then I'll manage to hold sympathy for a few two- and three-line HTML hacks which are already extremely well documented at places like The Noodle Incident, MeyerWeb, WaSP, Well-Styled, and so forth.
The things you're complaining about, even if they were as hard as you suggest, just aren't that hard. As an HTML novice but as a programmer I walked into an IRC channel, got a few good FAQ sites, read for an afternoon, and was able to write cross-browser sites afterwards. Go read Sutter's and Alexandrescu's papers about exceptions if you want to see short examples of what other people deal with silently.
Nobody makes more noise about fewer or smaller issues than the web programming community. Oh no, you have to preface a property illegally with an underscore. Shudder.
Oh honestly. I know more than ten people in the amateur Gameboy programming community alone that could do it. Bare-metal programming isn't that difficult, and as machine resources drop to 1961 levels, you come to a point where there aren't so many approaches to take, either.
1) Scientists operate telescopes with remote controls, and generally sit at reasonable altitudes.
2) Sports programs, especially track and field, have pressurized rooms for training. Space stations have them for relatively obvious reasons, as do submarines. Hell, some Southern California condominiums offer pressurization and oxygen control as a luxury. Telescope programs cost tens or hundreds of millions of dollars - significantly more than the other four things mentioned. There's already fierce atmospheric control for an antarctic outpost; pressurizing it would be trivial. There is no reason that if the station needed such a thing it wouldn't get it. Mountain telescopes could get them if they needed them too (or at least oxygen bottles.) This is a myth.
Now I think its safe to say that deep space observational technology doesn't grow at the pace of say microchips,
Actually, given that the images are taken, processed, stored and transmitted by microchips, it's not safe to say that at all. In fact, microchips, optics and hydraulics are about the only three technologies which are enablers to telescopes. Stabilization, atmospheric correction, location, resolution, and so on are all intimately tied to one or more of these three things.
Poster, repeat after me. Guessing is bad. Guessing makes me look stupid.
Moderators, repeat after me. Moderate up only when I know about the topic at hand. Only moderate down when I am an amateur.
Er. I'm not exactly a science historian, so maybe I'm missing something, but what about the transistor, the telegraph, medical magnetic location (Bell's device for the recently-shot president), machine gins, rifling, the mill, the planar, the lathe, alternating current, broadcast power, the internal combustion engine, recorded audio, the light bulb, tarmac, vulcanization, the concept of replacable parts, radio broadcast, literally hundreds of construction techniques and safety techniques, steel-frame buildings, practical techniques for giant magnetoresistance, MRI, PET, PMOS and CMOS, vacuum-packed, canned, frozen and freeze-dried foods, grounded power delivery, fuses, the vacuum tube, ore seperation, carbon button transmitters (early microphones,) the mimeograph, the digital scanner, thousands of concepts in medicine ranging from discovery to treatment, mechanical and chemical and occasionally biological, dozens of microfabrication technologies, and so on?
I mean, we're nerds. Have we never heard of PARC, PSC, Menlo Park? Just have a look at the histories of companies like IBM and Intel, GM and Ford, the Insurance Institute, the old gun industries, the birth of mass manufacturing, of land developers, basically any huge corporation making large-scale (billion dollar by modern dollar or above) effort, where research costs are lower than the savings would be. Granted, many - maybe even most - of the efforts on that scale are at least in part governmentally backed. That said, not all of them are.
Not based wholly or in major parts on any prior research in public academia? Well, that's sort of unfair. All research is dependant on earlier research. You could very easily claim that Intel's work is dependant on work done by Ben Franklin in discovering electricity, or by Da Vinci in improving metal alloys, or in fact by Confucious for popularizing the notion that abstract calculation is an important concept. It is frequently observed, in the historian's equivalent to Six Degrees of Kavin Bacon, that all of western science can be seen as a series of footnotes to Archimedes.
Here's another way to look at your claim. I dare you to name any profound, completely government-funded discovery, which was not based wholly or in major parts on any prior research derived from a war effort. When you're done with that, change the topic to the Ancient Greeks. When that's over, try the ancient Koreans (it turns out they're more difficult to seperate from today than the Greeks. Go Korea.) Oh, and if seeing it come from two ancient nations, war and academia isn't enough, here's the real slap in the face: show me a fundamental, ground breaking technology which cannot be traced in whole or in part to religion. This is stunningly difficult.
So no, I can't do it. The transistor comes damned close: you have to go either as far back as Franklin and claim that because the government supported his lifestyle as a Diplomat, that in some way it was knowingly funded research, or failing that, you need to go back to ancient times when kings deployed researchers into the early materials science of alchemy to get purer alloys for their coinage and to find pre-water-displacement methods to determine artifact purity ("Eureka!," etc.,) but sure enough, you can make that claim for pretty much anything I can think of. Vulcanized rubber wasn't really the auto manufacturers looking for better tires (tyres back then;) surely enough it's the New World era British and Portugese monarchies looking for ways to transport the fabulously profitable sap of the rubber tree without spoilage. Canned food wasn't Heinz looking to halt inventory decline; no no, it was the result of the money invested into WWI wartime ration research coming to a head five years later. The telegraph was tied to troop movements, the submarine and helicopter were originally speculative war machines in the renaissance, anti-lock brakes... well, you'll have to figure out how they're not just insurance companies broadening margins by sav
Yeah, but radioactives aren't hard to distill to 1958 levels - you can do it with a few common college textbooks, a bathtub, and a decent radiation suit. The hard part about building a bomb is the mesh of particle reflectors, back then usually just a suspension of reflective metal flakes in a particular configuration which is surprisingly difficult to achieve. That, and that it's already inside national borders, are what would have made it scary if it hadn't already been identified. ('Course now, even if it isn't dredged up already there are about a billion people with guns watching it, but still.)
Slashdot Mirror
It didn't work for Vendikar or Eminiar 7.
On several ocassions the Lord commanded the Israelites to destroy every man woman and child in a city.
So? He also made these supposed "thou shalt not kill" type laws, and he's the judge at the end of the road. If you have a real missive from god, you're allowed to break his rules.
On at least one ocassion (I'm not a Biblical scholar) Saul was even commanded to kill all of the animals in a city.
The bible has nothing to say on the topic of the needless killing of animals. This isn't a sin even without a missive.
Saul got in trouble because he decided that instead of destroying perfectly good animals that he would use them as sacrifices.
You're missing the point of that story, which was that God was pissed that Saul sacrificed animals to someone other than Him. It's that whole thou shalt not worship others before me thing. He's a jealous god. No three-ways.
Perhaps you should have quoted the New Testament.
Haughty is a tone best suited to those who're right.
Because current LCD pixels require six lead lines, and we can't make lead lines small enough to shrink the pixels any further. The article phrases this badly: it's not that pixels can't be made smaller. It's that TFT LCD pixels' lead lines take all of the available current space, and there is no current technique on the horizon to solve this. Other monitor types do not have this particular problem; this is peculiar to LCD and OLED.
but my understanding is that VGA says nothing about the size of the display, only the number of pixels (you can display VGA resolution of 640 x 480 on a 10" screen or a 30" screen, and its still VGA). ... yeah.
So isn't the whole term "half VGA screen" kinda dumb? Or is it just me?
It's just you. VGA is 640x480. Half-VGA is either 320x480 (many PDAs) or 640x240 (a few PDAs, blackberry-like devices).
Half refers to pixel count in one direction, not physical size. That the screens tend to reflect a normal monitor aspect ratio halved is a reflection of wanting to keep square pixels (which may sound silly, unless you're old enough to remember the pain in the ass which was drawing circles on non-square pixel screens like CGA and EGA. Algorithms slow down *lots* when they're stretching things.)
This is true in a more literal sense than you might have intended: both IE and pre-Mozilla Netscape were based on the Mosaic codebase, as to which both of their info boxes attest.
I'm not sure what the article is talking about.
Clearly.
As far as I know, there is no DRM in MHT files.
Then perhaps you should RTFA.
I wonder if its just because MS came up with the idea? (AFAIK)
MS did not come up with RFC 833. Yes, MHTML is just an implementation of HTML E-Mail using a file container instead of a mail container for the MIME archive. As far as why nobody else supports it, because it's a pain in the ass to implement, and Mozilla is community driven, meaning nobody feels like it. The primary bug for MTHML support, 18764, is almost seven years old.
Whereas everyone's going to suggest that the reason to want away from PDF is because Microsoft wants its death grip on the release format, I want to take a different kind of stand.
What's wrong with PDF? Everything.
Besides requiring a slow, crash-prone plugin, failing to respect whatever random UI changes I've made to my browser, and generally behaving like a near-dead Yugo, besides transmitting ridiculously overlarge binaries, besides having a plugin with ridiculous and inappropriate caching behavior, besides that I can't read it on my palm pilot, and besides that the plugin attempts to impose a second UI in space left over from the first UI, leaving me with about a half a postage stamp to actually read documents in?
It doesn't keep control focus when you swap away from the document.
Yeah, that's really my biggest problem with PDF. I have to keep clicking to use my lousy little scroll wheel. And that one annoyance is why I've been pushing inside irc.mozilla.org #mozillazine for MTHML so hard.
PDF blows. Single-file-delivery HTML would be the future, if anyone would just fucking implement it in Mozilla and Opera.
It's been more than a hundred years since each of these issues were settled by American law, by a lawsuit issued by Coca Cola against Pepsi and a lawsuit issued by Channel against a now-defunct perfume maker. Neither scents nor flavors may enjoy any form of legal protection more complex than a trade secret.
The pressurized rooms go in both directions. The best runners train at high altitude, sea leevel, and low altitude, in order to stress their lungs and to be able to handle oxygen-rich environments as well as oxygen-poor. This is one of the reasons why specifically Kenyans and Jamaicans have such good runners, as there's ready access to running paths that go from sea-level to extreme height in a single run.
The difference is that unlike all who went before, corporations claim ownership of the ideas.
Um. Maybe I'm missing something here. Since when did universities not own what their students did? The discussion was between corporate research and public academic research.
Besides, it's temporary monopoly, not ownership. So the corporation gets to charge for it for twenty years to make its investment back. In the long run, why's that such a problem? Either the public pays for it and gets it immediately, or a private interest pays for it and the public gets it soon.
Conversely, if one can "own" pieces of scientific data
One cannot. Patents do not (currently) cover data in any way, though there's a really scary question about the copyrighting of databases - currently not possible, but the Supreme Court is being boneheaded lately.
Patents cover a method, nothing more.
then corporations are abusing the priviledge of public information to achieve essentially a theft.
This doesn't make any sense. If the corporation is discovering the knowledge, then putting it into the public domain by patenting it (instead of making it a trade secret,) then how are they not donating directly to the public, again?
Your example of an immigrant is a fallacy
Your argument would make it a falsehood, not a fallacy, though I don't see exactly what part of my argument relies on any claims made by the immigrant, and thusly also reject your argument. Please don't use the word fallacy again until you know what it means; it does not mean "incorrect end to a deductive tree" as you have used it.
Actually, they're both copies of the first 1/3 of Kennywood's Steel Phantom, which has been since dismantled and remade as Phantom's Revenge. The Steel Phantom is possibly the craziest coaster I've ever been on, and I'm a recovering coaster fanatic (travelling to go ride rides, etc.)
How does that compare to other high rides?
It doesn't. That's why coaster fans in the know hit Kennywood in Pittsburgh for the Phantom.
You may have been there a bunch of times, but I lived there briefly, and parent poster is correct - that entire state, both the half that thinks it's NYC and the half that thinks it's Philadelphia call it Great Adventure.
But be sure to tell the natives how they talk, some more. It's amusing to the rest of us.
It's worth pointing out that the "patent" listed at the end of the article is fairly obviously bogus. Not only is it a patent for a technology which has existed for more than 20 years, and which already exists in three portable pure-gaming handhelds (the N-Gage, the GP32 with expansion pack, and the WonderSwan Advance,) but it doesn't even look remotely like a real US patent application.
Also, whoever made that patent application isn't much of a researcher. In adding random information to the patent to try to make it look real, they stuck the screen's color depth onto the document (which wouldn't be there in a real patent application.) Amusingly, they claim 56 colors, which is true of the GBC, not the GBA.
Nintendojo obviously isn't checking their materials very well.
What? What new hardware? I read the entire story, and the only mention I see of new hardware is the EECuber guy saying they'll add a microphone, which is silly, because the DS has been known to have a microphone for almost a year, and one lonely guy talking about some new chip to enable wireless in the DS, which is silly, because the DS has been known to do native wireless for more than a year.
Unless you think that buying a peripheral somehow adds hardware to the host?
Anyone which finds it informative that an article from the Onion is fictional doesn't have the common sense to deserve oxygen.
Ahem. "You might not want to live without input box grammar checking." English desires terseness.
Yeah, Just so you're aware, Flash is actually well-standardized, and because there's a single canonical viewer, one of its great advantages is that you don't have to play vendor control games. Arguably, for complex layout, Flash is easier to work with than HTML, specifically because it is so singly standardized and implemented.
Now, I can't stand to work with it, so please don't think that I'm advocating it. But, Flash was publically standardized and released to the public for reimplementation in the middle of the lifespan of Flash 4. That's the reason for projects like Ming, and for Macromedia's competitors like Adobe to have begun to include the flash format in their own products all at the same time.
As far as open standard things that can do what Flash can do which browser vendors are implementing - other than Flash (which satisfies your criteria,) it's called SVG, and it's about halfway there. You guys haven't rushed to it at all, hence browser vendors' lackluster support. It's been around since 2001.
As far as working in Firefox but not in Mozilla, son, I hate to be the first to break it to you, but they're built from the same codebase.
I'd love to see an example of that; it defies what the Mozilla project seems to be. Did you bother to report it in Bugzilla? Did you tell anyone at irc.mozilla.org #mozillazine about it? Look, it's one thing not wanting to fix it yourself, but if the impossible is occurring, you might at least tell the project about it? I mean, trapsing through bugzilla there appears to be no such bug, and so the only person you have to blame for this not being fixed is yourself.
Anyway, when any one of you guys has to write a container, deal with polymorphism, handle large scale architectures, deal with interfaces across applications, write libraries for static or dynamic linking, then I'll manage to hold sympathy for a few two- and three-line HTML hacks which are already extremely well documented at places like The Noodle Incident, MeyerWeb, WaSP, Well-Styled, and so forth.
The things you're complaining about, even if they were as hard as you suggest, just aren't that hard. As an HTML novice but as a programmer I walked into an IRC channel, got a few good FAQ sites, read for an afternoon, and was able to write cross-browser sites afterwards. Go read Sutter's and Alexandrescu's papers about exceptions if you want to see short examples of what other people deal with silently.
Nobody makes more noise about fewer or smaller issues than the web programming community. Oh no, you have to preface a property illegally with an underscore. Shudder.
Oh honestly. I know more than ten people in the amateur Gameboy programming community alone that could do it. Bare-metal programming isn't that difficult, and as machine resources drop to 1961 levels, you come to a point where there aren't so many approaches to take, either.
Not since I saw them debating nanotechnology and biochemical warfare, no.
Nuclear weapons aren't scary these days, and that's scary.
1) Scientists operate telescopes with remote controls, and generally sit at reasonable altitudes.
2) Sports programs, especially track and field, have pressurized rooms for training. Space stations have them for relatively obvious reasons, as do submarines. Hell, some Southern California condominiums offer pressurization and oxygen control as a luxury. Telescope programs cost tens or hundreds of millions of dollars - significantly more than the other four things mentioned. There's already fierce atmospheric control for an antarctic outpost; pressurizing it would be trivial. There is no reason that if the station needed such a thing it wouldn't get it. Mountain telescopes could get them if they needed them too (or at least oxygen bottles.) This is a myth.
Now I think its safe to say that deep space observational technology doesn't grow at the pace of say microchips,
Actually, given that the images are taken, processed, stored and transmitted by microchips, it's not safe to say that at all. In fact, microchips, optics and hydraulics are about the only three technologies which are enablers to telescopes. Stabilization, atmospheric correction, location, resolution, and so on are all intimately tied to one or more of these three things.
Poster, repeat after me. Guessing is bad. Guessing makes me look stupid.
Moderators, repeat after me. Moderate up only when I know about the topic at hand. Only moderate down when I am an amateur.
Mod parent down.
Not if they know what the word ironic means, they don't.
Er. I'm not exactly a science historian, so maybe I'm missing something, but what about the transistor, the telegraph, medical magnetic location (Bell's device for the recently-shot president), machine gins, rifling, the mill, the planar, the lathe, alternating current, broadcast power, the internal combustion engine, recorded audio, the light bulb, tarmac, vulcanization, the concept of replacable parts, radio broadcast, literally hundreds of construction techniques and safety techniques, steel-frame buildings, practical techniques for giant magnetoresistance, MRI, PET, PMOS and CMOS, vacuum-packed, canned, frozen and freeze-dried foods, grounded power delivery, fuses, the vacuum tube, ore seperation, carbon button transmitters (early microphones,) the mimeograph, the digital scanner, thousands of concepts in medicine ranging from discovery to treatment, mechanical and chemical and occasionally biological, dozens of microfabrication technologies, and so on?
... well, you'll have to figure out how they're not just insurance companies broadening margins by sav
I mean, we're nerds. Have we never heard of PARC, PSC, Menlo Park? Just have a look at the histories of companies like IBM and Intel, GM and Ford, the Insurance Institute, the old gun industries, the birth of mass manufacturing, of land developers, basically any huge corporation making large-scale (billion dollar by modern dollar or above) effort, where research costs are lower than the savings would be. Granted, many - maybe even most - of the efforts on that scale are at least in part governmentally backed. That said, not all of them are.
Not based wholly or in major parts on any prior research in public academia? Well, that's sort of unfair. All research is dependant on earlier research. You could very easily claim that Intel's work is dependant on work done by Ben Franklin in discovering electricity, or by Da Vinci in improving metal alloys, or in fact by Confucious for popularizing the notion that abstract calculation is an important concept. It is frequently observed, in the historian's equivalent to Six Degrees of Kavin Bacon, that all of western science can be seen as a series of footnotes to Archimedes.
Here's another way to look at your claim. I dare you to name any profound, completely government-funded discovery, which was not based wholly or in major parts on any prior research derived from a war effort. When you're done with that, change the topic to the Ancient Greeks. When that's over, try the ancient Koreans (it turns out they're more difficult to seperate from today than the Greeks. Go Korea.) Oh, and if seeing it come from two ancient nations, war and academia isn't enough, here's the real slap in the face: show me a fundamental, ground breaking technology which cannot be traced in whole or in part to religion. This is stunningly difficult.
So no, I can't do it. The transistor comes damned close: you have to go either as far back as Franklin and claim that because the government supported his lifestyle as a Diplomat, that in some way it was knowingly funded research, or failing that, you need to go back to ancient times when kings deployed researchers into the early materials science of alchemy to get purer alloys for their coinage and to find pre-water-displacement methods to determine artifact purity ("Eureka!," etc.,) but sure enough, you can make that claim for pretty much anything I can think of. Vulcanized rubber wasn't really the auto manufacturers looking for better tires (tyres back then;) surely enough it's the New World era British and Portugese monarchies looking for ways to transport the fabulously profitable sap of the rubber tree without spoilage. Canned food wasn't Heinz looking to halt inventory decline; no no, it was the result of the money invested into WWI wartime ration research coming to a head five years later. The telegraph was tied to troop movements, the submarine and helicopter were originally speculative war machines in the renaissance, anti-lock brakes
Yeah, but radioactives aren't hard to distill to 1958 levels - you can do it with a few common college textbooks, a bathtub, and a decent radiation suit. The hard part about building a bomb is the mesh of particle reflectors, back then usually just a suspension of reflective metal flakes in a particular configuration which is surprisingly difficult to achieve. That, and that it's already inside national borders, are what would have made it scary if it hadn't already been identified. ('Course now, even if it isn't dredged up already there are about a billion people with guns watching it, but still.)