Quote:
Originally Posted by Anteater
There's nothing fundamentally more special about a government funded project versus what a company might do under the same conditions. That's why when the government does produce results, it's because they worked with the private sector in some capacity to do so.
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There's a difference in terms of incentive structure. The reason the govt does frontier research that private companies don't is because there's not an obvious short term profit incentive but there is some sort of strategic advantage militarily or otherwise. There was a good half a century almost between the invention of the computer and computers becoming a widely available commodity.