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30 Years of Innovation
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The Ludwig von Mises Institute
Tu Ne Cede Malis
Advancing the Scholarship of Liberty in the Tradition of the Austrian School
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Exactly which one of these items did not depend on decades of federal research and development funding? Arguably the car is excluded, but, after the billions and billions in subsidizing thousands of miles of suburban detached SF housing, for car ownership, for oil and gas, and, of course, funding and building the massive Interstate Highway System–it’s safe to say that the automobile industry got a lot of help from the taxpayers.
Like the space shuttle, the wireless technology we depend on with our smart phones was developed by NASA; the computer is, of course, the result of billions of dollars in federal funding at our nation’s research and tech universities for scientific research and defense (WWII and Cold War era). That is to say, the market didn’t create these technologies out of thin air–the government (i.e., taxpayer) has played a fundamental role in developing these technologies to the point that they could be commercialized.
100% of everything the government creates requires capital first created then taken from the private sector. Every research trained, every piece of concrete, every ounce of metal, everything. It’s all taken, or derived from goods taken, from the private sector.
Even the biggest and most expensive projects the USA government ever undertook… the interstate system, the TSA, the space race… all funded by capital created by USA businesses and individuals.
You deluded by the lies of your masters. The government is responsible for creating very little, if anything, of those technologies you described.
Take your smartphone:
What, exactly, did the government create that is in your smartphone? Piece by piece. All that software, all that hardware, all that technology. Were did that originate exactly?
While the government did help develop and research computer networks and wireless technology, it’s still very clear that the majority of work creating the products we use today was with the private sector. DARPA and its net with IBM did create the first computers and networks, but there’s no evidence the private sector couldn’t have done it as well. The FCC has been regulating telephones since 1934, and It’s highly likely that early private sector computing machines could have used the phone networks as early as the 40s, and did not have permission from the FCC. The basic OSI model and Transmission control protocols are not impossibly complicated, and just because they were first produced by the Feds doesn’t prove the market couldn’t. And we all know the feds could never make thousands of games, smartphone apps and computer/tablet/other options.
DARPA is also a bit of a myth considering Xerox created the first network earlier. PARC basically invented modern computing.
Oh BTW.
Those NASA rockets?
They are too expensive and wasteful to actually be used in any practical way. Most of our communication satellites are put into space by Russian and Chinese rockets, not American ones.
Instead of using expensive liquid nitrogen fuel, the biggest of those ‘communist’ rockets use kerosene to launch our communication satellites into orbit.
NASA is so corrupt and worthless at actually being a space agency that the USA has been long been surpassed by Asia for practical space flight.
What is worse is that we’ve actually lost our technology due to the government’s level ineptitude.
Much of the technology developed during the space race as lost once it was over. I guess it was so secret and so valuable that it just ended up being lost forever. Hard to tell how much of it’s been re-created by the private sector, though.
Meanwhile in the 2000′s….
http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2009/06/atlantis-window-pane-begins-longerons-damaged-accident/
We have millions of dollars being blown and months of delays caused by a knob being stuck between the window and dashboard of the shuttle and a cart falling off a truck.
That’s probably why we havn’t developed further in 30 years…. The private sector completely left alone, who knows? The sky really would be the limit then….
Yes.
Here is the current reality on space flight:
http://www.spacelaunchreport.com/log2010.html
Kazakhstan space launches = 24
USA space launches = 15
The top 5 most popular rockets for launches are….
Chinese ‘Long March’ rockets carried out 15 launches.
Russian Soyuz = 13 launches
Russian Proton = 12
European Ariane 5 = 6
USA Atlas 5 = 4
This is all thanks to our Glorious Leaders in Washington, decades of research and development, and untold billions and billions of dollars flushed down the toilets in NASA.
It would be hilarious to see the relative budgets of Cape Canaveral, Florida (9 launches) or Kennedy Space Center, Florida (3 launches) versus Baikonur in Kazakhstan (24 launches)
Because, you know, stuff like this makes sense:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ui-ehJlGM1Q
*cry*
Oh, here is the Russian equivalent:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jZD8rK-Q0s
Odd. The techs watching that ‘crawler’ don’t seem nearly as fat.
Depend on? no. INfluenced by? Sure. The state takes and robs, and then uses the funds for other projects. Bastiat: the seen and the unseen. We must see the costs.
It’s the same picture at the end so it doesn’t work even though it’s true.
That’s the joke.
The joke was to show how government funded industries (in this case NASA) hasn’t innovated the last 30 years while the private sector has – a point lost when it’s the exact same picture of a spacecraft in both cases (look at the clouds).
Funny, I think we all got the joke.
Yes.
Because it’s impossible for us to tell if the photo was taken in 1980 or in 2010.
I think what he’s saying is the joke would be better if the picture of the shuttle was substantially different so you could tell it was taken at a different time.
But it’s not like the shuttle’s appearance not changing is in dispute.
DARPA is to the internet what mud huts are to skyscrapers.
The biggest ‘ideas’ that made the internet possible was the packet-switched computer network and the TCP/IP “Internet Protocol Suite”. These two ideas form the core functional framework for the internet. Without them the internet, as it is today, would not be possible.
Packet Switching:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_switching
TCP/IP:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Protocol_Suite
For example, you’ll notice that the packet switching can consist of two types of switching: Connection oriented (virtual circuit) and connection-less oriented (datagram switching). TCP/IP consists of both TCP and UDP protocols which run on top of IP. TCP is the connection oriented protocol, and UDP is the connection-less.
The concept for packet switching networks was simultaneously discovered by Paul Baran (A Polish immigrant to USA working for RAND corporation) and Donald Davies (working for the United Kingdom’s National Physical Laboratory).
It’s all pretty well spelled out in those wikipedia articles.
ARPANet was historic in that it was the first packet-switched computer network. But CYCLADES and many other similar networks were needed before TCP/IP was developed.
People bring up ARPANet and it’s government funding, but really the corporation that actually developed the technology that made it successful was BBN. They are the ones that developed the technology, put together the hardware, and actually made it work.
BSD took the BBN’s version of TCP/IP, improved it quite a bit, and released it as Free software, which was then incorporated into operating systems everywhere. This is what made Unix systems commercially successful and is the direct ancestor for TCP/IP we use to this day. (as thanks for all this the BSD folks sued for violating Unix’s Intellectual Property)
So.. You’re saying the internet was essentially complete with DARPA?
OK, even if I stipulate that, the Gummint’s role was inconsequential and unnecessary. I think you agree.
As to TCP/IP, hell, protocols are a dime a dozen. It’s just agreed-to rules of engagement.
Packets were a cool innovation, but I think it is significant that they appeared spontaneously from two sources. They were inevitable.
I am saying that the the Arpanet was historically interesting because it was the first packet switched computer network. It certainly was not the internet! The ideas and technologies used in Arpanet were used elsewhere and developed by many different groups.. some of them government organizations and other ones private.
The idea that Darpa is responsible for creating the internet is just stupid.
Well it would of turned out different, but it would of certainly still happened.
What is critical about TCP/IP and packet switched network was that it allowed you to create _decentralized_ networks.
There have certainly been computer networks created prior to this using different approaches. But they all failed to last.
Why?
Because they all relied on a central device, a sort of communication broker or overall network controller, that would take information from one computer and deliver it to another. This made the network controller the ‘smarts’ and the end points relatively ‘dumb’ in terms of what was going on in the network.
With the Internet it’s the exact opposite. The end points, the nodes, are the smart ones. Your computer is a node on the internet. It has the same ‘rights’ and the same ‘ability’ to send and receive information as any other system on the internet, as long as you have a publicly addressable address.
Each node, individually, not only decides on what gets sent, but how it gets sent. There is no central watcher or controller that decides on how information is relayed. Each node is a individual and independent player that gets to decide on the rules of the game on it’s own.
If the internet needed a centralized manager, a ‘overmind’ that controlled what was being said and were it was being sent to it could not possibly work.
Only a decentralized network of independent nodes working together voluntarily could it ever possibly worked. It’s completely Peer-to-Peer at it’s core.
It’s also a model on how any network should be designed.
It helps to illustrate how human societies should be formed.
Nothing is inevitable. We can destroy wealth much easier then it is created.
But certainly in a free society this would of happened as a matter of course. It is structured to match the rules of the universe.
BTW…
This is a glorious quote:
- Carl Sagan.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSgiXGELjbc
cool.
You know some stuff, dude. (not sarcasm)
But if you show how advanced the weaponry has become the change over 30 years is quite dramatic! But so has been the waste and corruption associated with this scourge. Thank God no one in the efficient free market has any reason to kill off its customers.
Weaponry largely developed and produced by private contractors supplying their biggest customer…
Also the utility of latest weapons systems like the drones is at best dubious to say the least.
This is very encouraging and making me want to be there in 30 years to see what it will be next.
Look back 50 and you’ll get an idea.
I was just blocked from posting this image onto Facebook. Abusive content?
Not to mention how deceiving it is. Here is a webpage from NASA from 2006 detailing just some of the innovations that were done to the STS since the first flight in 1981.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/main/shuttle_evolves.html
It Only Looks Like the Original
All this shows is that different technologies are in different stages of their life cycles. I wonder how many of the folks flying to view the launch made the trip in airliners like the Boeing 737 and Boeing 747 that were first produced in the 1960′s, over a decade before the first Shuttle, and which are still in production. Does that mean there is a lack of innovation in the commercial airliner industry, or just that the exterior designs reached an optimal point decades ago?
Boeing is primarily a government contractor; Airbus is mostly(completely?) government owned. Unsurprisingly, neither’s a hotbed of substantial design churn.
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