Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post - Should President Obama do more than just admonish????

dc_dux · 02-05-2009, 12:46 PM

No internet based private venture would exist today w/o Al Gore's "invention of the internet".

What Gore in fact said and did was sponsor the legislation, the High Performance Computing Act, that created the National Research and Education Network with federal funding...which became the "information superhighway"...which became the backbone of today's internet.

In fact, the first browser, Mosaic, was funded by a federal grant under the HPCA to the Netscape guys who were at the Univ of Illinois at the time.

Government funding is at the foundation of most technology R&D, medical R&D, envrionmental/energy R&D, etc. It always has been, starting w/ the railroads and the industrial revolution. In fact, IBM credits in existence today to a heavy reliance on federal grants from its infancy in post WW II through the 80s.

Another fact, in the emerging area of biomedical science, the US has fallen behind the rest of the world (EU, Israel, India...) as a result of significant budget cuts to NIH over the last eight years.

Without a base (most often from government R&D funding), there is little private sector innovation or what innovation does emerge tends to crumble w/o that base.

02-05-2009, 12:46 PM	#60 (permalink)
dc_dux Location: Washington DC	No internet based private venture would exist today w/o Al Gore's "invention of the internet". What Gore in fact said and did was sponsor the legislation, the High Performance Computing Act, that created the National Research and Education Network with federal funding...which became the "information superhighway"...which became the backbone of today's internet. In fact, the first browser, Mosaic, was funded by a federal grant under the HPCA to the Netscape guys who were at the Univ of Illinois at the time. Government funding is at the foundation of most technology R&D, medical R&D, envrionmental/energy R&D, etc. It always has been, starting w/ the railroads and the industrial revolution. In fact, IBM credits in existence today to a heavy reliance on federal grants from its infancy in post WW II through the 80s. Another fact, in the emerging area of biomedical science, the US has fallen behind the rest of the world (EU, Israel, India...) as a result of significant budget cuts to NIH over the last eight years. Without a base (most often from government R&D funding), there is little private sector innovation or what innovation does emerge tends to crumble w/o that base. __________________ "The perfect is the enemy of the good." ~ Voltaire Last edited by dc_dux; 02-05-2009 at 12:52 PM..