Did you go through a School Zone - YOUR CELL PHONE KNOWS

[marshaul]

imported post

Your argument can be essentially boiled down to little more than "there was no demand until government created it".

However, there is no shortage of innovation in other areas. As I already argued, government merely co-opts the demand impetus, claiming it as its original invention.

There is little doubt that these things would have arisen without government spending. The same genius responsible would have found employ elsewhere, which employers would eventually see profit potential in their ideas. After all, it's not like government can provide genius, or ideas. All it can provide is demand potential. So, while it might take to market longer to spontaneously recognize nascent demand potential than with the government waving stolen money in its face, so to speak, once realized the superior efficacy of market-driven innovation will rapidly pick up the slack left by lack of government "initiative", leading to a better product in a shorter period of time.

Anything for which there is no nascent demand to be excited, and can only be developed through government-driven demand, is by default something which has been deemed useless by the market.

Arguing that the demand would never be created at all is essentially giving government credit for original thought, something which I believe is self-evidently false. The only matter of debate should be whether the efficacy of market-driven advancement can in fact pick up the slack left by a lack of government initiative.

 

[marshaul]

imported post

tekshogun wrote:

Not true. You're referring to Selective Availability which Bill Clinton ordered turned off and the military has retained the ability to deny signals to certain areas of the world (to prevent enemy units from using it). Also, the FAA has put together WAAS (wide area augmented system) to provide more accuracy (about 3 meters) and before WAAS, the U.S. Coast Guard developed, funded, and established an-open-to-the-public system called Differential GPS which allows enabled devices to receive correction data from land-based sites that provide sub-meter accuracy depending on the quality of the publically available devices. Our GPS technology is resultant of the same technology used by the government and you do, if you have the money, have access to the same levels of accuracy. Only problem is, why do you care if your car is 20 centimeters off? Unless you're digging trenches for water mains or dropping precision munitions into bunker airshafts, you don't need super-accurate GPS. Plus, if you want, you can use the Russian GLONASS system...

Yes, in order for selective availability to be turned off, it had to have once been active. I'm sure you realize this. This is what I was talking about, hence the past tense. Government usurped the initiative and then strangled demand by restricting the accuracy for essentially invalid reasons.

Furthermore, Differential GPS and WAAS are both results of a development process that was arose in response to selective availability. Although the FAA was behind WAAS, this ought to be considered a market function, as the FAA was responding to market demand from airlines who desperately wanted GPS-grade accuracy, and the FAA, as a function of government, usurps organizational services that would otherwise be provided by a private enterprise. Although the USCG has a legitimate government interest, their incentive to create DGPS was a result of pressures places on them by market forces, in their role managing shipping. Claiming government is responsible for this when private shipping companies needed the GPS just as bad and were pressuring the Coast Guard for a solution misses the point: once again, government usurped credit for the demand, which existed for reasons of nongovernmental market forces.

Today private and nonprofit scientific research provides the majority of the demand for the most accurate GPS. Subcentimeter accuracy has little function even for the government.

All of this represents progress and demand in spite of government. The only thing government can take one shred of credit for here is paying for the initial implementation of GPS technology. Everywhere else it has provided impedance.

tekshogun wrote:

Much of it is now driven by the civilian market, as a matter of fact, many companies have begun utilizing geo-location technology developed from outside of the US. Look at companies such as Thales (now Magellan), Trimble, etc. They develop technology available to you and me that can be used exclusively or inclusively with GLONASS and GPS as well as the ESA's Galileo system if it ever gets off the ground.

Indeed. This was part of my point. Indeed, at one point during the Gulf War the government had to buy a bunch of Trimble GPSs, which were better than what they had except for Selective Availability, which they had to Selectively Disable.

This just goes to show that private innovation outpaces governmentally driven progress. Easily enough to pick up that slack from late-realized demand, dontcha think?

tekshogun wrote:

The technology that DARPAnet ran off of then is still in use today, it's called IP, more notably, TCP/IP.

Yes, and in becoming the internet, the protocol had to be made open and the network decentralized. Hence, the same people who created DARPAnet under the government's auspices were able to open it to the market, and move it to an infrastructure which is unavoidably beyond complete government control. "Having the keys" to the protocols is hardly sufficient to achieve meaningful control.