[logfromblammo]

I have seen enough "brilliant stuff that I can't talk about" in my career that I think you really can't ignore military/paramilitary R&D spending. But nor can you really measure the innovation that comes out of it, since countries are largely going to keep their coolest, newest stuff as national secrets.

The innovation you can see and experience in a product like Facebook or VKontakte is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the unseen tech from the three-letter agencies of many different countries, that are mining, scraping, and reducing the data.

But there's a lot of anti-innovation going on in that sector too, I'm sure.