[scotty79]

> It is an especially bitter irony of history that only the necessities of wars and conflicts provided the resources to make certain leaps in tevhnological progress.

I think this continues in US in some degree. US military gets as much money as it wants. Military spends how much money it wants on whatever research it wants.

For me that's the secret weapon of US science. Other countries struggle to allocate any significant portion of the budget to research while in US it's easy because it goes through army under the guise of protecting the country.

[sitkack]

And when DARPA was ARPA (name has switched a couple times), the Pentagon funded lots of pure research and research that would prevent wars. Afaik, DARPA projects have to a lethality metric for all research.