

The Future Postponed – Declining Investment in Basic Research [pdf] - christianbryant
http://dc.mit.edu/sites/default/files/innovation_deficit/Future%20Postponed.pdf

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yummyfajitas
This article is being a bit disingenuous and the title is simply misleading.
The uneducated reader might come away with the mistaken impression that
science funding has been reduced. This incorrect idea is further reinforced
with the graph of "Outlays as share of total federal budget".

Some other graphs from the same source:
[http://www.aaas.org/sites/default/files/DefNon_0.jpg](http://www.aaas.org/sites/default/files/DefNon_0.jpg)
[http://www.aaas.org/sites/default/files/FunctionNON_0.jpg](http://www.aaas.org/sites/default/files/FunctionNON_0.jpg)

A better title: "The research budget is growing, but the federal government is
growing faster."

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IndianAstronaut
There is another factor to consider. Future scientific gains may be more
expensive to obtain than they were in the past. For example pushing the
frontiers of space exploration is going to require much more funding. We have
a few rovers on Mars now, but to get rovers on Titan will not be as cheap as
getting them to Mars.

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jimmcslim
Or possibly, we have reached the limits of what can be achieved in certain
disciplines? Take batteries for example; a great many other technologies would
be greatly enhanced by a quantum leap in battery energy storage (e.g. mobiles
and wearables, robots, transportation) but we may have reached a practical
limit in what can be achieved with the chemistry of the universe.

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rjaco31
This is highly unlikely, there are numerous proofs of natural materials with
way higher energetic density.

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christianbryant
This is a brilliant read. On cybersecurity:

"One fundamental cause of cyber insecurity is core weaknesses in the
architecture of most current computer systems that are, in effect, a
historical legacy. These architectures have their roots in the late 1970’s and
early 1980’s when computers were roughly 10,000 times slower than today’s
processors and had much smaller memories. At that time, nothing mattered as
much as squeezing out a bit more performance and so enforcing certain key
safety properties (having to do with the way in which access to computer
memory is controlled and the ability of operating systems to differentiate
among different types of instructions) were deemed to be of lesser
importance."

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Animats
Nah. There were more secure operating systems in the late 1970s and 1980s: IBM
VM, Wang's OS, KeyKos, Popek's kernel.

Then came UC Berkeley.

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christianbryant
Ok, you've got me with IBM VM :-) But, I understand what they are getting at.
In fact, the GNU/Linux love I am, I actually subscribe to Jaron Lanier's view
that we are too attached to our long-held ideas of what computers and
operating systems need to be...

