Wrong solution to the wrong problem

And, given that a lot of that money is/was funnelled through universities, how much of it is/was of practical use?

Ivory tower research is all well and good, but at the moment it seems to be fuelling gas-guzzling data centres producing AI artificial stupidity results and the like, and probably always has. My first experience with "intelligent" web search engines like Jeeves et al, was to scream at them "stop giving me more of the same, you've screwed up, that's not what I'm looking for !!!". And the more I tried to vary my search terms, it seemed like they tried ever harder to come up with the same results !!!

The end result of most government funded research seems to be a paper and a Ph.D. and then it just gets filed and forgotten. Not saying it wasn't money well spent - education is never wasted - but so much of this seems to be abandoned once it's served its purpose of making the researcher more employable.

And how much of this research is simply discovering the same thing over and over? Somebody pointed me at a paper on "cuckoo hashing" from the ?mid?-90s. Only for it to trigger the reaction in me "hey, that's what that early-80s paper was describing, except it didn't give it a name".

DARPA / seedcorn funding seems a far better bet. If somebody comes to you and says "hey this idea could change the world, I just need some help", this is where you provide sponsorship and say "it needs to be Open Source". And then let them divert funds to other people to help them ... (properly accounted for, of course).

Cheers,
Wol