[vph]

>Intel, Westinghouse, biotech in general, and Dow do a pretty good job on the applied piece IMHO.

Private companies are in a great position to do applied research, but they are often slow or unwilling to distribute the research results for the benefit of everyone.

[Godel_unicode]

They actually do a good job of that as well, it's just that they do it in the form of patents which means that you have to pay to benefit from their work.