>>The only big invention I can honestly say the military mind has brought us is the Internet - but then it's become the businesses' nightmare: there are no wires or pipes which they would own, where they could plug the meter and control the content. It's too anarchic and centerless. I figure they're still regretting it :).
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>Even you have to admit that the invention of the transistor and GPS alone are big. I admit that GPS Nav. on a car is of little use to me, but it might be helpful to others.

"The first three patents for the field-effect transistor principle were registered in Germany in 1928 by physicist Julius Edgar Lilienfeld"... plus a couple of others. Then Bell Labs in the late forties, using Lilienfeld's work without actually referencing it. Then the first practical application in radar - which was invented in 1904 by one Christian Hülsmeyer for "detecting ships in fog". These inventions got the push into mass production by the military, but weren't invented in army labs.

>Now, GPS range finder on a golf course is sweet.

I wish it was much more available when we came here. The navigation here is something completely different from what I grew up with - there are always shortcuts, there's no "you can't get there from here", you can always take any street that goes in the general direction of where you're going, and you'll either hit it or get out of town. Here, you're more likely to find a dozen sack butts (cul de sacs) first. I wish I had a GPS when I was learning my ways around here.

But even the history of GPS shows that it took a big civilian tragedy to make such a good thing available to everyone. Before that, it was somehow too good for civilians, eh? Too much information that can't be trusted to normal people? And now anyone can have it - where does that leave the military restrictive logic?