>> NASA, as a government agency, has the freedom to set goals 10 or 20 
>> years in the future. Would this be possible for a publicly-traded 
>> company? I would say no.
>
> Yahoo has a world-class research lab in which scientists are paid to write 
> academic papers.  That's pretty long-term thinking.

Oh, and the founder/CEO has no salary, only stock.


-- 
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/dreeves  - -  search://"Daniel Reeves"

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace in a continual
state of alarm (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing them with
an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -H.L. Mencken
   (submitted anonymously 2002 December)