As Alan has said, the importance of funding is more about finding the problem. There's a lot of wandering and false leads involved (though, finding out the false leads is nevertheless valuable. It's still new knowledge). In terms of hardware, the thing to anticipate is what computing power will be necessary for accomplishing things decades from now, and paying the bill for that, not considering what one can buy from a computer retailer today, because that doesn't create the excuse to think of what computers will be able to do.
Using funding to find the problem is inefficient; side projects are a much more distributed and efficient method and they don't need funding.
As for hardware, you're repeating what's clear. What I'm saying is that you used to have to purchase the future but now you can mimic those coming changes and, while slower, offer perfectly acceptable performance.
I guess I'm trying to lead Alan to say something to the effect that the next PARC can be groups, working together, on their own time, over Skype. I'm not sure he believes that but I do.
