Listen up; the technology genie is long out of the bottle, and by sharing little ideas like Beowulf, they can grow bigger and better. I know you want to lock up all information here in the US, cause we all know that the poor dumb basterds in the rest of the world couldn't scratch their ass' unless we showed them how to do it.
I suppose NASA shouldn't work with and share ideas with Russia's space agency. I mean what could we possibly learn from the folks that first put a satellite, dog, and a man in orbit, and built and operated the first permanantly manned space station, and set endurance records for a man in space.
Nope you're right, we should be sharing anything with them. Nothing to see there, please move along.
And I guess any and all military, economic and political ties we have with friends and allies around the world should be out too. What do we have to learn or gain from such endevours. After all, we wouldn't want any of our ideas to find their way out of our country. No tangible bennefits from them at all.
Ummm.... in such a light; shouldn't your boy Bill; master of all that is holy, pull back from outsourcing code work to places like India? I mean, sure all the code work done there is covered by confidentiality agreements, and M$ patent lawyers are submitting applications for every line of code ever written (in the history of the world if they could) by their Indian development center, but the ideas and methodologies those coders learn from doing that work will be with them for the rest of their lives, and might - God forbid - spawn new ideas and methodologies that might find their way into (the horror) other products from other companies in other countries.
We're DOOMED!!
You're right, it's an insane thought that others could have important technology that we want. I mean without foreigners, we would only be missing the following for our defense:
Designed and originally manufactured in Belgium
Armor design from the UK, 120mm smoothbore gun design from Germany.
And of course those stupid foreigners couldn't design something like the World Wide Web, right?