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Missile Defense

Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a "Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense initiatives more successful? Can such an application of science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable, necessary or impossible?

Read Debates, a new Web-only feature culled from Readers' Opinions, published every Thursday.

guy_catelli - 10:54pm Jan 17, 2002 EST (#10853 of 10857)
the trick of Mensa

the deli case

out of deference pour Mademoiselle le Chic de la Lune, i have deleted my Vita Herring post so that we may resume responding to Robert's technobabylonian Red Herring.

even though the bologna in the deli case is getting moldy, it is quite revealing. it seems to belie R's current claim that he is not against MD per se, but merely the method currently persued. indeed, it seems to indicate that R is in favor of complete nuclear disarmament.

this, of course, would return the world to the state it was in prior to june 1945 -- ie, there would always be a national leader willing to roll the dice, in the hope that no matter how many of his countryman's lives he expended in a conventional general war, *he* still might survive and emerge from the rubble 'victorious'.

'voodoo patriotism'

R, if you had been working for Microsoft in the late 1980s, and a serious flaw had been identified in msft's business model that Apple might have been able to greatly exploit, and your employers at msft asked you to help them bluff Apple into thinking that that flaw was about to be remediated, and based upon your own private speculations *plus* secret consultations with Apple employees (eyeballs rolling) you refused to go along with msft, then i think that msft management, if appraised of these facts, would be quite reasonable in assuming that you weren't 'on their side' -- no matter how *sincerely* you (consciously) believed otherwise.

who/whom deflection?

"deflect"?!? R, who keeps bringing up Enron? hypothetical example: X says, "i have nothing against Jews", and then goes on to say that he does object to israel's policies on the west bank. however, when confronted with facts that contradict his thesis, X keeps harping on some israeli business scandal. it sound to me as if X has an anti-Jewish agenda, *regardless* of israel's policy on the West Bank, and *regardless* of X's conscious belief that he doesn't.

and, your 'impossibility' gambit. are we talking about reversing the direction of time, or an antigravity device, or perpetual motion? or are we talking about things like the telephone, the panama canal, the radio, heavier-than-air manned flight -- all of which were declared impossible, until they became realities that we all take for granted..

the panama canal is particularly relevant. a vast sum had already been expended. not only did all of the early money wind up going down a rathole, but there was great loss of life as well. yet, eventually the panama canal became a reality.

R, you're in denial as to your true motives.

lchic - 11:06pm Jan 17, 2002 EST (#10854 of 10857)

Doesn't Microsoft (MS) work this way:

Gates sees people making product
Gates buys product from them
'especial little JOBS'
Gates makes them sign a 'silence' clause
Gates makes out HE made the product
They all make heaps

It's just a trick of Men Sir!

lchic - 12:00am Jan 18, 2002 EST (#10855 of 10857)

The IT industry over the past decades has looked to incremental improvements. Incrementally the products have been better designed and developed. As memory capacity has grown, so has the sophistication and magnificance of user product.

lchic - 06:52am Jan 18, 2002 EST (#10856 of 10857)

Flag wavers note:

Godel spotted that the Constitution not only contained flaws and inconsistencies, but also allowed for the US to be legally turned into a dictatorship.

Albert Einstein and Oskar Morgenstern accompanied Godel to the government offices in Trenton NJ in April 1948, to be witnesses at his examination for citizenship. Of course they knew what fool to himself Godel was, and on the drive down from Princeton, Einstein kept him occupied with anecdotes and small talk, vainly trying to keep his mind off the Constitution.

At the proceedings, the official began by remarking that Godel had come from Germany (or Austria, as Godel corrected him), where the rule had been by evil dictatorship, and now he was in the Land of the Free, where such a thing could never happen. Godel responded to the startled official that, on the contrary, that was exactly what could happen under the terms of the Constitution. Einstein and Morgenstern almost had to gag him and sit on his head to stop him giving a 50-minute lecture on the subject. There were some hairy moments before matters were at last successfully concluded, and Godel, with his relieved friends, emerged clutching his papers. http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee9c8a5/12

rshow55 - 09:01am Jan 18, 2002 EST (#10857 of 10857)

There are some big problems, but I think there has been a lot of progress since "Muddle in Moscow" http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=533129 ..... cited in MD1126. Some things do change.

Some things do get better.

What differences half a year can bring. Putin's status, and Russia's status, have changed a lot.

Muddle, ill will, and all, I'm hopeful - and hopeful about some things that seem "hopeless" or "impossibly complicated" to a lot of smart people.

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