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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?

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lchic - 09:36am May 12, 2003 EST (# 11602 of 11609)
~~~~ It got understood and exposed ~~~~

Using this base link and substituting names of Nation States income per head of population can be found - scroll down.

http://www.countryreports.org/content/iceland.htm

rshow55 - 09:37am May 12, 2003 EST (# 11603 of 11609)
Can we do a better job of finding truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have done and worked for on this thread.

Often that umpiring is done, wholly or in part, by "government bureaucrats." At other times, advice comes from people whose status comes, in part, from government association. For example, the national academies (NAS, NAE, and IOM) are government institutions that scientists and politicians respect, with reason. Members of the National Academy of Sciences , or the National Academy of Engineering , or the Institutes of Medicine , are a carefully chosen and widely respected elite among scientists, engineers, and medical people.

There are more than five thousand of them, in all. Membership in the academies is by election of members, and is carefully done.

The government needs outside advice, and has institutional interfaces to get it, but government does a lot of essential work itself, as well. Some government institutions are necessarily rule-based bureacracracies. Intellectual standards in these institutions can be very high, especially when there is much institutional distrust, at many levels, that results in careful checking for right answers.

The United States Patent Office does too much work to be infallible, but it is very well organized to consider any and every technical issue that comes before it, has close connections all through the civilian and military parts of the government, and has, in my experience, the most impressive reference system for technical purposes anywhere. When the PTO lacks expertise, it can do a very good job of finding it. Patent examiners are specialists, and they are in the business of evaluating ideas, by clear rules, and killing off most requests. The standards of clear description required at the Patent Office are the clearest I know - meticulously so, in a way that must weary journalists, who are different kind of descriptive business.

When the Patent Office examines a non contested patent, the process involves resources that are limited. Oversights happen.

When a patent is contested (when there are real chips) there is a re-examination procedure that is much more careful, and very much more credible. Stakeholders are heard, and any expertise, from anywhere, can be brought to bear. I admire the reexamination procedure a good deal. The courts have come to respect it, and defer to it, though essentially every step in the re-examination procedure is subject to appeal in the courts. The reexamination procedure is one of the reasons why patents are now far more valuable than they used to be, and patent litigation is now much more predictable than it once was. (The other main reason is the institution of a Court of Patent Appeals.)

I do not know and do not believe that there is any matter in science or math likely to involve a perceptual impasse that the Patent Office couldn't judge pretty well, and considerably better than either of the contestants involved. The PTO does similar things, every day, and money and egos are involved almost every time.