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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.

fredmoore - 05:02am Jun 25, 2003 EST (# 12664 of 12690)

Gisterme ...

Lay off the teachers.

I am not a teacher and would not want to be but I have had some teachers who made a difference to me and I can see the cards are stacked against such people:

They are caught in a multi faceted vice grip.

Corporations hate them if they teach students good values.

Parents hate them if they discipline THEIR kids.

Parents Fear them because they could be molesters or God forbid, sensitive to children's real needs.

The Education department and pricipals hate them because they are just employees.

The Government hates them because so many are needed and that costs a packet.

The kids hate teachers because they are OLD and because they make them work and behave.

But mostly corporations and thus the media hate them because they threaten profits by creating kids with a sense of values.

There is an old saying, very true

pay them peanuts

and monkey do.>>>>>

Under the circumstances treating teaching as JUST a job is the only way the system can work, the only way teachers can earn a humble living and remain sane. However like all dangerous occupations in hostile environments, perhaps automation is the best way to go? Robot teachers? Hmmmm!

PS Education is perhaps the best Missile Defence going so I don't apologise for debating the issue here.

gisterme - 05:11am Jun 25, 2003 EST (# 12665 of 12690)

lchic - 02:33am Jun 25, 2003 EST (# 12661 of ...) http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.h5o6b1yLjfR.403005@.f28e622/14328

"...The 'gist' Gist reads as if you are 'a part' of that wonderful US government..."

Well, lchic, since the US government is a government of, by and for the people (at least on paper), then I am a part of the government to the extent that being a voter and a tax payer make me such. You already well know that my involvement with the US government goes no further than that.

WRT your question about being able to "inhabit" some past figure in US history and steer their actions, I'd have to say that I absolutely wouldn't want to do that. Nor would I want to change the actions of any other person from the past. Why not? Because if I or anybody else did that, it's highly unlikely that things would be at all the same when we returned to our own time.

For example, if I could be Franklin D. Roosevelt (knowing everything I know now) and I decided I'd have Hitler assasinated in 1935 knowing that on the order of thirty million lives would be saved, chances are that the world would be a very different place today...but not automatically different for the better. Perhaps if one of the German generals had been running the war instead of das Fuhrer, Germany might have won the war. Perhaps one of the millions killed due to Hitler had within him a mutating virus that would have wiped out all of humanity if he'd lived. There's no way we can know.

That may sound cold, but it is the truth. A small obstruction, even something as small as a single log, if lodged in just the right place, can change the course of a mighty river. I think that history and the reality of the present work in much the same way. Standing at some point along a river and looking upstream is much like being in the present and looking back in time. Our present is the result of a sequence of human activity over time, just like the condition and location of the riverbank where we stand is the result of the flow of water over time. A small change in past historical flow could and probably would make a huge change in the present.

If Hitler had been killed we might live in Utopia today, but on the other hand we might no longer exist.

Thank you for the opportunity, lchic; but I'll be content to occupy my own little nich in the natural ongoing scheme of things.

Sorry if I'm no fun. :-) Oh, by the way, what if I chose to be my own grandfather and saw to it that he became a monk from childhood? Where would I be now?

fredmoore - 05:20am Jun 25, 2003 EST (# 12666 of 12690)

Gisterme ...

Hmmmm! One log cannot change the course of a mighty river. Maybe the course of a tributary ar a stream. The river always gets to the sea!

Perspective is important.

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