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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.

rshow55 - 07:55pm Sep 4, 2003 EST (# 13512 of 13513)
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.

As of now, the scorecard does not look good. . . . Empire of Novices By MAUREEN DOWD http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/03/opinion/03DOWD.html . . . . it wouldn't take that many changes to do much better. Douglas MacArthur could have done much better - and so could most presidents in American history.

8047-49 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.sqGab9kQDyO.7232115@.f28e622/9574

8104 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.sqGab9kQDyO.7232115@.f28e622/9631

http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?8@@.ee7a163/319 and especially http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?8@@.ee7a163/346 give reasons why this is not "just another reader's opinion thread" - and why things should be checked for consistency against external standards . There are many ways to do this - and do it on a public and umpired basis where results would be beyond a reasonable doubt - and where people could be told "here - look for yourself" - not asked to trust blindly.

I am doing just exactly what Bill Casey asked me to do - within the flexibility I was entrusted with . . .

8127 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.sqGab9kQDyO.7232115@.f28e622/9654

8273 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.sqGab9kQDyO.7232115@.f28e622/9800

Being wrong doesn't mean being crazy. Were the patterns there to see? If the answer is yes, the pattern recognition is reasonable, based on what was known when the pattern was seen. J.M. Keynes was very clear about that in an interesting book A Treatise on Probability (I think it was Keynes' Ph.D. thesis.)

8810 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.sqGab9kQDyO.7232115@.f28e622/10337

President Bush may be as good a man as Ronald Dittmore. But Dittmore is capable of misjudgements, and mistakes, as are we all. He is not enough better to be trusted unconditionally. Checking - finding right answers - would be relatively easy to do in terms of money and time - and the costs of not doing so are vastly greater.

9252-53 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.sqGab9kQDyO.7232115@.f28e622/10780 and especially 9254 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.sqGab9kQDyO.7232115@.f28e622/10782 a stunningly cocksure, grossly misleading technical assertion - delivered in bullying fashion, by gisterme.

9958-60 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.sqGab9kQDyO.7232115@.f28e622/11504

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New York Times on the Web Forums Science Missile Defense