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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.

cantabb - 04:31pm Nov 5, 2003 EST (# 16591 of 16611)

rshow55 - 03:59pm Nov 5, 2003 EST (# 16589 of 16590)

I'm writing a response to a phone conversation earlier - and doing it carefully. Feeling good about it.

You think we really need to know everything about your day, every feeling ?

Have to worry - for it seems to me that everything I'd hoped to accomplish on this board might get done. Not exactly as I'd expected, but not too badly. Some while ago I wrote a note that included this:

IF you wanted to 'USE' this forum as a dumping ground for your personal problems, bioghraphical details, spiralling self-referencing links, conspiracy theories, paranoia etc -- and a rehash of the whole thing a number of times, I think you can relax: THAT "Mission" was "Accomplished" ! [Too bad that of GWB and his stand-in poster, wasn't ].

All things come to an end, sooner or later. This thread had far, far outlived any hint of potential if it ever had.

It appears that there will be no face to face meeting - and that one isn't needed in this case. I hope that the paragraph above will work out in essentials, .....

You were insisting on a face-to-face meeting, were you not, and had several conditions attached ? NOW, never mind ?

.... with this modification: I'm hoping that the Missile Defense thread - after one or a few phone conversations referring to and clarifying correspondence and an exchange of short letters, (one of which seems fine now) will clearly demonstrate how to solve the TECHNICAL problems of negotiating stable outcomes to complex games involving both competition and cooperation. In a case big enough to study, but not too big. With real stakes, but not stakes too high to permit intelligent function of intelligent people.

What this thread shows -- and amply -- is how a thread can be hijacked, how to continually abuse posting privileges. And, not much of anything else !

Maybe that's really going to be possible.

Dream on....

One thing I'm looking forward to is a chance to comfortably and safely write a very warm thank-you letter to The New York Times. In that hope, I'm writing carefully - and trying not to screw up.

Do that then, instead of wasting time and effort on THIS slop....

bbbuck - 07:51pm Nov 5, 2003 EST (# 16592 of 16611)

What about those chunks posting in 'science in the news'.

fredmoore - 08:30pm Nov 5, 2003 EST (# 16593 of 16611)

Filibuster:

In legislative practice, the parliamentary tactic used in the United States Senate by a minority of the senators—sometimes even a single senator—to delay or prevent parliamentary action by talking so long that the majority either grants concessions or withdraws the bill. Unlike the House of Representatives, in which rules limit speaking time, the Senate allows unlimited debate on a bill. Speeches can be completely irrelevant to the issue.

The word is derived from the Spanish filibustero (“freebooting”) and originally described piratical 16th-century privateers; it came into English usage to designate any irregular military adventurer, such as the Americans who took part in Latin-American insurrections in the 1850s. Filibuster was in use in the political sense by the mid-1800s. In 1957 Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina talked for more than 24 hours, the longest individual filibuster on record, as part of an unsuccessful attempt by Southern senators to obstruct civil-rights legislation. Invoking cloture on debate (i.e., limiting or ending a debate by calling for a vote) and holding round-the-clock sessions to tire the minority are measures used to defeat a filibuster.

Encyclopaedia Britannica.