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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
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(12783 previous messages)
rshow55
- 09:56am Jul 1, 2003 EST (#
12784 of 12790) 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.
Key story from the movie Casablanca - http://www.mrshowalter.net/CoreStory.html
http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee7a163/12
To solve a lot of problems - we have to learn to get
past some lies that may have started as "polite fictions" but
that paralyze and endanger us now.
lchic
- 10:00am Jul 1, 2003 EST (#
12785 of 12790) ~~~~ It got understood and exposed
~~~~
Showalter did you see the post above re UK and potential
Energy supply problems looming 2020?
rshow55
- 10:19am Jul 1, 2003 EST (#
12786 of 12790) 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.
And huge costs that have gone on for a long time
already. In the last month - I've made a lot of progress
toward getting "out of jail" - and a lot of problems are
setting up so that they can be solved.
We do need to make a breakthrough - and we're
getting set up for it on this board. We have to show -
so it is effective - that with enough "connecting of
the dots" you can get to clarity.
We are, still today, in a world that is too "Orwellian" -
but there are openings.
If It's 'Orwellian,' It's Probably Not By GEOFFREY
NUNBERG http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/22/weekinreview/22NUNB.html
and especially
The Road to Oceania By WILLIAM GIBSON http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/25/opinion/25GIBS.html
"Elsewhere, driven by the acceleration of computing
power and connectivity and the simultaneous development of
surveillance systems and tracking technologies, we are
approaching a theoretical state of absolute informational
transparency, one in which "Orwellian" scrutiny is no longer
a strictly hierarchical, top-down activity, but to some
extent a democratized one. As individuals steadily lose
degrees of privacy, so, too, do corporations and states.
Loss of traditional privacies may seem in the short term to
be driven by issues of national security, but this may prove
in time to have been intrinsic to the nature of ubiquitous
information.
"That our own biggish brothers, in the name of national
security, draw from ever wider and increasingly transparent
fields of data may disturb us, but this is something that
corporations, nongovernmental organizations and individuals
do as well, with greater and greater frequency. The
collection and management of information, at every level, is
exponentially empowered by the global nature of the system
itself, a system unfettered by national boundaries or,
increasingly, government control.
" It is becoming unprecedentedly difficult for
anyone, anyone at all, to keep a secret.
" In the age of the leak and the blog, of evidence
extraction and link discovery, truths will either out or be
outed, later if not sooner. This is something I would bring
to the attention of every diplomat, politician and corporate
leader: the future, eventually, will find you out. The
future, wielding unimaginable tools of transparency, will
have its way with you. In the end, you will be seen to have
done that which you did.
I say "truths," however, and not "truth," as the other
side of information's new ubiquity can look not so much
transparent as outright crazy. b Regardless of the number
and power of the tools used to extract patterns from
information, any sense of meaning depends on context, with
interpretation coming along in support of one agenda or
another. A world of informational transparency will
necessarily be one of deliriously multiple viewpoints, shot
through with misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy
theories and a quotidian degree of madness. We may be able
to see what's going on more quickly, but that doesn't mean
we'll agree about it any more readily.
But often - assumptions clarify - or there is common
ground (especially on "simple" things, like engineering.) And
idea that lchic and I have worked out - and illustrated
here - Disciplined Beauty is key. In the real world,
there often are right answers - and people can find
them. http://www.mrshowalter.net/DBeauty.html
A central fact is that often - workable "connections of the
dots" are sparse - so sparse that the truth can be
found.
http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.xLlLb4WplZQ.1445751@.f28e622/4770
http://www.mrshowalter.net/a_new_3000s/3924.h
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