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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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rshow55 - 07:11am Aug 15, 2003 EST (# 13308 of 13310)
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.

Gisterme: "I would try to save Robert (or anybody else) who seemed to be drowning. ;-)"

http://www.mrshowalter.net/SP_51_n_Swim.htm

Suppose you can swim well . . . and folks know it . . And you're near some water . . . And a stranger is drowning? . . . A stranger you could save. . . .

Aren't you SUPPOSED . . . to drop your clothes and business, . . . get wet and inconvenienced, . . . and pull that person out?

Maybe I slipped a decimal point . . . . and I hadn't expected that the nuclear establishment would respond so much like NASA did on the last disaster . . . hadn't expected a lot of things . . . but I've been worried about vulnerabilities, instabilities, and I've done the best I could.

Things might work out, it seems to me.

rshow55 - 08:13am Aug 15, 2003 EST (# 13309 of 13310)
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.

Fairness , equity , balance , guess , and truth are important words, each complicated, and with multiple meanings.

You can look for yourself at how multiple the meanings of such words are by searching at http://www.hyperdictionary.com/about.html , which prints out dictionary and thesaurus results at once.

fairness: http://www.hyperdictionary.com/search.aspx?Dict=&define=fairness&search.x=28&search.y=9

equity http://www.hyperdictionary.com/search.aspx?Dict=&define=equity&search.x=26&search.y=9

balance http://www.hyperdictionary.com/search.aspx?define=balance&search.x=34&search.y=9

guess http://www.hyperdictionary.com/search.aspx?Dict=&define=guess&search.x=28&search.y=7

truth http://www.hyperdictionary.com/search.aspx?Dict=&define=truth&search.x=18&search.y=8

clown and joke are set out in another format (and also a very good one:

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=clown ... http://thesaurus.reference.com/search?q=clown

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=joke . . . http://thesaurus.reference.com/search?q=joke

- - - -

Maybe I'm being unfair, unbalanced, and inequitable. The truth is I'm only guessing, and maybe what seems likely to me is exactly wrong - maybe I've got my signs backwards. But it doesn't seem to me that I'm just clowning around, and a lot of things gisterme posts don't seem like jokes. There are consequences that make these things serious - because things are interconnected - and often interconnected in ways nobody fully understands (or adequately models) - like a power grid.

. . .

How can anyone possibly be sure what words mean? For instance, the words just above?

Notions of context are both statistical and logical. I think it is fair, and balanced to say that they are also mathematical - in ways that would have interested John Nash. 4167 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.BH8QbYYuywy.0@.f28e622/5256

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