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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.

lchic - 03:26am Aug 18, 2002 EST (# 3786 of 3793)

""All across Zimbabwe, the story is the same - a chronic shortage of maize, exacerbated by stubbornly destructive government policies, is pushing a once plentiful country to the verge of famine.

The full folly of President Robert Mugabe's land redistribution programme is being laid bare. Yesterday farm groups said that 80 white farmers had been arrested and some charged for defying government orders to vacate land targeted for redistribution to landless blacks. Of the remaining 4,500 white farmers, 2,900 have been told to quit their land without compensation. Nearly two-thirds are refusing to go.

According to the United Nations, more than half of Zimbabwe's 12.5 million people are going to need urgent food assistance in the coming months.

http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,776571,00.html

[ Would taking out Mulgabe be of greater value than taking out Saddam ?

Rice might respond

" But - Mulgabe isn't - oil!

Foreign policy has to have a sense of priority!"

Watching the 'greed' 'power' factor one has to ask 'is this necessary?' .. ' can't the regular people be helped?' ]

kalter.rauch - 05:10am Aug 18, 2002 EST (# 3787 of 3793)
Earth vs <^> <^> <^>

lchic 8/18/02 3:26am

If you're not already part of the "Blocked Lst" clique, are you saying that White Farmers in Zimbabwe have a legitimate/critical niche in that country's future?

If so, I may have seriously misjudged you......not that it has anything whatsoever to do with "Missile Defense".

rshow55 - 06:24am Aug 18, 2002 EST (# 3788 of 3793)

Nice to have agreement.

The situation in Zimbabwe and in "Missile Defense" do have some key things in common.

Huge waste, based on dishonesty, false assumptions, wishful thinking - and muddle -- and things going wrong under circumstances where losses are real.

In both cases, facts, basic to function, that should have been understood and taken into account are being ignored at great cost - and human beings, who often seem so smart and aesthetically sensitive, seem stupid and ugly.

rshow55 - 07:21am Aug 18, 2002 EST (# 3789 of 3793)

Is this thread useful - and well adapted to serious purposes? What are The Odds of That ? http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/11/magazine/11COINCIDENCE.html

To figure those odds, it helps to know some key things about odds - and I'm reviewing the factorial series - central to evaluation of odds. Quoting from a posting on this thread two days after the tragedy of September 11, on the matter of odds, and on some very sensible concerns from almarst , as well.

rshowalter - 05:06pm Sep 13, 2001 EST (#8962 Robert Showalter mrshowalter@thedawn.com

Don't forget that it is possible to miscalculate , get surprised, and lose.

There's a common mathematical relation, called the factorial relation, set out with a number and an explanation point.

1! = 1

2! = 2 x 1 = 2

3! = 3 x 2 x 1 = 6

4! = 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 24

5! = 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 120

. . . .

10! = 3,628,800

. . . .

15! = 1,307,674,368 x 100,000,000,000

and explosive growth thereafter. When there are a lot of possibilities, and a lot of things can happen in several orders, the number of things that could happen grows fast.

In complex circumstances, you can't defend against them all.

You can't always know what's coming.

Be careful.

rshowalter - 05:09pm Sep 13, 2001 EST (#8963 Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

For reasons like that, by the way, there are jobs that are impossible , even for fast computers.

Missile Defense, as now designed, has a number of such showstoppers, some not encountered yet.

Some of them have already made progress on crucial jobs maddeningly slow for a decade.

Have your contractors missed this simple, unchangeable fact about the world?

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