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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 - 10:35am Jan 1, 2003 EST (# 7179 of 7184)
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.

That's a devastingly good question - and I'll think about it while I'm cooking pancakes, and having breakfast.

Before I go, there's one thing that I've found particularly ugly, and boring at some levels, but fascinating in others. People overdo "perfect" solutions. Which become astonishingly (if not perfectly) awful. People get orders and priorities wrong. Sometimes priorities are so wrong that important considerations are even omitted.

And there are a lot of biases that are stereotypical.

At the level of order, symmetry, and harmony - political persuasions also have certain patterns, it seems to me, that go wrong in stereotypical ways.

Conservatives are for order, sometimes to the exclusion of all other considerations - sometimes with too little attention to symmetry and harmony.

Intellectuals, often, are for symmetry - applied to their own arbitrary, capricious, and very diverse senses of order and harmony.

People of the left - of various persuasions, are for harmony - often harmony at all costs - often with no sense at all about necessities for order and symmetry in systems that can possibly work.

You need order, symmetry, and harmony together - - in complex systems they depend on each other - and again and again and again and again there has to be matching - and a question of what works, in the situation as it is.

And here's a pet peeve of mine. People set up exception handling to work well once - in ways that set it up backwards on the first use - so that a lot of systems, at all levels, that people think are set up right, are dead wrong - scattering sign errors all through the logical system. In nuke controls, and some other spots, that one scares me particularly - especially after I found another propogating error in those systems, a while back.

Anyway - - I'm having breakfast. I'll be back. I'm sorry I didn't post a summary yesterday that I hoped to -- I got diverted. Pardon me.

kalter.rauch - 11:08am Jan 1, 2003 EST (# 7180 of 7184)
Earth vs <^> <^> <^>

Nobody gives a rip about your pancakes Rshow.

What gets me is how you're always prattling on about talking to adversaries...when you won't give the time of day to anyone in this forum except for your sycophants like Almarst and Lunarchick who apparently hold onto a desperate hope that your delusion as per Gisterme will prove real and they too will get janitorial positions at the White House or State Dept.

This Forum isn't your personal property Rshow. Sooner or later all your meaningless insipid sophistry will be relegated to oblivion...where it belongs.

mazza9 - 11:58am Jan 1, 2003 EST (# 7181 of 7184)
"Quae cum ita sunt" Caesar's Gallic Commentaries

Kalter:

At the end of "AI" the young robot achieves his destiny...sorta. Maybe then, Robert will achieve his destiny. Of course he'll have to survive those thousands of years of being frozen in the ice at Coney Island. Ironic, huh?

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