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Politics : Al Gore vs George Bush: the moderate's perspective -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jlallen who wrote (9752)	7/23/2001 2:46:41 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10042

There's a slight difference between doing scientific research, where you pursue promising ideas and drop unfruitful ones, and defense "research", where you continue to throw bad billions of dollars after good ones on a demonstratably boneheaded idea, and concentrate only on how to dumb down the tests enough to produce the semblance of a success. But I wouldn't expect an ideologue to notice. In case you didn't notice, Putin is not in a position to make trouble. Give him a little face-saving gesture, some money, he'll have to go along. Wonder what his price really was.

To: jlallen who wrote (9752)	7/23/2001 2:58:57 PM
From: RCMac	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10042

>>The fact that the technology not currently up to the job is no reason to suspend the effort. On that logic should we cease "wasting" money on the "lunatic" idea of a cure for AIDS?? Stem cell technology is in its infancy, should we scrap it or should we rather consider the long term benefit that might be derived??<< Well, at least we shouldn't go vaccinate a lot of Alaskans with a vaccine that we haven't yet gotten to work, nor inject them with some random stem cells -- in contrast to the zooey plan to start building some of the star wars installations in Alaska (benefiting contractors, but hard to see how it benefits anyone else. Sure, do the missile defense research, but don't budget tens or hundreds of billions before we have some visible basis for a reasonable expectation that it might work -- although even if we could make it work, after the collapse of the Soviet/Russian missile forces the argument seems pretty good that we can spend the money elsewhere on much higher order threats that the fantasy of missiles from impecunious "rogue states."