Re: "My take on it is if they deploy a system that only works 20 percent of the time, it's infinitely better than no system at all."
A while back, Larry argued that saving the estimated thousands of lives per year was not worth the ruinous cost of removing a reasonable percentage of arsenic from our drinking water.
So... as I've urged before, let's do a cost benefit analysis. How many lives? How much does it cost? Is it more in our interest to work on missile defense, port security, or arsenic? How do we get the best bang (no pun intended) for our buck?