New Mars Forums

Should you worry about diameter when you are shopping for one?  Diameter determines collecting area, right?  Maybe I'm wrong.  I'll keep the apeture thing in mind though.

Clark, you're saying that there's a higher power, but then you turn around and say that humans are just "organizing chaos through patterns."

We can argue about the nature of religion all day, but the purpose of religion is to decide what your own truths are.  What you think is real and true in life.  Not generalizing patterns; trying to figure out what is going on.

We can't ever be 100% sure about how we got here; we can't be 100% sure about almost everything in life.  However, we can believe and have ideas about it all, and that requires that you leave your fears about choosing the wrong path behind, and put your beliefs into one truth that you percieve to be true.

It's called faith...  ???

Afghanistan doesn't have nukes.  It's the terrorists inside their borders that we're worried about.

This is what I don't get about liberalism.  You are being hopelessly idealistic.  The American policies overseas aren't near as bad as you make them out to be.  We are champions of feeding the hungry, defending the defenseless, and helping the needy.  It is only when tyrants don't get their way from our intervention that anyone gets mad. 

And I don't recall ONCE, not ONCE, a foreign country rushing to our aid when we have a disaster happen.  When an earthquake hits Turkey or India, who is there?  The US.  When terrorists destroy a building full of American citizens, who was there?  THE US, THAT'S WHO!  The world didn't even lift a finger to condemn the acts of 9/11, aside from their petty denuciations and foney pledges to join our coalition.  The world never has, and never will, asist any American goal that doesn't directly benefit them.

And on your point, I can NO foreign policies we as Americans have made that need to be changed.

When will you hippies wise up and realize that the threat of nuclear attack is here, and the terrorists, regardless of our actions, will use it against us.  If we don't act against the threat now, New York will be under a mushroom cloud before we know it.

Sorry.  I think Clark already got that point.  My bad...

If any of us knew James Cameron, I'm sure you would have heard about it by now.

You claim to be religious, but you are afraid to admit that there is a higher power.  You say that religion is nothing more than a perception of what we feel; that it is all in our heads, and so is everything, as you have put it.  You are trying to say that religion is only what we make it.

I really don't know how to put my feeling from here... bear with me...

You are saying that religion is only our perceptions, but really religion is trying to figure out the "whys" of how we got here (coincidentally, science tries to find the "hows).  The point of religion is deciding what the real truth to our existence is.  Some people will be right; others will be wrong.  Even if you don't follow an organized religion, you HAVE to have a belief as to the "whys" in nature.  You can't just shrug it off; you have to have a belief one way or the other.  An organized religion is just a bunch of people with the same fundamental ideas as to how they've answered the "whys" in life.

I get what you're saying now.  I was thinking you would use a Sonar line-of-sight to see through the edge and what was on the other side.

Even with a sonar out front by a meter, how would you navigate down "steps"?  A washed out hillside with ledges in the path would look like a drop still, even though it is easy to get through.  You couldn't keep asking mission control to summarize the gradient, because there's a 12 minute overlapse in transmission.

I think we should have accurate maps of the surface, and some kind of GPS system that is highly accurate, and a real-time video monitor operating in near-light frequencies.

Why give Japan the chance to regroup and rearm with our troops off shore?  The remainder of the Japanese army would have waited there and tried to repel and invasion.

Nagasaki was a ship building city, and in Hiroshima there were 60,000 Japanese troops waiting inside the city.  Don't make the US out to be the evil "peope-slaughtering-machine".  We bombed those centers because it reduced Japan's ability to fight the war any longer.  If we wanted to kill people, we would have dropped those bombs on Tokyo and Kyoto.

My point about nuclear weapons is, they have saved many more lives than they have destroyed, because of their use as the ulitimate deterrent.  Even though their use is a terrible last resort, it is still one of our best options to destroy the enemy, and one of the terrorist's best ways to destroy us.

And this post is getting pretty boring.  We're debating history at this point.  We need to get back to current affairs.

Osama bin Laden is part of a radical interpretation of Islam (Shiite?).  I believe it is something like 90% of the believers in Islam practice the peaceful type (Sunni?).

The IRA was the force working to liberate Ireland from Brittish rule.  They haven't been big players since the 1920's, especially not in Northern Ireland.

The Palestinians aren't killing people over religion!  The matter is race... the Palestinians want their own country, and the Israelis have tried to negotiate this several times, only to be slapped in the face with civilian bombings and riots.  It is pure politics, with a small bit of religious strife.

Yes.  I heard a story on 9/11 about an Arabic man who was so afraid of being persecuted because of his skin color, he stood outside a gas station asking if anyone would go inside with his money and buy rice and milk to feed his family.  That's why our political leaders urged Americans not to commit hate crimes against Arab-Americans.  I know most people aren't identifying their hatred of terrorism with Islam, but rather with Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.

Who was that remark aimed at?

How would the robot differentiate between a 1000 ft cliff dropping off into nothingness, and a gently sloping crater wall?  I mean, if you wanted to maneuver right up to the edge you could find out, but with sonar you would only be able to tell where the edge is, not its relative position. ???

That's why I'm not Catholic.

I can second that!  I turn on the TV to get news, and I'm plastered against my couch with special interest stories.  How do Nightline and 20/20 stay on the air?  They're the most worthless programming on TV.  It's not like I don't have enough problems with my own miserable life; then I have watch the story of a woman who's arms were cut off my this guy so he could rape her.  THAT'S TERRIBLE!  I mean, the point was that there is a flaw in California law regarding mutilation sentencing, but I really didn't need to know that.