DOE's existing counterintelligence polygraph regulations are set forth at 10 CFR part 709. Under section 3152(a) of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2002, Pub. L. 107-107 (NDAA for FY 2002), DOE is obligated to prescribe revised regulations for a new counterintelligence polygraph program the stated purpose of which is ``* * * to minimize the potential for release or disclosure of classified data, materials, or information'' (42 U.S.C. 7383h-1(a).) Section 3152(b) requires DOE to ``* * * take into account the results of the Polygraph Review,'' which is defined by section 3152 (e) to mean ``* * * the review of the Committee to Review the Scientific Evidence on the Polygraph of the National Academy of Sciences'' (42 U.S.C. 7383h-1(b), (e)).
So they attached this to one of those emergency defense appropriation bills:
SEC. 3152. DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY COUNTERINTELLIGENCE POLYGRAPH PROGRAM.
(a) NEW COUNTERINTELLIGENCE POLYGRAPH PROGRAM REQUIRED.-The Secretary of Energy shall carry out, under regulations prescribed under this section, a new counterintelligence polygraph program for the Department of Energy. The purpose of the new program is to minimize the potential for release or disclosure of classified data, materials, or information.
(b) AUTHORITIES AND LIMITATIONS.-(1) The Secretary shall prescribe regulations for the new counterintelligence polygraph program required by subsection (a) in accordance with the provisions of subchapter II of
chapter 5 of title 5, United States Code (commonly referred to as the Administrative Procedures Act).
(2) In prescribing regulations for the new program, the Secretary shall take into account the results of the Polygraph Review.
(3) Not later than six months after obtaining the results of the Polygraph Review, the Secretary shall issue a notice of proposed rulemaking for the new program.
(c) REPEAL OF EXISTING POLYGRAPH PROGRAM.-Effective 30 days after the Secretary submits to the congressional defense committees the Secretarys certification that the final rule for the new counterintelligence
polygraph program required by subsection (a) has been fully implemented, section 3154 of the Department of Energy Facilities Safeguards, Security, and Counterintelligence Enhancement Act of 1999 (subtitle D of title XXI of Public Law 106-65; 42 U.S.C. 7383h) is repealed.
(d) REPORT ON FURTHER ENHANCEMENT OF PERSONNEL SECURITY PROGRAM.-(1) Not later than January 1, 2003, the Administrator for Nuclear Security shall submit to Congress a report setting forth the recommendations of the Administrator for any legislative action that the Administrator considers appropriate in order to enhance the personnel security program of the Department of Energy.
(2) Any recommendations under paragraph (1) regarding the use of polygraphs shall take into account the results of the Polygraph Review.
(e) POLYGRAPH REVIEW DEFINED.-In this section, the term "Polygraph Review" means the review of the Committee to Review the Scientific Evidence on the Polygraph of the National Academy of Sciences.
Banning trans-fats in New York, banning smoking in Seattle. This has been the year of banning activities in the name of public health. Talk about violating civil liberties! (And, natch, in every single case the ACLU was behind it 100%.)
Smoking in public places I might understand. (Though I'd be inclined to disagree, since I don't smoke cigarettes.) But you lost your civil liberty to sell me trans fats in New York? Find me a violin.
People specifically want to buy cigarettes, because they are addicted to nicotine. There is no reason why anyone would specifically want to buy trans fats instead of cis fats. We buy trans fats only because the market is loaded with them, since corporations specifically want to sell them. They're associated with slightly lower manufacturing costs, because you can make them with a platinum catalyst at high heat, they present few FDA labeling requirements (the health impact was only discovered after Bush was in office), and there are enough people out there who don't know cis/trans/hole-in-the-ground for the cost savings to completely overwhelm the yuck factor, so that this crap ends up dominating the market; it doesn't taste better or anything.
To say "well what if I want to buy trans fats" is not a credible argument. Nobody wants to buy trans fats. The most that can be said about them is that some of us will tolerate them in our food to avoid the cost increase, but the same can be said of antifreeze or anything that is toxic and has a pleasant taste. There are legitimate reasons for governments to pass laws that govern the quality of food that is put up for sale. In fact, some countries do have problems with people selling foods and medicines laced with antifreeze (ethylene glycol) because it is a cheap sweet-tasting alternative to propylene glycol. It damages the liver, kidneys, and nervous system, which is more of a problem from the buyer's perspective, not necessarily the seller's. Would you rather live in a place like that, or New York?
And lets be realistic. Except in an abstract sense, nobody's personal liberties are going to be affected in the slightest by a curb on the ability to legally selltrans fats to New Yorkers. Anyone trying to get you excited about a trans fats ban is a corporate whore. Period.
>>>>" Scientists say it is the largest event of its kind in 30 years and point their fingers at climate change as a major contributing factor." >>>So what was the cause 30 years ago? >>"Probably a set of major contributing factors that did not include climate change, as can be inferred from the quote." > Like what - really big polar bears coveringing by the thousands and dancing a stomp in unison? > No, really... that's a whole lot of ice, and Canada isn't exactly known as a geological hotbed of earthquakes or volcanoes, so...?
This is basically an argument from incredulity: that if climate change were in fact not occurring, then NO ice should ever break off the sheet, because you, Penguinisto, cannot imagine why that would possibly happen.
>Not saying it's not possible for an earthquake to be the cause, but ruling out a huge factor such as climate entirely seems rather absurd, all things considered.
I think the issue here is what is meant by "climate change". Climate changes locally all the time. Globally, temperature is just a sawtoothy function over time that has gradually risen over the decades. This is what they're talking about when they rule it out. Nobody can rule out "climate change" in general which includes local changes and proximate causes. There could have been a warm summer that year over that part of Canada just by chance.
" Scientists say it is the largest event of its kind in 30 years and point their fingers at climate change as a major contributing factor." So what was the cause 30 years ago?
Probably a set of major contributing factors that did not include climate change, as can be inferred from the quote.
If someone gave you the choice of making $1 billion for making a television show, but the show is pirated to an extent such that over half the people who watch it don't pay you, or making $500 million for making a television show with little or no piracy of it at all with a much, much smaller audience, which would you prefer?
$1 billion and no future customers vs. $0.5 billion and lots of currently unsatisfied future customers?
They're not exactly in it for the money, not for today anyway. You're thinking short term. The RIAA and their partners at Microsoft are willing to make the necessary investments now so that they can eventually do for arts, culture, and politics what DeBeers did for diamonds. They basically want a stranglehold on popular culture so that they can reduce the diversity of viewpoints you hear and limit the quality of audio/video signals that you see- quite a lucrative position to be in that also confers significant political power. With consolidated media you can selectively promote political candidates who will let your lobbyists write the bills that they pass in Congress, and you can easily suppress alternative viewpoints from being heard anywhere except on the Internet. Political suppression on the Internet will require political/legislative fixes, to solve problems like Net Neutrality that just let anyone say anything.
Sending them a 30-day trial of Vista to evaluate is one thing, sending them a very expensive laptop preloaded with Vista is quite another. It'd be like record labels sending journalists a free 80 gig iPod and stereo speakers with every new song they're promoting.
Well, when you get an audio CD (a REAL audio CD), you can play it without worrying about degrading the performance of your equipment. But if I got a free Vista CD in the mail it would probably go right in the trash unless a sacrificial laptop came with it, and it would have to be preinstalled on that laptop to get me to run Vista.
A free laptop that downscales and then reupscales all "unprotected" high quality signals that pass through it? Just to cover the mere possibility that you didn't pay for something? A laptop designed to detect the slightest analog voltage fluctuations, and inject crap bits into the system to make it crash, just in case you attach an alligator clip to your sound card to get free music? Or with remotely destructible device drivers that are disabled by Microsoft once the RIAA learns about a driver vulnerability that allows leakage of "protected content"? No thanks.
Someone should get the list of developers who got free laptops, so we can send them Knoppix CDs as "no strings attached gifts". These laptops already need rescuing.
You are an idiot and have no concept of how the presidential voting system works in the USA. Go back to middle-school government class and, this time, stop texting to your friends, read your text book, and listen to your teacher.
I did go to school in the U.S. and they never taught me that the presidency is something that you win in court.
>My bogometer pegs every time I listen to one of the GW deniers
My knee-jerk-o-meter pegs every time I hear someone rail against George Bush
But he wasn't railing against George Bush. He merely called you out on your bullshit.
just because someone doesn't conform to your orthodoxy on the climate change question.
I think you'd run into this attitude a lot less, if only there were more global warming deniers who were not supporters of Bush. It seems that most of us run into practically none of these people- hence the preconceptions about the rare global warming deniers such as yourself who are truly motivated by the science and have no political motives.
so if I turn on my headlights of my spacecraft and i'm travelling at the speed of light, will they work?
No. If you are going at the speed of light, and you turn on your headlights, no light will come out of them. They may be on but no light they emit will be observed by you to even leave the surface of the filament.
But, in your "reference frame" the amount of proper time you experience (i.e. time as measured by your watch which is moving with you) between your origin and destination, is zero. For any arbitrary origin and any arbitrary destination you define along your path. The entire length of the trip has been length contracted to zero for you. You left and immediately got there as far as you were concerned. You experience no time at all.
Since your origin and destination are at the same place for you, it's no wonder that you don't see any light coming out of your headlights.
Assuming that what you are saying is true, that would mean that all atoms have a constant injection of energy, due to their electrons always being pulled toward a higher energy order than they normally sustain.
They're not pulled enough to matter since they never leave the ground state with such an immeasurably slow injection of energy.
Conservation of energy arguments get a little screwed up with inflation. Just look at the redshifted photons.
It works in Opera, you know Firefox and IE is not the only browsers in the world. Maybe before you stop saying stupid shit like "It only works in IE" (paraphrased of course) you should try other browsers? I don't know for sure, however it seems to me that doing so might make you seem a little less of a moron.
Why are there so many idiots on this site? Two browsers is enough to test. I'm not at fucking work, you know.
It doesn't work on Mozilla, only IE. And of course, "Best View:1024 by 768 pixel", so you'll want to carefully resize your browser window before you go there.
But surely if the universe is expanding, it should be expanding on every level (ie macro and micro).
It is expanding uniformly on all levels. An example of "micro" expansion would be an optical photon becoming a microwave photon over billions of years as space inflates. But atoms, unlike photons, only come in fixed sizes. If you try to expand an atom, or a chemical bond, by inflating the space it's in somehow, it will just contract a little to get back to the "right" size for the quantum state it is still in. Without changing the quantum state, you can't change the atom's shape or radius at all, and the ground state effectively fixes these things as a function of mass, charge, and a bunch of constants. By extension, anything made of atoms will be unaffected by inflation, for the same reason- molecular orbitals, etc. also come in fixed sizes.
An interstellar photon, OTOH, can take on a continuous range of energies, and its wavelength can be adjusted by arbitrarily tiny amounts. For this reason inflation has a long term cumulative effect on photons that is just not seen with atoms.
If the answer to the above question is yes, then what happens if the universe begins to collapse in on itself? The Universe Expansion Force would be negated, so the strength of the attraction between quarks would increase (as would the strength of the attraction between electrons and nuclei etc).
Atoms would stay the same size as they are now for the exact same reason they do now.
See, that makes no sense to me at all. For space to strech at such a high velocity with a horizon 53 billion light years away, you'd have to have the big bang expanding FASTER THAN LIGHT.
The speed of light is a local speed limit for your velocity relative to any objects that you're passing by right now. Not your nonlocal velocity relative to things that are far away. All the rubbery space in between could be doing anything and making a contribution as it expands everywhere. A galaxy can be at rest relative to the Big Bang (i.e. relative to the microwave background) just like we are on Earth (we're actually moving 380 km/s relative to it but never mind). If it's far enough away, there will be enough inflation to give a recession velocity greater than the speed of light, no matter how slow the galaxy is "actually" going. Recession velocity is affected by both the local velocity of the source and nonlocal effects from the inflation of space along the way, so it's nonlocal.
If the universe is expanding at all, then there will have to be galaxies far enough away to be receding at greater than the speed of light. But there is still no local motion greater than c. Superluminal motion that is nonlocal can't be used to send superluminal messages, and space that didn't exist at the time you passed its current location shouldn't count towards your "speed" anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
So they attached this to one of those emergency defense appropriation bills:
Your Congress at work.
Banning trans-fats in New York, banning smoking in Seattle. This has been the year of banning activities in the name of public health. Talk about violating civil liberties! (And, natch, in every single case the ACLU was behind it 100%.)
Smoking in public places I might understand. (Though I'd be inclined to disagree, since I don't smoke cigarettes.) But you lost your civil liberty to sell me trans fats in New York? Find me a violin.
People specifically want to buy cigarettes, because they are addicted to nicotine. There is no reason why anyone would specifically want to buy trans fats instead of cis fats. We buy trans fats only because the market is loaded with them, since corporations specifically want to sell them. They're associated with slightly lower manufacturing costs, because you can make them with a platinum catalyst at high heat, they present few FDA labeling requirements (the health impact was only discovered after Bush was in office), and there are enough people out there who don't know cis/trans/hole-in-the-ground for the cost savings to completely overwhelm the yuck factor, so that this crap ends up dominating the market; it doesn't taste better or anything.
To say "well what if I want to buy trans fats" is not a credible argument. Nobody wants to buy trans fats. The most that can be said about them is that some of us will tolerate them in our food to avoid the cost increase, but the same can be said of antifreeze or anything that is toxic and has a pleasant taste. There are legitimate reasons for governments to pass laws that govern the quality of food that is put up for sale. In fact, some countries do have problems with people selling foods and medicines laced with antifreeze (ethylene glycol) because it is a cheap sweet-tasting alternative to propylene glycol. It damages the liver, kidneys, and nervous system, which is more of a problem from the buyer's perspective, not necessarily the seller's. Would you rather live in a place like that, or New York?
And lets be realistic. Except in an abstract sense, nobody's personal liberties are going to be affected in the slightest by a curb on the ability to legally sell trans fats to New Yorkers. Anyone trying to get you excited about a trans fats ban is a corporate whore. Period.
I first heard one of these broadcasts at the end of 'Even Less' by Porcupine Tree. Very weird stuff.
Makes you wonder who will come out of the woodwork to sue them for the copyright violation.
© 2006 MillionthMonkey
>>>>" Scientists say it is the largest event of its kind in 30 years and point their fingers at climate change as a major contributing factor."
>>>So what was the cause 30 years ago?
>>"Probably a set of major contributing factors that did not include climate change, as can be inferred from the quote."
> Like what - really big polar bears coveringing by the thousands and dancing a stomp in unison?
> No, really... that's a whole lot of ice, and Canada isn't exactly known as a geological hotbed of earthquakes or volcanoes, so...?
This is basically an argument from incredulity: that if climate change were in fact not occurring, then NO ice should ever break off the sheet, because you, Penguinisto, cannot imagine why that would possibly happen.
>Not saying it's not possible for an earthquake to be the cause, but ruling out a huge factor such as climate entirely seems rather absurd, all things considered.
I think the issue here is what is meant by "climate change". Climate changes locally all the time. Globally, temperature is just a sawtoothy function over time that has gradually risen over the decades. This is what they're talking about when they rule it out. Nobody can rule out "climate change" in general which includes local changes and proximate causes. There could have been a warm summer that year over that part of Canada just by chance.
" Scientists say it is the largest event of its kind in 30 years and point their fingers at climate change as a major contributing factor."
:P
So what was the cause 30 years ago?
Probably a set of major contributing factors that did not include climate change, as can be inferred from the quote.
s/and/via
If someone gave you the choice of making $1 billion for making a television show, but the show is pirated to an extent such that over half the people who watch it don't pay you, or making $500 million for making a television show with little or no piracy of it at all with a much, much smaller audience, which would you prefer?
$1 billion and no future customers vs. $0.5 billion and lots of currently unsatisfied future customers?
They're not exactly in it for the money, not for today anyway. You're thinking short term. The RIAA and their partners at Microsoft are willing to make the necessary investments now so that they can eventually do for arts, culture, and politics what DeBeers did for diamonds. They basically want a stranglehold on popular culture so that they can reduce the diversity of viewpoints you hear and limit the quality of audio/video signals that you see- quite a lucrative position to be in that also confers significant political power. With consolidated media you can selectively promote political candidates who will let your lobbyists write the bills that they pass in Congress, and you can easily suppress alternative viewpoints from being heard anywhere except on the Internet. Political suppression on the Internet will require political/legislative fixes, to solve problems like Net Neutrality that just let anyone say anything.
>I did go to school in the U.S. and they never taught me that the presidency is something that you win in court.
Yeah it's something you win with backroom deals like in 1800, 1824, and 1876.
Well! That makes it OK then.
Sending them a 30-day trial of Vista to evaluate is one thing, sending them a very expensive laptop preloaded with Vista is quite another. It'd be like record labels sending journalists a free 80 gig iPod and stereo speakers with every new song they're promoting.
Well, when you get an audio CD (a REAL audio CD), you can play it without worrying about degrading the performance of your equipment. But if I got a free Vista CD in the mail it would probably go right in the trash unless a sacrificial laptop came with it, and it would have to be preinstalled on that laptop to get me to run Vista.
A free laptop that downscales and then reupscales all "unprotected" high quality signals that pass through it? Just to cover the mere possibility that you didn't pay for something? A laptop designed to detect the slightest analog voltage fluctuations, and inject crap bits into the system to make it crash, just in case you attach an alligator clip to your sound card to get free music? Or with remotely destructible device drivers that are disabled by Microsoft once the RIAA learns about a driver vulnerability that allows leakage of "protected content"? No thanks.
Someone should get the list of developers who got free laptops, so we can send them Knoppix CDs as "no strings attached gifts". These laptops already need rescuing.
You are an idiot and have no concept of how the presidential voting system works in the USA. Go back to middle-school government class and, this time, stop texting to your friends, read your text book, and listen to your teacher.
I did go to school in the U.S. and they never taught me that the presidency is something that you win in court.
But he wasn't railing against George Bush. He merely called you out on your bullshit.
I think you'd run into this attitude a lot less, if only there were more global warming deniers who were not supporters of Bush. It seems that most of us run into practically none of these people- hence the preconceptions about the rare global warming deniers such as yourself who are truly motivated by the science and have no political motives.
I remember getting an RTF-formatted email from my ISP back in 1995, when you would actually see RTF in the wild.
I chose RTF as the format for my reply. I thought that was reasonable. (I forget what mail client I was using- maybe Eudora.)
They wrote me back, again in RTF.
"WTF is this? We can't open it."
No, not WTF.
Microsoft RTF.
All I can say is, the war in Iraq must be going really badly if the DoD is this desperate for additional recruits.
No. If you are going at the speed of light, and you turn on your headlights, no light will come out of them. They may be on but no light they emit will be observed by you to even leave the surface of the filament.
But, in your "reference frame" the amount of proper time you experience (i.e. time as measured by your watch which is moving with you) between your origin and destination, is zero. For any arbitrary origin and any arbitrary destination you define along your path. The entire length of the trip has been length contracted to zero for you. You left and immediately got there as far as you were concerned. You experience no time at all.
Since your origin and destination are at the same place for you, it's no wonder that you don't see any light coming out of your headlights.
Actually probably not; I'll have to check. I stopped logging into that thing once they deleted all the mail, which is what really pisses me off.
I forgot to check my hotmail account for a few months and you guys deleted all 10 MB of my emails. I lost touch with a bunch of people.
Oh like you could even find batteries for that flashlight in fifteen seconds...
We've seen two-headed animals from China before. Apparently the pollution there is getting so bad it's going back in time!
Conservation of energy arguments get a little screwed up with inflation. Just look at the redshifted photons.
It doesn't work on Mozilla, only IE. And of course, "Best View:1024 by 768 pixel", so you'll want to carefully resize your browser window before you go there.
An interstellar photon, OTOH, can take on a continuous range of energies, and its wavelength can be adjusted by arbitrarily tiny amounts. For this reason inflation has a long term cumulative effect on photons that is just not seen with atoms.
Atoms would stay the same size as they are now for the exact same reason they do now.
...for google's free services. I bet they got a new young hotshot in house that wants to make lots of money (insert greedy pic).
Well, that young Google whippersnapper will ultimately find out the hard way that each of his company's services wants to be free.
If the universe is expanding at all, then there will have to be galaxies far enough away to be receding at greater than the speed of light. But there is still no local motion greater than c. Superluminal motion that is nonlocal can't be used to send superluminal messages, and space that didn't exist at the time you passed its current location shouldn't count towards your "speed" anyway.