Maintaining a personal white list is not easy - do you want your kid's school to be able to call you? Your credit cards' fraud-detection unit? Any hospital a close family member might be taken to in an emergency?

If this rule change is passed, then maybe it is time for some means to redirect these calls to the personal phones of FCC commissioners and board members of the companies pushing for the change.

When your proactive penetration testing finds a vulnerability, or one of your vendors issues a critical patch, follow through as if it were for real.

The claim that X is not newsworthy is almost always less interesting than X.

So what you are saying is that it is invalid to discuss the editorial policies of major newspapers?

No, that would be just another hyperbolic outburst of the sort that I am replying to here.

Jeremy Bernstein makes a good argument that the Nazi scientists were unaware of the true value of the critical mass, let alone other important but less basic issues such as the significance of prompt vs. delayed neutrons, until they learned, while being detained in Farm Hall, of the bombing of Hiroshima (Hitler's Uranium Club: The Secret Recordings at Farm Hall, ISBN 978-0387950891). These recordings of their conversations among themselves indicate initial astonishment and incredulity, but after several hours (days?) of work, Heisenberg was able to present to the group an analysis of how it could be done. Bernstein argues that that Heisenberg's initial back-of-envelope calculation for the critical mass, based on the mean free path of neutrons in uranium, was never questioned. While they may or may not have found this useful in discouraging Nazi hopes of an atom bomb, it seems unlikely that they were aware it was wrong.

They also incorrectly measured the neutron absorption cross-section of graphite (IIRC due to contamination by boron) and ruled it out as a moderator, making themselves dependent on vulnerable heavy water supplies from occupied Norway.

According to Thomas Powers' book, 'Heisenberg's War: The Secret History Of The German Bomb' (written before the Farm Hall transcripts were released), creating a power reactor was indeed their assigned task, but the Third Reich had more pressing priorities, so it was never funded in the way the V weapons were. If they had tried to build a reactor on the basis of Heisenberg's assumption, they would probably either have irradiated themselves out of existence, or found the errors in their theory. Either way, it does not seem likely that they would have been in a position to be so astonished by Hiroshima as they evidently were, if they had made much progress in that direction.

Most of them depend, in practice, on having a working nuclear reactor.

When everybody has the same goal, as is pretty much the case for usability issues, the shallowness of bugs posited by the many eyes hypothesis would be a good thing. When it comes to security issues, it sets up a race between the white hats and the black hats, and there is more incentive for the black hats (collectively, the rest of us have as much incentive as do the black hats, but that is not the case individually - for one thing, an attacker satisfies his goal by finding just one vulnerability.)

If there are insufficient eyes, then the truth of the phrase is moot.

I suspect he was referring to a self-administered study.

Is there evidence against the efficacy of a mandatory interlock program? On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence that harsh sentencing in other drug-related crimes does not work.

Reserve the harsher punishments for anyone who violates one of these restrictions, or who facilitates any such violation (the weakest link that I see in this proposal is the loaning of cars by relatives and friends.)

This is just a wild guess, but perhaps beelsebob was thinking of mandatory interlock devices. I read about them on Slashdot somewhere.

The first sentence in the Wikipedia article: "Andrea Rossi (born 3 June 1950) is an Italian convicted fraudster, inventor and entrepreneur." (Though the footnote to "fraudster" indicates he was ultimately acquitted, on what appears to be a technicality, of the major charges relating to an alleged oil-from-trash scam.) The best you can say about E-Cat is that Rossi seems to be doing everything possible to make it look like a scam (Starts with a Bang.)

Rossi's E-Cat was the first thing I thought of when I read of Gates trip to Italy, but he was apparently visiting the Frascati ENEA labs of the University of Verona, which is "recognized for excellence in [cold] nuclear fusion research", whatever that means. I do not know if it has any connection to Rossi.

The 'Tech Metals Insider' article contains a link to what it describes as another of its articles on Low Energy Nuclear Reactors, but it is actually about the hohlraums used in some inertial-confinement laser fusion research. The author is apparently unaware that this is a very different technology, and so cannot be regarded as a reliable guide on the subject.

A recent article in New Scientist (paywalled, I don't have an alternative) suggests that 8 km is about the limit for fish. The problem, apparently, is that the pressure distorts protein shapes, eventually preventing them from working properly. The tissue (particularly muscle) of deep-sea fishes contains trimethylamine oxide, which may protect against this problem, and the deeper you go, the more of it the fish have, but by about 8km they are saturated with it.

Invertebrates have been found deeper, so presumably they have a different mechanism.

I could be by design...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...