What makes you both partially correct is that there isn't a delay in fission, but a delay in neutron release.

From reading the linked Wikipedia page, I get that the delayed neutrons are responsible for 0.6% of all neutrons emitted from fission, and most of them with half-life times between 2 and 20 seconds. While this makes for some nice control bandwidth (you can afford to be 0.6% off with the control rods without getting an instantaneous nuclear explosion), I don't see how these delayed neutrons can be responsible for the majority of the 7% decay heat.

"Normally there is some time between neutron capture and actual nuclear fission (I have heard a figure of 15 minutes)."

The fact that you can detonate a nuclear bomb by bringing together two subcritical pieces of U-235 shows that this can't be true.

In a nuclear reactor, 7% of the heat output is from the decay of the fission products (alpha and beta decay). This 7% will continue to be generated regardless of control rods or neutron absorbers. It will last hours to weeks, depending on where you put the threshold for "finished". Remember Fukushima: it became a disaster when the water circulation backup pumps failed 12 hours after the reactor shutdown.

"until the discovery of the chirality (and chirality affects a lot of things) of saturated fats, they probably got mixed together (they're still saturated fats, after all) and the original problem was because of the hidden trans- version."

I think you are mixing up things. Trans and cis fats are both unsaturated fats, with double bonds. Saturated fatty acids have no chirality. (Well... Triglycerides are technically often chiral (the middle carbon atom of the glycerol backbone), but that's not relevant for the cis/trans/saturated discussion.)

"I recently heard about a case called "Kids For Cash", where a judge was sending lots of juveniles to a privatized detention center and getting paid for each."

Actually, two judges: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Quote: For example, Ciavarella adjudicated children to extended stays in youth centers for offenses as minimal as mocking a principal on Myspace, trespassing in a vacant building, or shoplifting DVDs from Wal-mart.

"I use lightweight WMs such as XFCE or Openbox. Not a fan of the bloat..."

XFCE isn't that much lightweight compared to MATE (i.e., Gnome 2), only compared to Gnome3/Unity/KDE.
https://flexion.org/posts/2014...

Where did XFCE get this lightweight reputation? It surely doesn't look very polished (based on looking over other people's shoulders only).

"A 100mW red laser pointer aimed"

You play around with a HAND-HELD class 3b laser? Still have eyesight in both your eyes? (And your pets/household members)

Legally, those should be operated only by trained staff and I believe they must be equipped with a key lock and interlock connection. That stuff from WickedLasers should really be banned. The laser inside a dvd writer is of similar power, but interlocked and much less dangerous due to the focusing lens.

"Except you forgot to pay gas, maintenance and insurance on those 40 miles."

And depreciation, say $15k over 150k miles is another $0.10 per mile (I'm not from the US, not sure of typical car prices and lifetime mileages. YMMV)

Car owners typically don't count depreciation "because they have the car anyway". However, once infrastructure (or choice to live and work close to mass transit) is available, you can choose not to own a car and rent one for the few occasions you need one.

Apart from those costs, your own time may also have value. IMO, time spent driving is a waste and costs me EUR 20/h in loss of life quality. Time in the train I use to read the newspaper or slashdot (or post comments, like now). The bike ride to the station is my primary form of exercise (no gym subscription).

"GPS receivers have been in cell phones for years. The cost of the receiver doesn't add $1,000 to the phone."

The ones on phones don't need to be certified, tamper-proof, and linked to a database with financial consequences. Because of privacy issues, you'd probably want the unit to only log distance per day, not full location information. So,.reliability is extremely critical.

See alcohol locks (whatever they're called) for people with a multiple DUI conviction. You can get an uncertified breath analyzer gadget for a few dollars/euros, but the ones that are actually attached to a car are hundrds of dollars.

"the claim that this can work against all Microsoft Wireless Keyboards is 100% BS, and has been since 2007, when the issue was first uncovered; covered in depth by Schneier, and remedied in all versions of the Microsoft Wireless Keyboard created since then, which use at minimum 128-bit AES; NOT XOR."

The only meaningful hits on 'schneier microsoft wireless keyboard' is just a few broken links to a Dreamlab study: http://www.google.com/search?q...,

Those were using a 27 MHz transmitter (near field, i suppose) and an association process that at least uses a different xor key each time. TFA claims that the newer 2.4 GHz keyboards always use the same xor key, 0xCD. TFA mentions at least two recent keyboard models that use this protocol. (Maybe I overlooked other ones)

It seems that there is only the MS "2000 AES for business" keyboard that is explicitly marketed as using AES. http://www.microsoft.com/hardw...

"Turkey -- 99.8% Muslim"

Where did you get that number? Walk around in a big city and you will see less than 50% of the local women wearing head scarves, in most neighborhoods. In some places, it's less than 10%.

Turkey does register most citizens as "muslim" as a default value, unless they are christian or jewish, but it has little to do with the beliefs of those citizens. Many Turks are atheistic (and utterly despise the present muslim government).

Source: my Turkish S.O., who has "Islam" in her passport despite coming from a family that has been secular for several generations.

TFA: "... RC4 are broken. Again, no need to wait for them to become even weaker, disable them now."

Is that really so? I think RC4/arcfour is only known to leak secret data in the first 2 KB of the cipher stream, and for that reason SSH will simply feed it 2 KB or so of garbage data before encrypting the actual payliad. Or am I mistaken?

RC4 has a big advantage: it is by far the fastest cipher, which is relevant if you want to do large file transfers over slowish hardware (home-grade NAS, Raspberry Pi, old Atom CPU, etc.).

The mistake he made was not understanding the tools he was using. (...) Signing up for a service and then using it without reading the documentation is foolish.

I assume that you also blame the subprime borrowers for signing a contract that they didn't fully understand without putting most of the blame on the banks that knew damn well what they were doing?

The fact that one person can be blamed for a mistake due to lack of experience does not mean that there is not someone else (i.e., Amazon and the people who actually abused the keys) who deserves a lot more blame.

I knew my API key needed to be safe, so I installed the Figaro gem (a rails API key security gem, which typically works great), and trusted it to keep my API key off of git when I pushed. (...) deleted all traces from GitHub. I was able to clean it up within about 5 minutes (...) After a close call, I went to bed.

Surely it is not that unreasonable to (1) realize that those keys will be scraped within 5 minutes after uploading to an obscure project, and (2) not realize that an S3 key in a free trial subscription wouldn't allow racking up $2375 in EC charges within 10 hours?

Repeat guests? C'mon, really? You shop for hotels the same way the rest of us do - Either your employer tells you "you will stay here", or you use a price search and pick the lowest place that doesn't mention rats in the toilet.

Would you book a place that mentions complaints along the lines of "The bathroom is clean, but cell phones of any provider don't work here and the room phone is 2 dollars per minute?"

As for the employer: the travel offices of big companies who regularly have their people work on site at major customer or other offices will consider putting their employees somewhere else if they all complain about a particular hotel. The repeat customer is not the individual person, but the employer.

"the carriers and phone makers are all REQUIRED by calea (in the US) to have backdoors on anything that has a 'network' aspect to it."

Citation needed.

"they have magic usb cables that get into your phone"

I think I saw a website of a company that claims to have such a device, but I had the distinct impression that it mostly helps with booting into recovery mode (android phones); it will tell you which combo of power/volume up/down to press during boot. Some phones don't have a locked bootloader or have a bootloader that allows installing software to the "ROM" from the bootloader. (I've seen this on low-end Samsungs and the popular Clockworkmod bootloader for Cyanogenmod allows this).

For phones that are switched on, it will.check for usb debugging and mass storage access.

Essentially, it has collected the known procedures for rooting for a lot of phones. Guess what, a lot of phones cannot be rooted without either having unlocked the screen or wiping all user data.