The system and safety protocols are working precisely as they were designed.

Actually, the faults were found by chance, there wasn't a specific check for this which could be scheduled and signed off, it was just an engineer noticed something odd while doing other inspections.

So while you are right in that this is not a huge safety issue and we weren't minutes from disaster, I wouldn't agree that the system and safety protocols are particularly brilliant either.

The stories would be of the form:

As a user, I want to change my password...

But they generally won't say that the means to do that should be a link from the user account page or what the steps of the process would be. Now for something simple like a a password change, there are generally well defined industry best practices that both the developer and the end user are probably aware of and so both have a common conception of what should happen. That isn't true for functions specific to the application or domain.

There is a big gap between User Story and implementation specific documentation.

Use the web interface to download the file, then decrypt with a local copy of the encryption tool/key.

What they mean is they can't render a document on the web interface.

I would have intuitively said the other way around.

Since the gravity is so small I would have expected the motion of the smallest particles to be close to random, perhaps close to Brownian motion if you looked at the system over a long enough period of time.

I guess, even though there isn't much to pull the material together, once a small particle is in a crack or void it is very unlikely to ever escape and so the crack does eventually fill in, it seems to me that the process should exist but be much slower than when compared to the effect in a strong gravity field.

As you said, "Intuitively, which we all know is probably wrong"

The coal we use was created before bacteria evolved the ability to decompose trees, so it's not quite as simple as you seem to think...

bollocks

I'm not sure you understood the GP's point. In fact you seem to have interpreted it completely backwards.

Allowing the companies making the loans to go bust, rather than trying to protect them by not allowing Student Loans to be cleared by bankruptcy is the attenuation that you are looking for. It's sends a clear message to other companies loaning money that there are risks and that they should be filtering potential customers.

If economists had known in advance of one of the great depressions that it was going to happen, and releasing the results would of only sped-up the collapse, should they release the information?

The earlier the bubble is burst, the small the correction needs to be and the quicker the recovery afterwards can be. Knowing a burst will happen, it is ethical to make the information public as quickly as possible.

The tricky bit comes when you are 55% sure of a crash, but knowing that making those fears known publicly will definitely cause a crash. How sure do you need to be before it is worth causing a small crash to offset the chance of a bigger crash later on? 60%, 70%, 80%?

I would have thought that lack of crime was the goal of any law enforcement, not number of arrests. Although number of arrests is certainly an easier number to work out.

except that the idea of foreign workers being prefered over domestic, regardless of the reason, is a widely held believe.

Evidence that that is not the case would be just as worthy of publication

The number of brainfucks in Washington could be turned to our advantage.

We only need to introduce a single letter typo into a funding bill and for the brainfucks to not notice.

If there's a big bias against Americans in the results, publicize the heck out of it.

Regardless of the outcome, publicize the heck out of it. You don't get to hide the results just because they don't confirm your pre-existing bias.

Do you stand to gain, directly or indirectly, any benefit either personally, professionally, or politically, by whatever is being whistle blown on?

That is an extremely wide difinition.

Anyone whistle blowing is doing it because they want something changed, whether that is an improved working environment or a social/political change. That means they are indirectly benefitting and therefore by your definition no whistleblower is a whistleblower.