There were two experiments. In one, 360W was applied continuously, and in the other, 930W was applied on a 35% duty cycle. Of course, that's assuming there's no trick wiring. The other assumption is that their baffling method of estimating the power output was working properly. It certainly looks fine (assuming the IR camera didn't go over 50C, which is all it's rated to without active cooling) but Rossi doesn't like people to do actual calorimetry and I can't help but read that as an indication that the positive results would immediatley disappear.

I'll settle for less: let the same people perform the experiment again, but don't have Rossi setting up the experiments in his lab on his terms. You don't invite Yuri Geller into the lab then let him set up the spoon-bending experiment.

NASA are looking at a possible mechanism for how a similar reaction might go. NASA have not, and probably will not, touch Rossi with a barge pole.

There's plenty of reseach into legitimate low-temperature, low-pressure fusion, going under names like muon-catalysed and antimatter-catalysed fusion. It's very well accepted work. The trouble is that most research going under the name "cold fusion" would better be described as "I have invented a machine that makes energy from nowhere and am postulating fusion as its mechanism of operation".

If I'm reading it right (which is a shaky assumption) one pad is sufficient to decipher messages sent to that recipient, but both would be necessary to read messages going both ways.

I suppose my error here is letting the title's "uncrackable cryptography" override the summary's "invulnerable to electronic attack", which is absolutely true.

Right, it's difficult, not impossible. You need a sufficiently large time window to steal both pads and duplicate them.

That's not the case with a properly used one-time pad. Normally you break a cipher by finding correlations due to the repeated use of a finite encryption key on different parts of a comprehensible plaintext. If either the message is random, or the encryption key is random and nonrepeating, then the message cannot be deciphered.

Unless you steal the pad, or force the user to repeat it.

Yeah, that's supposed to be what this problem solves, though, if I'm reading it right. Haven't they just taken a step back to having a physical OTP on your desk/in your shoe?

Couldn't you just steal the plate?

That's a lofty expectation for a squirrel.

Listen, the way I pack for a picnic, they could take biscuits for years and I wouldn't even notice the reduction in quantity.

Rivaly implies entirely the wrong kind of relationship between the two, a competitive one. You don't have a rivalry with a squirrel that's lifting biscuits from your picnic, you have an irrational obsession with destroying it while it carries on with a kind of benign codependence.

I may have stretched that metaphor.

That's an excellent point, at some point or another the tax just gets passed onto a human being, with differing degrees of elasticity.

You understand that the government offsets lost or unavailable corporate tax revenue by increasing the taxes it does collect, i.e. yours, right?

NASA didn't even want to launch it, they had to have their arm twisted to schedule an extra Shuttle mission so it wasn't just left on the ground to rot.