The paper Rossi and Focardi wrote about their reactor has been rejected by multiple peer-reviewed journals (and when it was finally published it was published in a journal they made).
(It probably doesn’t help that Rossi has been accused of a few crimes, including tax fraud and illegally importing gold.)
http://www.motherboard.tv/2011/1/25/is-cold-fusion-real-not-yet
Rossi Discovery – What to Say?
http://blog.newenergytimes.com/2011/01/15/rossi-discovery-what-to-say/
“Pay close attention to Andrea Rossi; he has a dirty past. Twenty years ago he was arrested for illegal importing of gold from the Swiss.
“Not only that, but in the 1980s he was involved in a scam with industrial waste. It is a complex thing to explain, but the scam cost the Lombardy region € 25 million. He honestly does not convince me as a person, and I am not convinced about the test done at Bologna today.
“Check this link: http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroldragon
“In friendship, I suggest you be careful, I smell something burning.”
According to the link, in 1995, Rossi was jailed for conspiracy to engage in tax fraud for his involvement in a business that was trading precious materials between Switzerland and Italy.
Something like the difficulty that scientists had in getting papers published which challenged the Global Warming orthodoxy.
I'm not saying that Rossi is right, nor that he's a fraud. The situation is interesting enough that I'm going to wait for the one megawatt pilot plant to crank up in October.
I was already aware of everything in your post, as one may infer from my comments about circumstantial criticisms that do not involve the E-cat itself. Please be careful not to fall into close-mindedness. That is not skepticism.