November 3rd? Pshaw. The real announcement date to pay attention to is Oct. 28th...

Last time I heard the phrase 'power too cheap to be worth metering' was in connection with the nuclear fission power industry.

I'm just sayin'.
 
Trade secrets are in a gray, case-by-case kind of region. But it's a matter of established law (in the USA, anyway) that once included in a patent application, no element of the submission can be considered 'secret.'
 
Sad Max said:
Trade secrets are in a gray, case-by-case kind of region. But it's a matter of established law (in the USA, anyway) that once included in a patent application, no element of the submission can be considered 'secret.'
Click to expand...
Ok, so my understanding of that law is that while you may have kept your "secret" by not including that in your patent, if some third party "discovers" it and used that "secret" on their own device, you, the "original inventor" of that "secret" is not legally protected then. This is the trade off right?
 
For a start, the US customer remains anonymous. In other words, a group of unknown, unverifiable people carried out tests which cannot be checked.

Secondly, observers apart from the customer were only allowed to view the test for a few minutes at a time and during the entire test the E-Cat remained connected to a power supply by a cable.

The external power was supposedly turned off; as a demonstration it would have been more impressive for the reactor in its shipping container to be visibly disconnected while operating.
Click to expand...

The external power was supposedly turned off, and there's no independent verification? Huh, really?

I'm no scientist (nor do I play one on TV), but I remember the first claim of cold fusion, and this sounds like some cross between cold fusion and alchemy...
 
Okay, that guy's report saying there was a 500kw generator hooked up to the power plant that's producing 490kw does seem a little... well, in the words of C+C Music Factory, that seems like one of those "Things That Make You Go ... Hmmm..."

But presumably any customer who's looking into buying a 1 megawatt power plant would have the brains to know whether the energy was coming from a generator or from the powerplant under discussion...

This is a scam.
Click to expand...
Well, no, a necessary component of it being a scam is that they'd have to be scamming somebody out of something, and so far, as far as I know, they haven't asked anybody for anything.

It could be a mistake, or it could be a prank, or a hoax, but if they don't take anything from anyone it can't be a scam. The "4K firmware" for the t2i was equally implausible, and it turned out to be a prank or a hoax. If they'd taken money from people on "preorders", then it would be a scam.

Right now I think of this whole thing about the same as I think of a lottery ticket. It's probably a million to one that it'd actually pay off, but I'm not clamoring to shut the guy down either, because hey... what if? The idea that this 1-megawatt plant (a million watts... enough power to power 16,000 60-watt light bulbs) was tested not by the scammers but by the end customer himself, who presumably would be thorough in his due diligence... I dunno, it certainly keeps the legend alive until the next news cycle...

Sure would go a long way towards legitimizing the whole thing if he'd just turn over a unit to, oh, say, Consumer Reports and let them run with it... not that they're the most qualified scientific minds in the universe, but they'd darn sure find out whether it was generating more power than it was consuming, and they'd report it for all of us to see...
 
Ah, the Forbes follow-up.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/markgibbs/2011/10/30/believing-in-cold-fusion-and-the-e-cat/

Sounds like he's getting pretty frustrated with the comments people are sending in, and he probably shouldn't have written it while quite so worked up, should have cooled off first. But he does raise some good points. I think the biggest thing I take away from all this is... I'm pretty surprised Forbes published it at all, especially the follow-up. Doesn't seem up to their normal standards.

Wired also did a follow-up:
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-10/29/rossi-success

In it they speculate that perhaps the customer is DARPA. Who knows... whole thing seems to have been conducted in a really curious manner...
 
Barry_Green said:
In it they speculate that perhaps the customer is DARPA. Who knows... whole thing seems to have been conducted in a really curious manner...
Click to expand...

I think the main reason for the curious manner this was all conducted is that, even though they are calling it "low energy nuclear reactions", it's just cold fusion, and they remember what happened to the last two guys who claimed they achieved cold fusion...or it could be a scam. I think this is becoming less likely. It's either the real thing, or someone who thinks they have the real thing and isn't competent enough to realize they don't. Anyway it's probably best people aren't taking them seriously, for their own lives anyway.
 
Barry_Green said:
The idea that this 1-megawatt plant (a million watts... enough power to power 16,000 60-watt light bulbs) was tested not by the scammers but by the end customer himself, who presumably would be thorough in his due diligence... I dunno, it certainly keeps the legend alive until the next news cycle...
Click to expand...

assuming there was an actual customer...
 
ugafan said:
assuming there was an actual customer...
Click to expand...
Granted... but ... wouldn't building a 1 megawatt power plant be a rather expensive thing to do, just for a hoax? I mean, jollies are jollies, and putting a rickroll in the t2i 4k announcement was all fun for those guys and whatnot, but building a (real or fake) 1 megawatt power plant and staking your reputation and the reputation of scientists from the Bolognese University all on a hoax... just seems unrealistic.

I mean, it's either got to be that they're dead wrong (which seems unlikely) or they're scammers (which seems unlikely) or they're actually on to something (which seems unlikely). Hard to see what the true end game here is.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top