Or... he's using slight-of-hand tricks to make me think he's a) only putting one dollar in, b) that there really were 10 coming out, and c) that the 10 came out of the wallet.

[Watch Teller (of Penn and Teller) create an unlimited number of coins from nothing and put them in a small metal bucket.]

And, by an amazing coincidence, these are the things that people are questioning about Rossi's device and this "analysis". A) Was the input power properly measured (no), B) was the output properly measured (no), and C) were other (conventional but hidden) sources of input energy properly excluded (no).

Given a choice between making $400k a year

Read it again, that $400k is just the first year. Then $800k, then $1.6m, then $3.2m... Until he's made his billions of dollars.

If you are capable of making the first plant (as Rossi did), you are capable of earning enough income from it to make the second, and so on, until you've made enough money to sate your appetite and decide to just give the design away. But it's better than that, because if you are actually selling electricity, not magic beans, it makes your magic beans a hell of a lot more credible. [For example, Rossi claimed (early on) that he was using his device to heat his "factory", precisely to give himself that kind of credibility.]

Can't get on the grid due to {conspiracy}. No problem. You sell on-site off-grid power to individual large customers, if you can cut their power costs they'd jump at the chance. Aluminium smelters spend a fortune on electricity, mining companies spend a fortune on fuel for remote power generation... (That said, you might pick one or two clients as demonstrators and offer them free power. That also lets you work out the bugs in the system before you have contractual obligations.) A decade later, you're powering everything from Google server farms to the International Space Station. And at that point, if you are not wealthy enough to get a licence to build grid-connected plants in any market that has commercial power, you're doing it wrong.

But there's even more money to be made. In the paper, the isotopic composition of the post-experiment "ash" from his ecats included several isotopes that are extremely valuable in their own right ($20k/oz.) There's one that is a beta-emitter that (if it could be produced cheaply) would power compact "nuclear batteries" for anything from laptops to space probes, for applications too small for the ecat-based system. [At least one lithium isotope is "dual use", so selling that requires some extra paper-work. But others are no harder than selling smoke-detectors.]

Right now he could not only be selling power, but also be selling rare isotopes, and developing other product lines not directly connected with the ecats made from the "ash" of his power plants. (And the good thing about the beta-voltaic battery is that not only are the fairly simple, the technology is off-patent. Doesn't matter if someone reverse-engineers your design, unless they have a source of cheap beta-emitter. So you can sell the "batteries" wherever you can get appropriate licensing, without worrying about IP theft.)

And every one of these things does more to demonstrate the reality of his device than getting a few gullible patsies to write stare at a glowing rod for 30 hours.

IIRC Bill&Ted's excellent time machine didn't actually fly and didn't do anything special with space, such as being bigger on the inside. (I suppose it is in itself compact, therefore saved space, compared to, say, a flying Delorean. But that's not the meaning I took from the original comment.)

They been in trouble with the law since the day they was born.

Shockingly there are also places you can't drive to.

However, most SF "flying car" scenarios assume we'll adapt new infrastructure around VTOL capability. For example, downtown in large cities.

Until we develop anti-gravity, no "flying car" will truly qualify for the SF image. Drivable-planes like Terrafugia and clones still need runways. Moller's Skycar, even if it wasn't a scam, wouldn't be allowed in real world cities. (BTW, it also isn't drivable, yet few would say it's not a "flying car" (again if it wasn't a scam.))

My point is that you're being pedantic and stupid. (My own pedantry is much more sophisticated.)

A police box isn't a phone booth. The direct-line handset is on the outside (behind that little door), the inside is more of a lock-up shed for local bobbies to store their equipment. (Such as wet-weather ponchos, first-aid kits, logbooks, etc.)

The point of a flying car is that you don't have to. A "Velocopter", if it was practical, is something that could land in your driveway.

Moller Skycar is a long time investment scam. The "working" version has never flown high enough to clear its ground-effect after 20 years of "demonstrations", because of, ummm, "insurance", which somehow doesn't affect any other experimental and novelty aircraft designer.

Skyrider is a straight rip-off of Moller's design, and purely a paper-plane.

Xplorair PX200 is more about its completely new propulsion system. If the propulsion worked as advertised, it would be a useful product for conventional aircraft. That the inventor is using it to get investors for a flying-car is a pretty big indicator that there's nothing there.

Terrafugia and Aeromobil are actually flying. Which is kind of impressive. Both are just folding-wing planes awkwardly squeezed into a vaguely roadable shape. But, honestly, you really don't want to drive your fragile aircraft on a road.

More realistically, if you want to fly without getting a full licence, buy an ultralight, paraglider, or gyrocopter.

Ten!

Eight!

Seven!

Vista!

XP!

2000!

ME!

98!

95!

3.11

3

2

1

DOS!

We have DOS of the Microsoft operating system. The processor is at 16 bit, and 86-DOS has cloned the CP/M.

Trying to dispel it, or trying to conform to it? "Fair warning guys..."

Unlike the shit I flush into the same system?

Pretty sure that article was a hoax.

For about three years? With the program itself being hidden at remote locations, out of public view, during a war. With every American, every journalist, who accidentally stumbled onto the program being easily convinced to keep the secret "from those sneaky Krauts."

And a program which was for the country, for the common defence, doing something that they believed in. (Either out of loyalty to the US, fear of Nazis, or just because they were giant nerds playing with nuclear fire.) And since then, many of those scientists changed their loyalties and joined the anti-nuclear movement. (And pretty much everything that could leak, in the 60 years since then, has leaked.)

A moon landing hoax would have been the opposite. It would betray their own people, betray their friends at NASA, betray their own beliefs and morality, and they didn't get to go to the moon. For what? Why keep that secret for decade after decade after decade...?

They still had to build the giant rocket and land something on the moon in order for the telemetry to work. So they had all the complexity of building Saturn V and the Apollo stack but in addition they had to seamlessly pull off the greatest hoax in history with the greatest concentration of pedantic nerd geniuses in the world watching.

Apollo succeeded in spite of its failures. The Apollo 1 fire, the Apollo 13 explosion. Apollo 12's repeated lightning strikes and then the astronauts destroying their only video camera, etc etc. All with thousands of experts watching over them. Going back to the various cluster-fucks during Mercury and Gemini when they were trying to learn EVAs and later docking; but they could keep trying until they got it right. And once it was done, it was done. It didn't matter if new people came in and went through the archives, didn't matter if people looked at the hardware. There was nothing to hide.

A giant conspiracy to fake the moon landings had to get everything right the first time, with a skeleton crew, and it was not only vulnerable to a single major leak or screw-up at the time, it has continued to be vulnerable for 50 years. The hoaxers can never stop the cover-up.

For example, the LRO imaged the Apollo landing sites, showing tracks and vehicles. Was that faked? A brand new cover-up during the LRO program, adding a whole new conspiracy they had to seamlessly pull of under the noses of the LRO science team, and then keep secret forever.

And each layer of cover-up adds more things to go wrong, more people able to leak now or in the future. With every single person involved, every astronaut and technician, knowing that they are sitting on the greatest secret in history. It just needs one person, diagnosed with terminal cancer, conscience, or greed, to say, "Fuck it..."

You can buy LED strips (and fancier kits) to stick behind your TV/monitor to create a coloured glow on the wall around your screen which extends the edges of the images to create a greater immersion.

Given that screen-size is the limiting factor in these VR headsets, are any of the manufacturers including this kind of ultra-simple peripheral lighting within the headset? To reduce the blinker effect from the limited FOV.

TV/monitor kits can only use the regular image and extrapolate the edge effects. But with a VR kit, the content developers themselves would be able to program peripheral lighting in addition to the monitor image. So an object could appear in your peripheral vision before it reaches the edge of the actual screen. Similarly, small and large objects would show differences in the peripheral lighting even though both have the same size on the screen. Both effects increasing the immersion. (And, of course, in horror games, the devs would use it to just fuck with you.)

IMO, with a peripheral lighting system, a screen with a mere 90 FOV would be plenty for full immersion. It's rare that you pivot your eyes beyond 45 without turning your head. You flick your eyes across, then turn your head to re-centre your vision. And when you do that, your eyes don't have long enough to focus on the object (to extract detail) before your head movement has caught up, so under normal circumstances you still shouldn't notice the extremely low resolution of the peripheral lighting.

[Disclaimer: I ain't even got a Nintendo Virtual Boy, so maybe modern VR devices all do this, but I can't find any reference to it online except a single 5 year old forum post.]