Its really too bad that APS et al are doubling down on their crime even after decades of experiments that meet Ramsey's criterion. Indeed, I'm virtually certain that when -- I said when not if some sort of new form of heat production is demonstrated in D-Pd systems to the satisfaction of even the Secretary of Energy and President of the APS, that they will still claim, as do you, that "Koonin is on the right side of history" by pointing to some error that F&P made somewhere.

They will then be so dismayed and puzzled at why a Western version of Pol Pot starts hauling them off to reeducation in the Western version of the rice paddies.

The controversy over Rossi is a tempest in a teapot. If you want to know when the real crime was committed, it was by the American Physical Society at this moment in its Baltimore, MD meeting of May 1, 1989. Agreed, it was more like a riot with looting than any kind of criminal conspiracy to commit fraud, but it was vastly more damaging.

As you watch Steven E. Koonin in that video and listen to the obscene applause of is "colleagues" with the APS, keep in mind that the original announcement had been at the end of March -- a mere 5 weeks earlier -- and that the experimental protocol hadn't even been published yet. When it was published it stated that it took 2 months of electrolytic loading before the effect might occur.

The sole act of scientific integrity among the establishment figures was as follows:

"Ordinarily, new scientific discoveries are claimed to be consistent and reproducible; as a result, if the experiments are not complicated, the discovery can usually be confirmed or disproved in a few months. The claims of cold fusion, however, are unusual in that even the strongest proponents of cold fusion assert that the experiments, for unknown reasons, are not consistent and reproducible at the present time. However, even a single short but valid cold fusion period would be revolutionary." --Norman Ramsey

Dr. Norman Ramsey Jr., Nobel laureate and professor of physics at Harvard University was the only person on the the 1989 Department of Energy cold fusion review panel to voice a dissenting opinion. Ramsey insisted on the inclusion of this preamble as an alternative to his resignation from the panel. The committee acquiesed because he was its co-chair and the only Nobel laureate on the committee.

Dr. Ramsey's condition has been fulfilled hundreds of times over the last quarter century and there has been absolutely no acknowledgement by the APS of its crime.

Killing healthcare workers prevents Ebola and I'll just betcha that injecting hemorrhaged blood from an Ebola victim in his family will vaccinate against Ebola.

In fact, let's get rid of public sanitation. What a regressive idea.

While plausibly ameliorating the absurdity, your argument is exaggerated. He not only was symptomatic hence shedding virus while at home with his family for days with them totally unprotected and untrained, he was vomiting and probably hemorrhaging when they finally called the ambulance.

What's all this about protective gear? Duncan's family wasn't wearing protective gear for crying out loud and they didn't come down with the disease. Something doesn't add up here.

So imagine you're an ISIS terrorist train to be a suicide bomber and somehow, I can't imagine how but bear with me, somehow you manage to get to Washington D.C.

Now imagine that you see all this brouhaha about Ebola on the tube -- you know, people panicking for no reason and all that -- and you get this crazy idea that maybe rather than splattering your body all over one Metro subway station you'd kill a lot more infidels by catching Ebola, waiting for the first symptoms to show up which look like the flu, and then spend the day making like Divine in Pink Flamingos and leaving your bodily fluids on surfaces in all of the subway cars.

The mass censorship of gamers over the last month has raised questions about how well functioning that immune system really is. Gamers and the game media have never gotten along. But the degree to which gamers were thrown out of sites for talking about Gamergate was disturbing, and the "trivial" nature of gaming as a subject matter does not soften the blow.

Gamers were ejected from all major game news sites/blogs, almost all major game forums, news media outlets, subjected to shadow bans and mass deletions across the whole of Reddit, barred from editing Wikipedia, and finally -- in the the most absurd capstone to the whole farce -- all gamergate discussion was banned from 4chan, a place which still openly permits the posting of severed human body parts and rabidly anti-semetic hate speech. What few remaining forums for discussion were left ended up being DDoSed.

What happened during gamergate was what we were told could never happen to free discussion on the web: Site by site, the lights on the internet went out for video gamers.

In retrospect, it could only have happened for something as "trivial" as video games, and to a group as "subcultural" as the gaming community. But it has happened; It is still happenning. The entire concept of the Internet as a "fifth estate" or a forum for open debate has been severely discredited by recent events. If video gamers are unable to discuss or dispute that "Gamers are dead", or that games are not misogynist on the internet, then what can be discussed or disputed?

If the internet has an immune system, I don't see the patient recovering yet, and even in the event of a return to "health", the complications of this acute inflammation of censorship will be with us for a long time. This may yet end up being a watershed for the medium and our assumptions about it. Something has just gone very, very wrong.

The majority of the gamers who wrote Intel agree with you. In fact, the entire furore over the past month seems to have cemented the idea of "gamer" as a inclusive, universal identity into the collective mind of the gaming community across the web.

However, that was not the argument the Gamasutra and other articles made. The gaming press collectively declared that "Gamers were dead", that gaming as a descriptor was obsolete, that the "identity was dead", or referred only to a obsolete subset of exclusionary, female unfriendly, "selfish", "conservative", "tribalistic", and -- implied by the accompanying stock images -- fat angry unkempt adult males.

Meanwhile, games companies, marketing firms and online game fansites were still actively using the term to refer to everyone who, well, plays games. Even Forbes magazine was shaking its head in disbelief at the game media's attack on its own consumers. People are now asking how much damage recent controversies may have done to the public image of the gaming industry.

A $80 billion dollar industry which had achieved almost universal consumer acceptance and success may have just been torpedoed as a woman-hating "Cathedral of Misogyny" by its own press publications. Intel is cutting its losses before the conflagration spreads to the rest of tech.

For anyone interested, here is a link to the article Intel pulls ads from Gamasutra over. It is ... colourful in its descriptions of gaming to say the least.

'Game culture' as we know it is kind of embarrassing -- it's not even culture. It's buying things, spackling over memes and in-jokes repeatedly, and it's getting mad on the internet. ...

It's young men queuing with plush mushroom hats and backpacks and jutting promo poster rolls. Queuing passionately for hours, at events around the world, to see the things that marketers want them to see. To find out whether they should buy things or not. They don't know how to dress or behave. ...

Traditional "gaming" is sloughing off, culturally and economically, like the carapace of a bug. ...

These obtuse shitslingers, these wailing hyper-consumers, these childish internet-arguers -- they are not my audience. They don't have to be yours. There is no 'side' to be on, there is no 'debate' to be had.

About ten or so articles like this appeared over the course of a few days at the end of August across most of the top game news sites. Apparently, a lot of gamers were upset enough to write into site advertisers to request they stop sponsoring the offending site with ads. Intel have evidently made a dash for the door out of a building the owners have decided to set on fire.

The author of the piece, Leigh Alexander is a described feminist critique of video games and video game culture, as well as wider "geek" cultures. Her personal views on geeks and their fandoms are ... equally colourful.

Why do you sometimes mock 'nerds' and 'gamers' so virulently? Isn't that the same kind of bullying you rail against? ...

Self-identified nerds are often so obsessed with their identity as cultural outcasts that they are willfully blind to their privilege, and for the sake of relatively-absurd fandoms â" space marines, dragons, zombies, endless war simulations â" take their myopic and insular attitudes to "art" and "culture" with tunnel-visioned, inflexible, embarrassing seriousness that often leads to homogeneity, racism, sexism and bullying.

Nerds escaped high school. Some of them made millions making video games. Digital literacy doesn't make you special anymore, it makes you baseline employable. Fantasy is on mainstream cable. ...

The fact you got a Game Boy for Christmas and liked it so much you stopped doing anything else doesn't entitle you to a revolution. Your fandom is not your identity. Your fandom is not a race.

I am not convinced that this person is not an ultra-conservative plant sent to discredit feminist and progressivism in geek and gaming culture. If she is, she's making a spectacular effort at doing so. This entire furore is doing real damage to the genuine participation of women in the video game and even wider tech. Intel's pulling of ads might help take the oxygen out of this fire before the industry gets burned.

And so it starts exactly as I predicted here: He went to the emergency room with flu like symptoms and they ... wait for it .... SENT HIM HOME.

Early symptoms of Ebola are "flu-like" and it is contagious during these "flu-like" symptoms. Now ... consider the fact that flu season is upon us. But you know what's _really_ frightening about this? Not one of the goddamn idiot "authorities" has even mentioned, let alone assessed, this confounding situation's impact on public health containment measures.

Now THAT'S frightening!

Read the CDC's guidelines on monitoring and movement of persons with "exposure" and tell me their guidelines work for a country in the throes of massive incidence of "flu-like symptoms".

While reading this wisdom from on high, imagine there is, in this multi-"culture"al heaven that is the US nowadays, a "community" somewhere with strong identity, Hollywood-fired resentment of the US's white-supremacist history of slavery and colonial exploitation with corresponding suspicion of its public health measures (just look at the murders of public health workers in West Africa -- and many of those health workers weren't even "white-devils"), strong relations in West Africa and -- to top it all off -- a flu season that has a good percentage of its community exhibiting the early stage symptoms of Ebola...

The New York Times Opines:

The ideal of contamination has few exponents more eloquent than Salman Rushdie, who has insisted that the novel that occasioned his fatwa "celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelisation and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Mélange, hotch-potch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world." No doubt there can be an easy and spurious utopianism of "mixture," as there is of "purity" or "authenticity." And yet the larger human truth is on the side of contamination - that endless process of imitation and revision.

A tenable global ethics has to temper a respect for difference with a respect for the freedom of actual human beings to make their own choices. That's why cosmopolitans don't insist that everyone become cosmopolitan. They know they don't have all the answers. They're humble enough to think that they might learn from strangers; not too humble to think that strangers can't learn from them. Few remember what Chremes says after his "I am human" line, but it is equally suggestive: "If you're right, I'll do what you do. If you're wrong, I'll set you straight."

Kwame Anthony Appiah, a philosopher, teaches at Princeton University. This essay is adapted from "Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers," to be published later this month by W.W. Norton.

Correct. Furthermore when you have gutted the demand side of the economy what emerges are phenomena like Walmart where lower consumer prices are achieved through a monopsony (the private sector form of the "single payer" holy grail socialized medicine seeks for the same reason) that not only pays its suppliers less, but also its employees less because as the jobs market contracts, there is nowhere else to work ultimately. Walmart also knows EXACTLY what it is doing when it trains its employees in the art of extracting government benefits from a decreasing government revenue stream.

All of this wouldn't be so bad if the tax base were on net assets rather than economic activity as at least then the companies engaging in corrupt hiring practices --such as I witnessed during the huge ramp up in H-1b circa 2000 when I was told I could hire all the programmers from India for HP but not the single US-citizen specialist in the field that I needed -- will be dumped because the companies doing them will be put out of business by a more level playing field in the free market.

silfen confesses "Yes, H-1B workers are at the bottom of the pay scale for the simple reason that H-1B visas are for people just starting out."

Ah I see. So the violation of the H-1B statute is so pervasive now that people are under the impression that it is for people who are just starting out.

My mistake.

Mark et al should simply be thrown in jail for fraud and since this has gotten so far out of hand as to permit responses like silfen's to have the remotest credibility, the jail time should be mandatory without parole.

Its tragic that Mark et al are being forced to put up with just sort of OK US workers.

You know one step that Mark et al could take that would grease the skids on their immigration reforms?

Pay the geniuses they want to import what they're worth. See The Bottom of the Pay Scale: Wages for H-1B Computer Programmers.

In fact, Mark et al should either pay back salaries to all of the H-1b workers they've ever employed or Mark et al should be thrown in prison for fraudulent abuse of the H-1B guest worker provision.