6.25% APR is a lot better than a lot of poor people can get. Yes, Microsoft charges extra for the service of offering a lower upfront cost and assuming the risk associated with hoping people don't break the 2 year commitment (pursuing ETF fees from people who break the contract isn't free, and its by no means anywhere near 100% effective). There's nothing to see here.

Because foot powered pumps wouldn't be wheelchair accessible. Duh!

The 'kooky' energy breakthroughs I'm talking about are the ones that are pushed by all the whack-job websites out there.

'Cold fusion', taken as 'fusion which can occur in an environment that is macroscopically not operating at fusion temperatures' is not an and of itself impossible. Bubble fusion is a hypothetical mechanism. Muon-catalyzed fusion is a well established mechanism which, were it not for the half life of muons and their tendency to be consumed alpha particles (by byproducts of fusion reactions), would be a cheap source of power today.

1) Rossi is working with Sergio Focardi, who is a physicist. 2) Just because there have been hoaxes in the field of energy production before does not mean every possible breakthrough is also a hoax.

I have lots of doubts and am impatient to see this either disproved or validated. The fact remains, if there every is an energy breakthrough like the one being described here it will inevitably look just like this. There will be tons of rational skeptical people nay-saying it because that's the safe bet. There will be tons of kooks and conspiracy nuts supporting it as validation of what they've believed all along (which it isn't necessarily). Any real energy breakthrough will always end up looking crazy because initially it's going to have all the same responses and symptoms of all the prior scams and kooks.

If you look at all the secrecy around the customer, you can say it's because it's all a scam. But you can equally say that any real customer doesn't want to reveal themselves publicly before the tech is validated precisely because of the fringe science air this all carries.

Yeah, 'Cold Fusion' and LENR are largely synonymous, but the former term has been tainted by bad press over the last 20 years. In point of fact my submission used the term LENR in place of Cold Fusion, but apparently the editors felt it wasn't mass market enough. And to be fair, there have been some quotes by Rossi saying it's not actually fusion, but some sort of weak field interaction, but since it supposedly consumes nickel and produces coppoer, not calling it fusion seems more like marketing.

Maybe he doesn't want to sell to an existing energy producer, because it means the difference between making a few billion, and probably seeing your work buried, vs building a new energy industry and ending up controlling a sizable percentage of the wealth & political power in the world. I mean who would you rather be, the heir to some multi-billion dollar business fortune, or someone who has an active say in the destiny of the whole world.

Electrolysis is a chemical reaction, and as such will be orders of magnitude less expensive in terms of energy than any nuclear reaction. While hydrogen can't really be used as a fuel efficiently since its inefficient to produce if you're using electricity produced by chemical reactions like fossil fuels, if your energy source is nuclear and the reaction requires hydrogen, then its perfectly reasonable to use some of the energy output to generate hydrogen and still have plenty of surplus. A nuclear reaction will always be orders of magnitude greater than a chemical reaction.

As far as I know, hydrogen can be produced pretty simply using water and electricity.