they just happen to have religious beliefs that match the science on a few points.

Isn't that better than religious beliefs that don't match the science on any points?

I can't imagine it's bandwidth, because no matter how many projects are there the bandwidth needs are going to be miniscule compared to another of their free services - YouTube.

For personal loans this is true - not so much as illegal as a lot of regulation to discourage it. Most bonds have penalties for early repayment.

When we're talking about public expenditures/loans to business, early repayment penalties don't make sense. As I said, the government isn't making these loans in order to profit from the interest. They're making the loans to help industry and the economy.

And your data on how government investments have been very profitable? profitable for who? and by who's standards are you measuring this profitability?

Do you really need data to tell you that the interstate highway system has been profitable for everyone? The Internet?

The fact that there is even an argument about whether government investment has been beneficial shows just how far the country has shifted from fact-based to tribal/faith-based when it comes to politics. All I can say is "Good luck with that".

The trick is that you don't put your conclusion before your hypothesis. "Cold fusion" is the conclusion, or the result, of the whole process that would result in your utopian revolutions (again, something that is post conclusion or desired symptoms of the result of this sort of research). When your research begins by you working backwards, that's when the red flags should go up because there is no logical way to work backwards. Sometimes a sci-fi author will imagine something but it takes a very talented scientist/research/inventor/engineer/whatever to go from hypothesis to that end construct -- even then there's often a slight catch or permutation of nonfiction idea.

What this paper appears to do is formalize observations ... which is great (any more transparency is always welcomed). But it's also curious, wouldn't you say? We've been hearing about this for years now and no one can tell me what, exactly, is going on in this solution filled chamber. The critics are rightly asking questions about why the next steps aren't being taken (like getting real world measurements on its power draw versus its power emission). And are suspicious not of the data that is provided by this paper but of the data that aren't provided and would be obviously interesting.

The fear is that Rossi stumbled upon a neat trick that is just not sustainable but he realizes that if he controls the parameters on the experiments, he can make it look like this thing works. Then he rakes in billions and walks away from any involvement in it. It is suspicious because it's being conducted at a university that should be making obvious logical steps forward. Yet we continually only see "demonstrations" like his "public displays" and "observations" like this paper.

My charges are still borderline character assassination/ad hominem and this could very well work. But I've had enough talk of what is "perceived to happen" and I'm afraid that someone has a really neat trick that they've already thoroughly investigated and figured out why it works. And maybe it even fooled them in the beginning. But truly there is no good way to monetize this trick. So they give everyone else only enough information to make them think that it works. Then they capitalize on this public interest and walk away from it just before the reveal.

If not, I apologize but I also wouldn't be buying into this idea until we start with a hypothesis and tests are reproduced around the world and the true reason behind this anomaly is well understood and indeed a good energy answer. It's totally possible he doesn't know yet and his greed is the reason we only get tastes of this device. If that's true, however, we still don't know if it's a good answer to our energy addiction.

I only hope there are enough details in this paper for other researchers around the world to better reproduce and analyze these results. I'm sorry if this is just a matter of an ill-equipped laboratory at Bologna University but with all the interest this has generated, I would be surprised if that was reason.

In conclusion, start with a hypothesis, openly publish your methods and results. Wait for others to reproduce. Your rigor and its results will be your vindication if you fear being attacked for doing research. Just don't start your research by saying, "I'm going to make cold fusion and cheap energy is just ten years away." That's when you're openly attacked for good reason -- that's not science, those are words that you spout to get money.

you might be right, but it won't come soon enough to help this generation.

You're both just ranting unless you ask the people she supposedly helped, most of whom are presumably now dead. If they were happy then she did a good job. If they were unhappy then she did a bad job. There is no other metric which is meaningful but happiness per dollar or whatever other number you're measuring effectiveness by. (Man-hour? It pretty much always boils down to dollars or hours, and hours can be converted into dollars.)

If you're going to come over all logical, I have to ask, where is the grain coming from? I mean, you're not proposing that they print bread from PLA, are you? Just because you can theoretically eat it doesn't mean it's a good idea.

I got my first webpage at 15. And there wasn't a lot of content around at the time.

Suffice to say, if I ever entertained notions of running for political office, they were long since dashed.

This is much of why I feel so free to share my feelings here. My attitude is already well-known and a matter of public record. (Although since the internet archive operates based on the current robots.txt, our once-significant site is not available to the public...)

There are two kinds of noise in the car which are insulated for, the road noise and the engine noise. If you run any kind of fancy rubber for performance reasons, road noise will be considerable at high speeds. Of course, most EVs and hybrids run LRR tires which produce less friction and thus less noise... but in a luxury performance vehicle, you want some decent rubber. You really need it if you want to actually use the car.

"a Tesla" will soon include a $30k model and, hopefully, will later include a lower-cost model. If a family can't afford to buy a $30k car on credit, then there are deeper problems afoot in the nation which you simply cannot pin on Tesla, and which are not adequately explained by the Government granting them a loan which has now been paid back.

How amusing. Solyndra is what you're asking for, and Tesla is what you're complaining about, but we've been paid back for Tesla, and not for Solyndra. You really have no clue what you're on about, or even what you're saying, have you?

It wasn't until the auto companies bought up and shut down profitable public transportation systems nationwide (including both local and long-range transport — streetcars, buses, and trains) and shut them down to increase demand for their product. When coupled with the development of the interstate highway system which was allegedly intended to promote national defense but which was actually unnecessary for that purpose (expanding a rail network provides for the same function, but delivers more transportation efficiency) this forced citizens to buy automobiles if they wanted to remain relevant members of society. I grew up in Santa Cruz as the child of a single mother who refused to buy a car. Some of our buses ran every fifteen minutes but that still resulted in adding hours to my day every day because of the dominance of cars and the ineffectuality of the bus system — again, a situation which was deliberately created by auto companies nationwide.

You're looking at history through typically rose-colored glasses. The fact is that it wasn't the price coming down that drove acceptance of the automobile; that was a result of acceptance of the automobile that was forced upon the populace, due to the deliberate removal of the systems which had naturally evolved to fill actual consumer need.

That's a massive change. That's several of the most failure-prone systems removed and replaced with something less failure-prone than anything that's currently on the vehicle. It basically reduces the vehicle to body, suspension, and electrical work, because statistically nobody is actually going to work on the motor or controller (which will be replaced as a unit) and many of these vehicles don't even have a transmission. Vehicles with regenerative braking also reduce the wear on the brake system, extending even such a trivial service. The fact is that EVs built to the same standards will require significantly less maintenance hours than vehicles with ICEs in them. Dealers are already hurting (primarily "big 3" dealers) due to the loss of service revenues which came with American automakers finally electing to compete on quality and not simply based on being made in the USA, which is mostly a lie anyway since so many major parts (including castings!) have been coming from China since the 1980s.

You offered a false dichotomy. It's not a choice between "a new car for $10K and $1K in gas fees every year for 20 years" and whatever, because of the massive externalities from gasoline-powered vehicles. As long as people are driving them, we all suffer and we suffer by loss of environment and due to health impact. Petro-fueled cars have a cost in lives. Those who drive them are murderers, myself included. Hyperbole? Bullshit. We're killers for nothing more than convenience.

EVs have the same problem, but not inherently. Of course, we could run even our gassers on biofuels (i.e. Butanol, a direct 1:1 replacement) if not for legal malfeasance designed to keep us from producing and burning them, thanks to Butamax, a shell company owned by BP and DuPont. They are leveraging patents produced at public universities, partly with our tax money to prevent production of Butanol as a motor fuel, which would make the world a better place.

An open statement, not to be misconstrued as any accusation against the parent poster: If you work for BP or DuPont, fuck you. I hope you die in a fire.

Well, you're just wrong. They don't need to do that. They can be profitable with a $30k car.

Why are you still prevaricating about luxury cars when we're talking about the $30k model?