Sorry, but rubbish.

Six reputable scientists? Where? Names, histories, qualifications? The only ones I see involved were from dubious backgrounds and/or part of the scam. To be reputable, you also have to be independent and well-published, not just "Call me Dr" which just takes a few years of study in the chosen area.

Demonstrations? Where? When? Who was present?

Because as far as I can tell, the University of Bologna want nothing to do with him (and that's where his biggest demos supposedly happened / were to happen) and everyone else who's seen it was dubious (though there is talk that there were a couple of stooges in the audience who later went on to write about things that NOBODY ELSE present had seen in the demo).

In a court of law, you have to prove beyond reasonable doubt. That hasn't happened, or people wouldn't be calling it a hoax. And if they judge by people who were present and took photos? Well, most of them didn't see a damn thing in any of the demonstrations, and certainly nothing that they'd attest in a court of law was anything but a demonstration under uncontrolled conditions.

It's EASY to prove a positive. It's impossible to prove a negative. Even courts recognise this. Thus, the burden of proof is really on the E-Cat people to prove they can do it, not everyone else that they can't. (i.e. Please prove that I CAN'T turn off all the lights in the world just by blinking - the only way you can get close is to have me co-operate yet "fail" to do so X amount of times, or to admit it - but it still wouldn't be acceptable proof that I *CAN'T*, just that I *DIDN'T*. But to prove I *CAN* do it, all I have to do is do it once, under controlled conditions).

And all the pseudo-physics crap (inverse square laws etc.) you have in your post? Sorry, all bullshit. Every line. Nobody but a moron would think that claims like that were made by reputable scientists in the last 100 years (we invented quantum mechanics over a hundred years ago, so please don't give me this "as a youngster" crap unless you're over 100 years old). You've either been listening to crap nutters, or you've misunderstood.

Next you'll be telling me that scientists "don't know" how bees manage to fly and all that other crap that gets spouted as science rather than just the remainders of popular urban myths that sound cool at the dinner table.

E-Cat is, was and always will be a fraud. I'll lay money on it. Prominent scientists already have (over a million dollars!). At this point, you could make more money by proving these scientists wrong than you ever could by marketing the result of the prototype.

So at what point aren't "matched pads" repeats of the original pads, or devices which would repeat the results of the original pad?

This is my point - these pads aren't "random", because if they were they'd perform differently in two different devices. In which case, their results are surely trivially capturable and, thus, reproducible if you digitally capture the performance of a single example?

It's the old "if you can read it, so can anyone else with the same equipment, and so can you 'fake' it with sufficient knowhow" DRM problem

But to be a useful one-time pad, don't you have to be able to repeat the results to decode the message?

You've been reading too much XKCD.

The problem is that to be accepted in an area of science that's basically nothing more than a consequence of the maths, you have to show the maths that generate the results you expect.

I'm a mathematician. I don't claim to understand 1% of 1% of quantum mechanics at all. But it comes from a mathematical model that happens to have real-world consequences that are weird and wonderful. When we then tested for those consequences, we found out that they exist in nature. Which, to a scientist mind, kind of hints that the maths must have been at least somewhat correct (or at least on the right lines).

I have my own understanding and theories, but I would also have to state, quite clearly, that quantum physics isn't really "physics". This isn't Newton seeing an apple fall and realising there's a force at play. This is someone (probably THE most famous genius) sitting down for decades with almost unsolvable equations that make absolutely no sense until they realise that it works if you have 11 dimensions, or if space and time are two different elements of the same thing, etc. And that was back in the 1900's when quite a lot of physics and maths we enjoy now didn't even exist.

Then you go out and measure in real life and you find that, actually, it turns out that your theory fits what happens in the world, not the other way around.

As such, I don't for a second think that I can just posit a hypothesis (theory is a slightly stronger word in any science) and have any concept of if I'm talking gibberish or not. The maths of quantum mechanics is horrendous and complicated and quantum theorists spend more time in front of the blackboard than they do the LHC.

If you wish to contribute, even if you don't intend to be taken seriously, it's only proper to get yourself a decent grounding in not just "hey, there's something smaller than an electron and weird stuff starts to happen at that scale, I bet I can guess what else happens", but in WHY that's so and HOW we got to that point. And in anything quantum, that means understanding the maths behind it.

As someone with a degree in maths, I tell you now, you're going to need a decent grounding in quite a lot of basic physics and huge amounts of maths and that "real world intuition" will basically be next-to-useless until the very end. That's not to mention the level of things like calculus and linear algebra you'd need to even get close to learning how we got to all of the old "wrong" models, let alone the newer ones.

This doesn't mean that wild ideas and theories have no merit, it's just that you're theorising about something that you probably don't understand the basics of. I know I don't. And I *can* read the mathematics and, given enough time, understand it.

It just comes across to any mathematician or physicist as someone who is looking at a car for the first time and saying "You know, I bet if you made the whole thing ten times bigger, it would go even faster" or "If it goes that fast with four wheels, imagine what it'll do with 10!".

In a way it reminds me of the Moon conspiracy theorists. They can come up with a million weird and wonderful things that intuition says "must be wrong". But it turns out that a few simple tests or bits of maths show them to all be nonsense. "The shadows are wrong" - fine, go out into the street on a sunny day and try hard to replicate them. If someone can replicate something that's "wrong" in the space of ten minutes, then maybe you are reading far too much into the image, or commenting on something you just don't understand.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_quantum_mechanics

Seriously, just on that page there are some 16 equations, and that's not even a millionth of what you need to understand where those equations come from.

Honestly, I DON'T understand quantum mechanics at all. I believe it, because it's accepted as the best self-consistent theory we have that has made verifiable predictions, and I use its results every day (GPS, computer processors, etc.). But I don't understand even the bare minimum of it, past a handful of experiment names and a brief summary of what their results should mean for physics. I don't understand work that was done on it over a hundred years ago (and, hell, that predates most of graph theory, which I consider a particular fascination of mine whose first textbook only arrived in 1936 - whole areas of mathematics have sprung up and matured in that time and STILL I don't understand how people arrived at those equations for quantum theory at that time). I don't understand even the bare foundations of it.

Thus, simple statements and assertions over how I think it works? They - rightly - mean nothing at all.

And the bigger problem? Because quantum theory is a result of some very high-end mathematics, the real truth is probably MUCH, MUCH too weird for us to contemplate at the moment. Chances are, anything you can think of to add to quantum theory just won't be weird enough and will be far too "logical" and grounded in an intuition that was taught Newtonian physics from the start.

Quantum theory sprung up because we hit a mathematical dead-end on quite a simple question (relatively speaking) and it took people who believed the maths had to be right even when it looked like they were going wrong, and they bent their minds in knots trying to find ways to make the maths work in reality. In doing so, they truly thought so far out of the box that they were laughed at for decades until others could get their head around it. And then they'd invented a whole new era of science (at some point in the future, there will no doubt be a reference to "The Quantum Age" as an entire era of science).

I don't intend to say "don't have an opinion" or "pssh, without a maths degree, you're nothing". But if you wonder why you don't get taken seriously, you should just take a quick course in quantum theory, starting from what we were learning in the late 1890's / early 1900's. Otherwise you come across as, say, a shaman from the Egyptian times trying to tell a modern neurosurgeon that "you have this fabulous idea about the brain".

Not really. Work in a garage for a month, you see all kinds of weird damage come in.

And this wheel is basically a cut-open barrel. Punch it on the outside and it makes a dent on the inside. It's rolling across a rocky landscape, after being basically dropped onto the planet. It probably bumps down a lot more rocks than you realise and even more than NASA ever plan, the chances of finding a level surface to wander over that doesn't have a hidden 10cm drop onto rock for at least one of the wheels hidden behind is slim. And it weighs quite a bit. Not to mention loose things getting inside the wheels and basically being inside a small tumble-dryer.

A dent in the wheel would be the least of my worries, to be honest. And there's no way you can actually tell that the dents go from inside-out or outside-in, it's an very common optical illusion. And even if the dents go "the other way", there's no way to tell from the photos that they line up - those wheels are basically taking the shape of whatever they roll over so you might find the dent going "in" is right next to a similar bend in the metal going "out".

But never let the facts stand in the way of some mad conspiracy theory, eh?

If you don't raise taxes, companies sit on a fortune doing nothing but letting the banks earn them a bigger fortune. None of this benefits the average person.

If you raise taxes, the luxury products that such companies sell will undoubtedly become more expensive or of lower quality. However, the country then has a lot of money it's sitting on that it can't just let earn interest (government money doesn't work like that for very long) and it has to spend. Some percentage of that will find its way into healthcare or education or crime prevention or SOMETHING that the average person will benefit from.

It's really just a question of who should be sitting on a stockpile of money and pumping that back into themselves? The government, or a company that makes iPads?

Given that I'm on a geek website, I was expecting a flurry of corrections, actually. Maybe Slashdot isn't the geek hangout that I thought any more. Maybe we're all just naysayers following everyone else because "Bitcoin is stupid" or whatever.

I've barely looked into Bitcoin myself and don't mine and wouldn't come close to some of the insane setups I've seen documented for mining even if I did.

But:

https://blockchain.info/charts/n-unique-addresses

Something like 90,000 unique Bitcoin addresses seen every single day. Bear in mind, that's not "90,000 users" so much as "90,000 transactions to/from unique addresses for that day". Something like 80,000 GH/s. That's a lot of oomph being put in by clients for a long time. Go googling for mining setups, or exchange rates (there are BUCKETS of individual exchange websites for Bitcoin alone), or anything related to bitcoin and you find tons of results. And just about every single news provider in the world has run half-a-dozen stories on Bitcoin already.

Someone, somewhere, most probably geeks / overclockers /etc. is pumping away at Bitcoin for most of the day, sending or receiving money or generating coins. Just because you're not one of them, doesn't mean it's not happening.

SETI@Home / BOINC would kill to have those people running their software instead.

I've decided to stop paying my tax. Turns out most of that money goes to warmongers and making weapons. And I won't pay my phone bill. Turns out that that part-funds illegal phone competitions.

Guess who I'll be hurting more.

(P.S. Also the reason why I'm in fits of hysterics when a DVD tells me I'd be supporting terrorists if I pirate it - ironic given the criminals I'd supported by buying it in the first place)

World of Warcraft accounts.
Steam's new Trading Card beta (with RARE FOIL CARDS!)
Trading cards in general.
Achievements in games.
XP in game networks.
"Levelling up".

There's any amount of intangible things that people will pay real money for. That's the incentive. It's not that *I* would pay X amount of money for whatever it is, but that *SOMEONE ELSE* would pay it. That makes it valuable.

Why they buy it is up to them. To complete their collection? To get one over on their friends? To say they have one? Who cares? People buy junk all day long every day ("acre of land on the Moon", "name a star", etc.).

The difference is between those who see the item itself as valuable, and those who see possession of the item as a way to extract value from it (i.e. I think it's baloney as a currency, but someone will give me £20 for it, so I'll happily pay £15 and make a profit).

Does the share of Microsoft that you have actually GIVE you anything? Or is it a speculative holding that only has value because someone else has TOLD you it has value? Is it really any different until you get into owning literally millions of shares and get a say on the board?

Something is only worth a value when someone else is willing is pay that for it. And why they are willing to pay for it is not a huge part of selling it, or being some kind of middleman (except possibly as market research). I can't explain why people want to buy iPhones or iPads for commercial use, but there is an awful lot of money to be made in producing them and selling them to that industry.

I can't explain why people will pay for the next DLC in a game that was released with less content than all their competitors with DLC available on release day. But, for sure, if I could make money from it, I would.

I hold a fraction of a Bitcoin. Literally. A fraction. I bought it recently and will hold onto it to see if it holds value. I don't really care what people will do with a Bitcoin I sell them so long as, in a few years, it's worth more than I paid for it.

The people who got in early on it did exactly the same and the largest single wallet address (not the largest single Bitcoin wallet which is impossible to determine) holds something ridiculous like 400,000 BTC worth millions. So lots of other people also think it has value. And there are marketplaces that will GIVE you that value, in cash, products or services, for a Bitcoin. That's the point. Otherwise it would be just a number. People say your bank account is just a number - it is. But it's a number that people are willing to exchange for goods or services, that's what makes it valuable.

Sure, we're all gambling on the future of the market (not the currency, necessarily, and hell, I'd rather have had Bitcoin than Zimbabwean dollars a few years ago), but while it has value (i.e. someone willing to convert to "real" money or tangible goods), then it will still *be* valuable.

The primary motivation, I think, behind owning Bitcoin is to have anonymised currency based on number-crunching that you can generate yourself from nothing more than computer hardware and a connection to the Internet. That appeals to all kinds of people from geeks to overclockers to mathematicians to kids with no pocket money to datacentre and network owners (when the Bitcoin return on the cost of number crunching crosses a point that makes it profitable, you can be sure that Google will use all their idle time to do it! At the moment, that point is long gone and not likely to reappear until all the Bitcoins are mined) right up to criminals.

You can buy an ASIC-based bitcoiner miner, now, that will pay for itself at current market rates within a year. After that it's sheer profit, even including the electricity used to run it (the ASIC-based miners give the most return on the lowest power). Sure, it's a few grand to buy one and the price of Bitcoin could crash. But it could also go through the roof. So if you have a few grand and you want to invest it, you could do a lot worse than buying a Bitcoin ASIC miner and leaving it running for a few years. Hell, it might even outperform just about any savings account or other investment you might name.

You can't predict future demand, so you might make a loss comparable to the cost of the hardware plus the cost of keeping it running, or you might make some almost-unlimited profit. Is it more or less risky than opening a business, trading on eBay, putting your money in a bank, stuffing it under the mattress, playing the stock markets or gambling on a horse? Who knows. That's for each person to decide for themselves because it basically involves predicting the future. People have got rich doing so and gone bankrupt doing so.

Quite why people will give you money for those numbers is no more sensible a question than why Amazon give me DVD's for the numbers on my credit-card statement, really.

You've obviously not used Bitcoin a lot.

You can have as many wallets as you like and a wallet can generate as many "addresses" as you want to receive money on. Outsiders have no idea that two distinct Bitcoin destinations aren't in fact the same wallet.

Additionally, only the network as a whole really knows where the transactions are coming from, an individual Bitcoin user doesn't (otherwise it would be pointless!). It's peer-to-peer so somewhere, some peer knows what IP generated that transaction. But without having control of a vast proportion of the whole network, down to the IP level, there's no way to reliably trace anything back to a "real" IP, person, wallet.

Transactions are logged. But with wallet addresses. And you can tell what wallet addresses should have how much money in each. But you can't tell which wallet addresses are the same address, nor where they come from, nor who owns them. A transaction will just appear in the blockchain and come from several thousand peers almost simultaneously who share the information across the network and even the first one on the list isn't necessarily the client who first saw the transaction.

And those clients are private peer-to-peer clients. If my client was the first to see your transaction, you'd have to raid ME to get the IP information from my systems - and what are the chances of a random Bitcoin user having full network traces of all the actions on their network, going back to the transaction you're interested in, by the time you find them?

Transactions are basically sent to random people in the swarm. They talk to more random people and eventually the network all sees the transaction. Finding out which Bitcoin address first saw the transaction is nigh-on impossible even with complete knowledge. Raiding them and finding information on their systems that links back that transaction to an originating IP is incredibly unlikely even if you could do that. And if they used Tor or a proxy to initiate the transaction? You're stuffed.

Even collection of funds? They can publish any number of Bitcoin wallet addresses that secretly correspond to a single wallet and anyone who sends them money will NEVER KNOW where it's going. The transaction goes into the swarm and after a while, all clients agreed that wallet address X has amount Y in it. The total wallet, though, might have several million addresses associated with it and even the last client on the route to informing that wallet of a received transaction won't ever know that it's talking to the wallet holder.

No matter what you think of it as a currency, Bitcoin is a fabulously-designed anonymous transaction protocol. About the only threat is one entity holding 50% of the hashing power, but that just gives them the power to control the block chain, not identify users.

There's any number of ways, it's just a matter of how careful you are.

Control a botnet, use that, make sure the botnet can't be traced back to you.

Use public wifi in random locations at random times. Pretty damn easy to do even if you're broadcasting a static MAC - those sorts of places rarely have proper logs.

Use tor, proxies, intermediaries (shell servers bought with Bitcoin etc. would be hard to trace, etc.). There are any number of ways.

But the important thing is to be careful and watch the trail that you're leaving. Anyone with half-an-IT-brain should be able to do that, if they really want to. The fact that others are caught, whenever you hear the story, is normally down to some boasting or weak link in the chain where they got sloppy.

It's not like criminal forensics at a crime scene where it's almost impossible to cover your tracks. You are in control of every packet you send from every location and what it contains and what information that can be linked to. It's just a question of knowing that and not getting cocky / sloppy.

That said, it's still quite impressive that (if they exist) this person has managed to do so for this long.

Define furniture.

If you want all-wooden gear and solid plastics like you'd use in an office, then making room for a cable / box isn't difficult. Hell, computer desks have existed for decades. Look into schools, where they have some lovely (and ludicrously expensive) desking solutions for IT suites.

The problem is that most home furniture ISN'T like that. If it is wooden, it's quite ornate and not really suited to drilling huge holes in for cables and power strips. And the rest of it is fabric, leather, and other materials that don't bode well for permanent electrical installation.

The fact of the matter is that most people dangle cables because most furniture doesn't incorporate them (and they do exist, don't kid yourself, but they are rare precisely because nobody wants them or the hassle - the closest you really get are the integrated horrible American idea of "lazeeboys" or whatever they're called with sound systems built in), and that's on their own head.

Building a fabric sofa, for example, with power ports on it that needs to cope with kids jumping on the sofa, drinks being spilled on it, etc. etc. isn't something that a company wants to take liability for. From a liability point of view, you're looking at IP67 sockets with tough metal housings integrated into a relatively flimsy supporting structure that is soft and moves a lot. You're also exposed to the problems of fire and fire retardant materials which probably makes it quite expensive before you start. And then you have to cater for every possible combination of layout (i.e. where do you pull the power lead out of the back of the sofa to, how long can it be, etc.?), heatflow, etc. There's a reason that 99.9% of the electrical items in your house use solid materials for the main electricity-carrying-parts and fabric only for covers (at a suitable distance, e.g. lampshades) and not for the main parts.

There's just too much to take account of. Sure you can do it. Sure, an electrician who was handy with tools would get it done right in his own home. But selling them to the general public is a bit of a liability nightmare. And, to be honest, they make the furniture look damn ugly, whereas a socket can be tucked out of the way when you're finished with it.

Similarly, I want to wire my shed at the bottom of my garden. To pay an electrician to do it properly will cost a fortune and involve digging a 65 foot long trench and dropping a very expensive armoured cable into it, fitting a fuse box, wiring into the house mains, losing a lot of electrical power because of the voltage drop at such a distance, lots of waterproofing and compliance testing and all sorts.

My solution? I bought a caravan "commando connector" socket, such as are used on building and caravan sites, and will have it fitted and certified by an electrician. It's waterproof and the only bit that needs to be "certified" to be legal. It's not the local government's business unlike if I have a permanent installation to the shed (which is actually illegal in my jurisdiction unless a qualified electrician signs off on the whole installation).

What you plug into it? That's up to you. Sure, if I kill someone, I'll be sued, but I don't have to check in with every wiring change or have huge underground cables dug in and certified in order to use it.

Then I can buy pre-made extension cables and pre-made socket adaptors to give you normal sockets on the other end. If one breaks? I buy another. I don't need it recertified. Not an ideal permanent solution, but it does what I need it to and requires the minimum of certification and regulation on my part (all the equipment is tested elsewhere before I buy it, etc.). And I can plug in a lamp or a charger or a tool in while in the shed and not have to worry about it. And I don't have to think when digging over the garden beds about what's running underneath them.

The fact is, electrical certification has some serious consequences and costs to it. And in Europe at least, you would have to take account of WEEE regulations that say you have to dispose of the electrical goods when your customers are finished with them (which ups your sale prices, of course!). And the first kids that jumps on the sofa too hard (and pulls out a cable inside) or spills a drink and electrocutes themselves is going to come gunning for you - fault or no fault.

Sometimes, build-it-yourself is the only way to get something that you think is quite a reasonable request at a reasonable price. If you want to see why, try selling things and work out how many people are going to have you pay to transport their sofa back to you because a fuse has gone inside and they aren't prepared to fix it themselves. That's technically a fault you need to fix so you have to pay for a sofa to go back and forth, or an engineer to visit at their convenience, just to fix a damn fuse and stay within your "product should be fit for purpose" requirements.

If you want it, make it. Then get it certified. If you get that far, look how hard it'd be to mass-produce and sell. If you manage to get to the second stage at all, I'll be impressed.

That's right.

So basically, all these fancy energy-saving methods we've been implementing lately have been wiped out by things that are EVEN WORSE for the grid than what we had.

Electric cars, supercapacitors, etc. all add to PEAK usage. Between 5:30 and 6:00 everyone is going to be putting their 8KW charger on, even if only for a second, and raising peak time usage (which means that even more capacity has to be brought online - sometimes for hours before and after - to cope with demand and we'll be "even more" idle throughout the rest of the day).

And, shockingly, the only plants that can really handle those are the old-fashioned, always-on, slow-to-ramp-up-and-down, coal, oil, gas and nuclear plants. Or HUGE inefficiencies from renewables.

I just find it ironic that at the time we're pushing for low power, variable, "always on" supplies, we're pushing for gadgets that need high peak load, or high load for a LONG time generally.

The point is that threatening legal action costs the person you're threatening. Not everyone even has a few hundred dollars to retain a lawyer no matter how briefly. Yes, you might "get it all back" but at great risk even if you are completely innocent and the charges are groundless.

A threatening letter from a lawyer doesn't have to go through another expensive lawyer. Sure, if you try to get clever, you can dig yourself in deeper, but the fact is that if you can't afford to fight the case, then you sure as hell can't afford to do anything at all - even the simplest of letters from your lawyer will not make the case go away every time, but will cause huge bills unless you find a no-win, no-fee lawyer.

Courts are quite reasonable in this regard. You just write back a letter that says "I have received your letter dated XX/XX/XXXX. I believe it to be without merit." (or similar). That's it. Just send it back. Let *them* take *you* to court if you're sure you're innocent. There, THEY have to prove YOU did it. With expensive lawyers and to a legal standard. And once you get there, junior lawyers will often jump for the chance to advise on a case for free. Once it's in court, your legal fees will be paid if you're victorious and it will be stupidly expensive if not so you have nothing to lose. Hell, if you are forced to take out a loan to hire a lawyer, it can often happen that the other side has to pay the loan too. And you will KNOW that it's time to hire a lawyer or face worse problems.

However, before it gets to court, there's no point settling unless you are guilty (and sometimes not even then) as it will only be to your detriment. Settlement paperwork often has clauses that say you were guilty and accept that you did it. It's then an irrevocable fact of law that you can't ever contest. This is also why "no comment" exists, and why you have the right to say nothing when arrested, and why you SHOULD say nothing until a lawyer arrives. However, if you are innocent, there's no harm in saying "No, I didn't do that, etc." By letter, being silent is easily confused with ignorance, disregard, attempts to evade justice, etc. so you just write back and say, in effect, "Nope".

Even if settle only to get away from the case, you are forever taking responsibility for that event. If it later comes up in another case that "if you did X, then you must have done Y" (i.e. if you downloaded that tune at that time on that day, then that MUST have been you driving your car past your house a minute earlier, etc.) then you are stuffed.

Until something lands in court, you don't need a lawyer. It may be prudent if you can afford it, but lots of people can't. And in the same way you don't need a lawyer to go over your terms and conditions of every service you use, or approve everything you say to a sales person, you don't need a lawyer in the early stages of response to threats like that.

I have been threatened with court several times. Funnily, it's never actually happened.

First, over a mobile phone contract (with phone) that never arrived at my door, was never signed by me, and I phoned up to REPORT IT MISSING / STOLEN. They wanted to force me to pay for the contract (for the whole year!), pay for the missing phone, pay for any replacement, etc. They threatened all sorts, in writing and on the phone. I wrote back, stated my side, and let them get on with it.

I can see it from their point of view - I ordered a phone, it might have arrived and I've done a runner with it. Sure. I get that. It's a valid case that there might be a simple answer to or that might need taking to court to get to the facts of the matter.

They harassed me for a month with letters and phone calls and after a while, I just stopped answering or answered only with "Sorry, your company has threatened me with legal action. Therefore, I will not discuss the issue."

In the end, I had the bank force a refund of my money that they'd taken (with zero problems, actually, it took only ten minutes and no paperwork - good old Direct Debit scheme!). Which made them even angrier, and they threatened even more, including recouping their bank default charges etc. And, after a month I received a letter. "We're sorry... " blah, blah, blah. And they "generously" decided not to charge me for the chargeback.

Because, I assume, by that point a lawyer had actually looked at the case and decided that they had no proof of postage, let alone proof of receipt, no received contract, no authorisation from myself for the funds given (they are supposed to be taken only on verification of the contract, and the contract was presumably in the box that never arrived!), no way to prove any sort of malice on my behalf, and I had phoned THEM up to report the phone missing and DEMANDED they place it on the IMEI blacklist that my country uses (so even if I had "stolen" the phone, it would have been useless from that point onwards).

You can threaten all you like. Until it's in court, it doesn't matter and actually until then, the less you say, the better. But silence isn't the best option either. It's only if you're playing dodgy legal games that saying things will hurt your case, though. And even when you get a letter from a lawyer who may have a case, until it gets to a court it still doesn't matter.

Case in point: I collided with a car, in my car. It was a little knock, but my fault. It went through the insurance, all legal. A year later, I get a snotty letter from the other driver's insurance company's lawyer (on letter-headed paper, and with any amount of legal threats) demanding I pay £9000 because my insurers hadn't paid out despite agreeing to do so. It threatened court action and taking my money and all sorts. It looked very scary, I give them that, and cited lots of technical legal mumbo-jumbo.

I sent a letter back. It said that they had no recourse through myself, that my insurer was the only entity they had any business talking to, that there were compensation schemes and regulators whom they need to take their complaint to for it to have any merit (and still wouldn't involve me, even in my insurers had gone bankrupt), and that - even if I was wrong - what my insurer agreed as reasonable costs isn't in any way binding on myself.

Additionally, they are lawyers, and they know this - they knew this before they started writing the letter - and they shouldn't be sending me such letters at all. I threatened to report them to their bar. I got a letter back that was equally snotty, but didn't address any of my points. I ignored it. Haven't heard back from them in 4 years. But the guy I hit? He didn't even know anything about it and has had all his work paid for a long time ago, and my insurer's happily reinsured me for years, are still in business etc.

I can only assume there was some dispute over the £9000 charge (which seems very excessive for what damage was caused) and the lawyers were hoping to scare me into either paying or pressuring my insurer's to pay it.

I did a little basic research, told them where to go, and at all times made my view clear. It cost me nothing. I imagine it cost them a lot more then it needed to (probably why they charge £9000 for a dent). I imagine they couldn't possibly have made me pay that in a court and it would have been laughed out, but they could have made an awful mess of my life in the meantime if they'd tried to. But I also imagine that some people just pay up because it's a scary letter from a lawyer.

I was renting a house once with someone. The plumbing blocked meaning we had no toilet. In law, the landlord (or their agent) is responsible for fixing that, and it's a public-health sort of law, not just "Well, we'll get round to it in 30 days or so". Phoned up the landlord's agent, they refused to send someone out to fix it, or give the landlords details. Not just "that day", but ever. So just kept phoning and phoning and phoning.

They threatened me with ALL sorts. I told them they can do what they like, because when the policeman knocks on my door asking why I'm "harassing" them with phonecalls in their little office, I'll be quite happy to explain the situation. Strangely it didn't happen. Nor their threats to sue me. Strangely, I had a plumber on my doorstep at 9am the next day. Strangely, I also had the landlord come around because he'd heard that I'd "been harassing the agent" and it was then that he discovered that I had proof of paying the rent that the agent said they'd never received from me and never passed onto the landlord (I didn't know anything about that, but it was certainly entertaining when the landlord found out, and he was very nice about it, very reasonable and dealt with me direct from them on, and sued the agency, I believe. But if the situation had continued you could quite easily see the agency throwing me out and not telling me why because they'd told the landlord I'd not paid the rent!).

They threatened me with police, with lawyers, with everything you can imagine. But, in the end, it never materialised. And, in fact, my threat to report them to Companies House wasn't as empty as their threats. And - purely because I wanted to dig down into the agency and find out who was in charge - their absence of prominent display of company registration details on their website, their paperwork, and their place of business (which *almost* stopped me finding out who was actually director of the company) just meant that they had to have a word with a government agency and pay THOUSANDS to replace all their stationery and change their website to include said details. And pay for the emergency plumber. And the follow-up work he recommended. And compensate the landlord. And lose all his future custom on several properties.

Funnily, at no point did they mention the "harassment" after that, or try to sue me for destroying their reputation, etc.

I had a friend get one of the infamous letters from ACS:Law. Told them to ignore it, write back a simple letter saying "No" in posh words. All the people who fought it - even the genuine innocents - lost out when ACS:Law was declared bankrupt by its owner. Sometimes thousands of pounds more than it would have cost to settle. But the ones who wrote back "No"? Never even got to court. They were just ignored by ACS:Law and their cases forgotten about. They knew they were meritless, they were just trying to cash in quickly. The people who took them to court caused the company's bankruptcy because they never expected anyone to actually bother to fight it.

Don't get clever. If it gets complex, call in a lawyer. But 99.9% of these things can be handled by denial or coming to the settlement yourself (a settlement is a two-way agreement, not just what they put on paper, so even if you were guilty of pirating, say, $10 of music, you could offer to pay $10 or even $20 first and see how that goes).

Cooperate, even in the face of ridiculous accusations or outright lies, but that doesn't mean capitulate. And then if it ever does goes before a court, you're extremely unlikely to have done anything to make the situation worse for yourself and quite likely to have made it MUCH worse for the other side. What do you think a judge would make of a case involving the "unauthorised copying" of $10 of music which a lawyer then tries to turn into a $5000 settlement / fight, plus legal expenses, and waste the court's time - when the accused is perfectly happy to pay reasonable recompense from the start?

Don't be an idiot, and you'll be fine. Once it gets to court, bring in backup - at that point it's win or lose so you need to make damn sure you win. Before that? Nothing much matters so long as you don't write "I did it, but ha ha, fuck you".

And 99.9% of everyone who threatens you with court action - even lawyers - know that it would never stand or would cost so much it wouldn't be worth it. And when it would stand up, they'll issue you a court order or similar legal notice first.