The physicists? You mean the biologist whose name is the only one splattered all over it who has now withdrawn from further projects?

If you've seen the credentials, post them. Give us all a good laugh.

I don't need to provide my credentials. I have none in the field of physics (maths, maybe, but not physics). The difference is that I've NEVER claimed to be well-respected scientist whose opinion on an ENTIRELY new technology should just be taken as read.

And it's still a lot easier to prove a positive than a negative, no matter how difficult even proving a positive can be. That's kind of my point.

Just because Joe Bloggs says that something is bunk doesn't automatically make it right or wrong. (So what I say means nothing at all, I've already said I'm not a physicist. If you really want to get into this, what are YOUR credentials?) But, of course, if Joe Bloggs happened to be a world-renowned expert in the chosen field who work is both respected and reproducible by his peers, then it carries infinitely more weight.

So far, the only people to back E-Cat are the owners/investors - i.e. people with a vested interest in misrepresenting the product. And there's no ONE person with any decent reputation who's stood up and said "Woah, that look interesting". Not one. And in order to find someone who DOES do that, you have to allow demonstrations which are useful from a scientific viewpoint.

Again, there's a million pounds that says it's a hoax. And NOTHING that says it isn't. Compare and contrast to the situation about "psychic powers" etc. where - again - scientists have offered a million pounds and NOT ONE PERSON has stepped up and been able to demonstrate them. And 90% of them just won't even agree to take part in a controlled test, let alone sit through one.

You are confusing ignorance with disbelief. The fact you miss is that myriad people, myself included, would be interested in seeing a device that performs as the E-Cat promises. The fact that we can't, because "we're not allowed", "we don't understand", "we don't have the credentials", etc. just means that it's going to be called bullshit from day one.

P.S. I have relatives in Bologna, including those who go to that university. Want to know quite how many of them have ever heard of even the demonstration, let alone the person involved?

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.