The opinion of The Garbage Scow is worth what?

Yes. While I suspect defamation by "Does," I preferred to wait to name them until there is more evidence. There will be a cost of service. Especially for the U.K. Does (There may be three or four).

Shit comes from assholes.

By creating the publication that the trolls cited as proof of their claims that I must have Done Something Really Bad, to receive such an extraordinary sanction. Context matters.

Civil case. Proof not needed, merely a preponderance of evidence, and there is plenty of evidence, more probably available through discovery. I actually warned the WMF a year ago to keep server records. If they didn't, if they destroyed them, they become liable for what might have been in them. Spoliation of evidence. Bad Idea, once notified.

One who hides behind anonymity may think that, but my account was never anonymous. It was obviously me. This is a stupid objection. Naive.

And I have not claimed an injury from being banned, only from publication of the ban without necessity.

Correct. Who claimed that I did?

I don't have to know how at this point. That is what discovery is about, uncovering possible evidence. If the action is not challenged by a motion to dismiss, or the motion is rejected, or if the case is not settled before then, it goes into discovery, which is where lawsuits get expensive. Requests for production of documents are not expensive, but depositions are. Who pays for a reporter who transcribes the deposition? How is this handled by an in forma pauperis plaintiff? I don't know, I have seen no counsel on this. Bridge down the road, not yet in sight. But if I need to raise money for that process, I'm pretty sure there are people who will throw money at this.

There are a number of harms that may be alleged. If they are not all alleged in the complaint, my legal advisory (not an attorney, but a highly experienced paralegal) said "Keep it simple." I can amend later. This is like any libel. The injury may be subtle, difficult to quantify. But I do know some people to ask, possibly to depose. See, filing an action gives a plaintiff some super-powers, to compel testimony. If the court agrees it is relevant. Will I wield those powers with skill? I don't know, how about I find out? And part of this is obtaining expert advice. I am much more likely to get it because I took those first steps.

Unless they communicate with the one who posts there, and act according to that person's libels, believing them, and the action then serves the defamatory purpose. I have not claimed that the WMF is responsible for that action in itself, but it is responsible for the consequences of its action, and especially after they are on notice, which they were about a year ago.

It is obvious that Vigilant is a basement dweller, with no real-world legal experience. I am not a lawyer, but I know some and have been reading legal opinions for many decades, and have even written legal criticism, accepted by lawyers, and every motion I have filed in court (as it happens, both motions to quash service of a summons) was accepted. And the judges were amused, at this pro se hippie outfoxing the professionals. It's fun for them! Doesn't mean that I will prevail after the lawyers wake up and smell the coffee and realize they might have to work for their fees.

He is addressing me on Wikipediocracy, when I was banned from there, probably for confronting him on some libel of another. I didn't see all this until it was referenced elsewhere.

The ban was immediately announced on the RatWiki article on me (started by Darryl Smith and maintained by a long series of Smith socks plus occasional edits by actual independent RWidiots and even some smart ones, on occasion), with the WMF health and safety acknowledgement mail published by Oliver Smith. So two complaints, Oliver and Darryl Smith. I have an address for Oliver, and if this gets serious, I can probably get the one for Darryl. But all this hinges on what will be revealed in discovery, as a core.

It was never an anonymous account. The Witchsmeller hasn't done his homework, he's encountering some serious dementia, with no preparation.

How do you make an example of someone without making any comment on the underlying situation? And I could have filed in forma pauperis, I qualify, probably. They allow people to file who have no assets, where a countersuit for malicious prosecution or some such nonsense would not be able to collect any damages, so any sane attorney would tell them, "You are big boys, you can afford to defend this, but maybe you should fix your process so that you are not vulnerable to claims like his, and take the cost of settlement with him as the price you pay for the learning experience. If he is crazy and insists on the Moon, well, cross that bridge if you come to it. Maybe he's not crazy. And I imagine the drooling, batshit insane WMF officer, saying, "But he is a well-known loon!!!" And the lawyer will say, so what? The only way to find out is for a lawyer to communicate with him. Sooner, rather than later, before he incurs more expenses, making all this more expensive. You really should have asked me when he wrote that first certified mail. Might have saved $400.

Never tried the stuff. I have ADHD and small amounts of Ritalin work wonders, but I haven't taken it for years. Vigilant should go back to smelling witches, some of them are beautiful, I've known one well. But I think he might find that they are not, in the least, attracted to this asshole. So he can then join an incel group.

I had to give a value to the damages, at least $75,000, to be a proper Diversity case. Punitive damages, if the court awards them, could take this up. $200,000 is not necessarily a high figure. Do I think I will get it? Only if they default, or if they go to trial and I wipe the floor with them. Or, by that time, my attorneys do. That filing is just the toe in the door, I'm not going to incur attorney expenses until (1) the need is immediate, (2) an attorney volunteers on contingency, or (3) I have raised the money --- or some combination.

If the WMF is swift to address this issue, it might all go away quickly. That depends on them.

"Published" is the key word here. Not "banned." Further, that they "refused response" shows that the libel was continued in spite of notice. They were warned, by mail to the registered agent. They chose not to respond, so they, my opinion, become liable for further costs and damages.

He noticed. I was trained to notice these leverage points, where a small effort might have a large impact. Or not. We don't know until we push that lever.

Claims that I will be found liable for enormous costs and possible, but unlikely, I suspect, not for a case of first impression, as this appears to be. If precedent were clear, yes, that could be possible. It is not clear, or I would not have filed.

They probably have a sign-off procedure, but as star chamber process, it is entirely unclear how thorough it is in actual practice. Some of the bans are highly questionable. But those banned are not unitied, only a few talk to each other. And most believe the WMF is impregnable, thinking that the TOS, written by the WMF, controls. When a contract is written by one party, without the participation of another party, a court will fully interpret it, usually, in favor of the other party, not the author. Unconscionable terms will be rejected by the court, if not made very clear to the user.

The are not impregnable, but every lawsuit I looked at, except maybe one, was unskillfully filed, that suits died for lack of prosecution was common.

The WMF was designed to serve the community. What "community," It was never clear, but it would be the community that builds the project. Everyone else, eff 'em. Readers? How can we serve the vast anonymous hordes? Because it was thought impossible, they never went there. But it is not impossible. By bifurcating accounts into "people here to build an encyclopedia," and those judged as having some other agenda (like truth, for example, which might be personally known to them, as experts or otherwise), and by blocking the great unwashed, not "Wikipedians", they poked out one of the eyes of the entity that could actually approach neutrality, if given structure. That structure was proposed as an experiment, and it was immediately and viciously attacked, the vehemence amazed me, for a mere experiment, harmless. Unless, of course, it worked and it was then decided to use it. Can't allow that. This is the Iron Law of Oligarchy at work. By not enabling the full community of interest from the beginning, by depriving the "other" of any voice, even if expressed without disruption, they made the drift away from neutrality inevitable.

Actually, the suit is about the WMF usage of the software. Not mine. And they did not block me over my usage of the software, but about something else, unknown, possibly guessable.

That is all meaningless without a definition of "real." Is the mind real? Is Mona Lisa smiling?

Sorry about that child's disappointment. But, long-term, reality is better than fantasy, and there is a way in which Santa Claus is real, and when the child grows up, part of his or her job may be to actualize that.

Machina, there is a huge clue that, if you notice it and realize the implications, could transform your life into that vision of liberation. It is that you imagine this claim in the blog post. It is not there. This is your fantasy, and you don't know the difference between your fantasy and understanding and reality. The first step toward transformation is recognizing our existent condition, -- we must start from where we are, not where we imagine or think we should be -- that we live and believe in fantasies. Once we admit that, we then develop an appetite for reality. That appetite is, perhaps, natural, but has been conditioned out of most of us. Or it is not natural, I don't know for sure. I just know what happens when we honor and amplify it.

So first, baby step: he did not claim what you said.

You are trapped by your belief in "correct." To be useful, a story or interpretation or even understanding does not need to be "correct." It is more generally accurate to say that no story or interpretation is "truth." What is a bit deeper, perhaps, than what he wrote is that if one is in a position from which one understands the story, one is already liberated. The story is pointing to something. But it is not the story causing what is pointed to. The entire dualist construction (cause and effect, right and wrong, yes and no, is confronted by koans, the point of a koan is to create a mind-failure, a breakdown of the traps we have created. Looking at a koan and taking it as some sort of scientific reality is completely missing the point, and abusing it. It's a test. Koans are actually used to measure progress in training. Outside of training, they are meaningless except as others who have experience the same may recognize it in the koans. And many Buddhists intellectualize the koans and explain them, missing the point themselves, treating them as some sort of religious dogma. "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him." or they talk about the "Stink of Zen."

As a child. Really, Rats can be so obtuse. One who has made a mistake of some kind will generally have deeper understanding than one who never made the mistake. On the other hand, sometimes we flip to the opposite pole, still trapped in dualism.

Gold on RationalWiki. Who knew?

The problem disappears in practice. One step is to look for reality in one's own experience, and a sign of reality will be stability and, I'll claim, peace. There is a core choice to make, and I call it a choice rather than "the truth," but it is one of many examples of something becomes true because we say so. (And not true if we don't say so.) Do we trust reality? Or, perhaps, do we fear it? (If we are honest, most of us will come to recognize, that at least in some ways, we fear it. But we can fear a thing and also make a choice to trust it.) That choice is fundamental and will dominate the rest of our lives.

that is because fundamental Buddhism is actually universal, it is not rooted in belief and dogma, but in experience, that is actually accessible to us. There is also a "Buddhism" that has become a body of dogma. I found this with Buddhism first, myself, but I also found the same with Islam. It takes some degree of work and experience to distentangle the encrustations of dogma from the core.

I've known that Ariel was "with it" for a long time.

Asking questions about why other people think as they do is not a formula for gaining understanding, unless you ask those people, and, even then, if you are holding firmly to your own ideas, you may not be able to understand what they tell you. I suggesr, instead, asking yourself why you think that what is on that page is "nonsense." You are assuming that it is, and then want to understand why some, you apparently believe, take it "so seriously."

I'll answer the question for you, you are free to contradict me. You think it is nonsense because it does not make sense to you, and you believe that your own understanding defines the reality of "sense."

Koans are designed to test consciousness. If you have certain experience, a koan makes sense, if not, not. It's that simple. I asked the Abbot of Nanzenji, on a visit to the U.S., about koans. I said, "Koans are often considered paradoxes, but my understanding is that, to the enlightened, they are not paradoxes. I was a little more than 20 years old and, ah, precocious. He looked straight at me and said, "To the enlightened man, koans are not paradoxes."

What could be called entry-level koans were transparent to me. Advanced koans, not. I might have needed decades of training, not just a more or less accidental stumbling into kensho that I had experienced.

So, that's my experience. What really matters. for you, is your experience.

If one takes koans "seriously," they don't understand them, big surprise.

You think others are taking them "seriously," trying to extract wisdom from them. perhaps like squeezing blood from a turnip.

There is a practice in Zen, koan study. It's not the kind of Zen I have practiced, and it requires a master, probably. They are not easy to find.

Your question has no answer that you could possibly understand, without doing the work. People spend decades in training to break through what keeps us from kensho (insight into our true nature). You want to read an article, or ask questions on RationalWiki, to get what people work for years to obtain with mixed success. However, along the way, there are other benefits to the study.

Let's remember that this is a blog, an expression of a opinion, not a scientific article. He is invoking a high-level fantasy, not actually citing anything scientific. I'd call it sloppy, but sloppy is very normal!

But there is a science involved here, in a personal sense. Buddhism in general can be understood as claiming that by attending carefully to our own experience, we can discover reality in a deeper way than is possible just by going with the flow, the avalanche of experience, the endless chattering of the monkey mind.

This can be called religious, but it is also secular, it requires no belief in gods or the supernatural. However, if one practices what is being suggested, one may encounter experiences outside of the normal. How one interprets those experiences is another matter. This, then, can create a problem. Can one transmit this to others? Carl Sagan brilliantly explored this in Contact.

This is what can be done: if one carefully describes the experiences themselves, as sensory reality, others may recognize the descriptions as confirmed in their own experience. Those without those experiences may call it all "nonsense." And, for them, it is.

Until and unless they do what might be needed to share the experience. In my training, the advice was to "hang with winners." I.e, keep the company of people who are living well, who smile a lot, and who create joy and happiness in those around them.

Right. And the author was not claiming that. I could say he was a bit careless in how he expressed the idea, he did not need to mention "cognitive science" because we all already know enough, if we pay attention to our own experience and have any basic understanding of biology and psychology. Once we attribute consciousness to the brain, we have the elements needed for the mechanistic understanding that there is a model of the world that is not, in itself, reality, but a reflection of it. Study this for a few years and then consider what happens when the mirror of the mind is shattered. There are koans about that. On another level, science cannot establish the absolute non-existence of anything. In general, that is not testable.

The language you use is full of red flags as to how your imagination and reactivity dominate your thinking (and thus your expression). "he makes it seem" That is not discriminable. Rather, you read what he wrote and you thought something, and you attributed that to what he was "making." it's fantasy, and that we engage in these fantasies is part of what he is talking about. You add something to what he wrote, you added "really" and "just." Rather, what is studied in Buddhism is how the mind works. We do put together an image of the world. If you study your own senses carefully, you may notice this. Most of us do not remember what the world was like as a newborn, do we? We learned to put it together. How much of this is built-in, I don't know, but we also learn, very clearly, to ignore much of what we actually see and feel and hear. If you don't know that, it's because you have not studied your own life. (look up "entoptic phenomena" and learn to see them. You have been seeing them since you have had eyes to see.

You use "experience" and "consciousness" as if they are different. Are they? A sense organ is like a switch. If we flip a switch, does this create in the circuit and "experience"? Is the brain a machine? Where is the consciousness?

Someone who claims this is setting themselves up to learn nothing. Great idea, eh? Repeat as needed for comfort and a life that is not worth living.

Right, Ariel is often a clear thinker. I should add a bit more. Take this literally: It literally does not say "there is nothing real outside of your own mind." It does say something else that you have collapsed into that.

What is clear to me, having been studying Buddhism, in texts (including in the original Sanskrit) and with teachers, for over fifty years, is that there are places where the author moves outside what is fully grounded in the dharma, missing half of the message. But he's good about the other half, and it is the other half that may be important for practice.

Perhaps because you did not ask a question in the body of your post. You have one -- many, actually -- but you didn't ask it, and the question you asked has a yes or no answer. Ariel does give it to you below. Do you actually care about this subject? If so, why are you asking on RationalWiki, do you expect to find a deep understanding of Buddhism there? Or antyhing, for that matter. Quora is much better.But they require real-name accounts (though you can ask questions and even answer anonymously.) And they will whack you immediately for incivility. But you could probably manage it.

The language you use is full of red flags as to how your imagination and reactivity dominate your thinking (and thus your expression). "he makes it seem" That is not discriminable. Rather, you read what he wrote and you thought something, and you attributed that to what he was "making." it's fantasy, and that we engage in these fantasies is part of what he is talking about. You add something to what he wrote, you added "really" and "just." Rather, what is studied in Buddhism is how the mind works. We do put together an image of the world. If you study your own senses carefully, you may notice this. Most of us do not remember what the world was like as a newborn, do we? We learned to put it together. How much of this is built-in, I don't know, but we also learn, very clearly, to ignore much of what we actually see and feel and hear. If you don't know that, it's because you have not studied your own life. (look up "entoptic phenomena" and learn to see them. You have been seeing them since you have had eyes to see.

You use "experience" and "consciousness" as if they are different. Are they? A sense organ is like a switch. If we flip a switch, does this create in the circuit and "experience"? Is the brain a machine? Where is the consciousness?

What premise? It is possible that the author has fallen into a trap, but that is not "Buddhism." His writing is generally quite good, but I'd need to study it more; The invocation of "cognitive science" is a bit of a red herring.

It's great that you are questioning what you read, Machina, but not great that you are not aware of your own processes and what keeps you from understanding the material on that site. What does the "guy" say? You wrote about what you "feel," but is not a feeling, it is a thought you invented or that fell upon you in reaction to what you read, the "feeling" part would be an emotional reaction -- a body sense -- in response to it

To understand what is on that page, will, for most people, take at least a few years of practice of what they are talking about. (For those with the experience, it is all obvious.) I can say this for sure to you: the guy did not say what you think. The page is not saying "there is no physical reality." What Buddhism works with is what we actually experience, and we experience through the senses and the mind. What we sense and our awareness are phenomena of the mind, not reality itself, so Buddhism is silent on the issue of "physical reality," except \that it focuses on actual experience, which is a kind of physical reality. But it is all the mind. And the same set of experiences and understandings can be viewed as "it is all physical reality." The paradoxes and difficulties arise from the idea of two realities: physical and mental (or "spiritual"). "There is only one reality" is also a story, and imagination, but it happens to be a very useful one. Buddhist training is about attending to what is present, not trying to "figure it out." No "belief" is required.

To be sure, the author of that page (and possibly the source on Abhidharma) wrote something you could take as denying physical reality. In a more complete understanding of Buddhism, denial and affirmation become one, and one way of understanding that is dialectical. I.e., it is A and it is not-A, and deep understanding arises -- in practice and experience -- when one can hold opposites, seeing the difference and the unity. Now, someone can tell you this and it can be meaningless, because to understand it requires having gone through the process. That can take years, though some degree of awakening can occur in a flash. Don't believe it till you see it! However, Ariel31459 has pointed to the value of respecting others. Respect, not worship. Test what is said, but, of course, you must first understand what is to be tested! If you have not understood it, at least to be clear about what practice is being recommended, you may otherwise create a test that is doomed to failure.

You can do what ya wanna.

Hypothesis is a web-wide collaboration. If someone else wants to annotate this page, they can. There are pages dense with annotations.

Dysklyver gets it right. Abd and Abd ul-Rahman Lomax are the names I mostly use. Dennis Lomax is still my legal name, I never bothered to change it.

Thanks for passing it on.

I've looked at a few. Mostly idiotic failures. but there was a German case where the plaintiff won.

Tarantino is actually useful. Yes, I'm aware of that action. The charges are outrageous, far beyond what is necessary for incremental expense for access. But give any agency a cash cow, then try to take it away and watch the fireworks.

It might be difficult to find.

Perhaps. I doubt it.

But consider this. To be dismissed for failure to file a claim of action, the defendant will have to appear and file a Motion to Dismiss. How much will that cost them? I bet it would be more than $400! As well, I can amend my complaint in response to such a motion. By that time, it is likely that I'll have legal assistance, so this will not be entirely my own expertise, which exists but is limited.

$200,000.

They have been soliciting donations on the plea that they need to be able to defend lawsuits. So maybe. However, there are many more people being defamed. The goal here is not big bucks, but to stop defamation. I think expenses might be squeezed out of them, and maybe more, but this is going to be a decision to be made by more people than me.

Well, I have not set up the conditions. I'd need to issue a take-down demand. And the law is not entirely clear. But, yes, I could possibly put some pressure on them. I considered whether or not to include the RMF, but didn't. I wanted to keep this initial action very simple and clear, and the RMF itself has not libelled me. The WMF has.

That's an element that might enter into negotiation, especially if other banned users decide to join the case, which is possible. (I'd have to think about it!) I agree with the principle, but there is a problem, the protection of complainants. It can be resolved, but the problem for the WMF is that they would have to actually devote staff time to it, which costs thej money.

IOne of the insanities of my ban may be that it probably was not based on on-wiki activity, and so the ban not only did not protect the complainants, but made it more likely for me to amp up whatever I was doing. By banning, the WMF served the purposes of users who were, in fact, defaming many, for many years (and clearly violating the TOS). So . . . either really dumb, or there is a larger conspiracy than I thought.

Technically, it is not about the ban itself, but about the effect of announcing the ban, in a context where it is commonly assumed that one must have done something Very Bad to be so banned. So the absolute minimum of any settlement would be that the ban announcement would disappear, and the easiest way to do that would be to lift it. How to manage that and still protect the community from Abd With Fangs Dripping With Blood would be a matter for negotiation. Maybe they could ask me nicely, and then reban if I actually eat any babies or threaten to do so .Actually, I should probably not reveal what I would settle for. Bad Policy. But the point is to get them to ask that, or to make an offer. In a court, they are not God.

Well, in that case, I was funded to use PACER to access the documents, and some of the most expensive (filings with many attachments) were obtained by someone else and shared. I believe I may be able to get documents free, as plaintiff, but I also think there are then restrictions on sharing them. I can obvious share my own filings. It's unclear to me.

Ah, Vigilant. When I was banned from Wikipediocracy without notice or, really, any explanation, it may have been related to him. This theme of everything Abd being a Time was common for him. In fact,, he has never seen a filing from me. They are edited carefully as polemic. It's entirely different from bar chatter and some kinds of blogging.

In any case, there is a limit for the charge for a single document, 30 pages is the maximum billing. So the most expensive document is $3.00. But it can be complicated.

Sorry. Can't do everything. But we can dream.

Unless I drop dead, always a possibility at my age, I will, at least, get their attention. If they try to ignore this, it could get really expensive! No, they will respond. They might negotiate, they'd be nuts not to.

The goal was to show the WMF that ignoring a request from a banned user could be expensive, and to recover some compensation for damages from libel. The ban was create by defamation and was intended to be used for defamation, and it has been frequently so used..

No lawyer yet. But after I have served the WMF, I will run a GoFundMe and look for counsel. The filing was very simple, and I needed to get the thing going. Or I probably could have filed for free.

In my desk drawer.

I'd noticed, but I'm suppressing response to Kevmolenr. his comments are dense with ignorance. It is possible that someone might get a prosecutor interested in the perjury issue, but I'd imagine it quite difficult, without a complainant (and who was harmed by the perjury? It's not obvious). To develop the evidence enough for a criminal trial would required more investment in investigation. Without the findings in the civil trial providing a basis, I'd imagine getting a prosecutor interested could be difficult, and who has the time? A phone call would not work.

Ampenergo, AFAIK, made money dealing with Rossi. On the other hand, maybe IH recovered it, or agreed with Ampenergo that, since the Settlement Agreement was a revision without Ampenergo's consent, it could be voided, but that it was not worth doing that unless value appeared. We never saw the original agreement with Ampenergo, nor the side-agreement between IH and Ampenergo. I think they were paid about $5 million by IH, and were in line to get more if IH had paid Rossi more.

five years (2012-2017)

People without knowledge toss around "probably: to mean :"I imagine." As I recall, Rossi had refused to settle the day before the trial was opening and Lukacs asked to speak with the Jones Day lead attorney. My opinion is that Lukacs

1. Told Rossi that if there was no settlement, he could not only lose all the legal fees, and a judgment, but might also be convicted of perjury. "Yes, I know, Doctor Rossi, it is unfair, but this is life. Next time keep receipts!."
2. Told IH that Rossi needed to have the IP back or he would go down fighting. So whereas holding on to the IP was a good general strategy by game theory (0,1% chance, say, of a trillion dollars, vs a few million, a good bet any day if you can afford to lose (and they could), they were going to have to put in a few million and five weeks of nuisance to insure it, and since they believed it was bogus . . . why not give it up? Lukacs was kind of an asshole, my opinion, but I think he did a spectacular piece of lawyering. He was hired last-minute, and had a reputation for negotiating settlements.

This is speculation. Anyone can be fooled. People who were very sharp when younger can become quite dull with age. Or, more accurately, the sharpness can become unreliable.

this is speculation. Much of the control was or could have been automated. With experience at operation, efficiency should improve. If the device actually required what I called "Rossi grease," someone else could have been trained to provide it, with Rossi available for consultation.

That is, within reason, nobody. Because someone finds XP from some nickel and Lithal is not a "partial replication of his results," it is only the weakest of general confirmation. Replication requires exact (or at least very substantial) identity of protocol.

Basically, he lies sixty ways till Sunday. He has learned that it doesn't matter if his lies are obvious, people want to believe so much that they will believe almost anything, and make up reasons for it if he does not supply them.

Because he could then pretend what he told to Lewan, that that is what he really wanted. He didn't really want the $89 million, that was peanuts compared to the Real Value of his Magnificence.

They didn't.

This is correct and obvious from the agreement and amendments. Rossi argued estoppel, that IH had consented to proceeding differently, but was unable to find, as far as we know, evidence to that effect, only assumptions that Rossi made. I.e., if Penon, the "ERV" for the orignial Validation Test, measured power in Doral, he was therefore ERV for a Guaranteed Performance Test. If IH had agreed to that, it would have been extraordinarily dumb. It does not appear that they did. Rossi set up something that resembled a GPT, but without the critical agreements, and his behavior during the Doral operation would have demolished it as a GPT in any case. As one example, suppose he did install a heat exchanger, which would have been necessary from Day One. No heat exchanger was described in the system diagram provided by Penon. Monitoring equipment installed by IH, testimony showed, was removed by Rossi. Penon was only present on four occasions, and mostly depended on information fed to him by Rossi (just as the JMP "invoice requests" were based on information from Rossi, not measured independently as contemplated in the Terms Sheet. It goes on and on.

He did not want to be answerable to anyone else. He took the money from IH, but, as they point out in their Answer and Countercomplaint, either had no real technology, or had not disclosed it. Either way, deceptive or delusional.

Rossi never surrendered his "rights to the IP," but only granted IH a license for about half the planet and agreed to full disclosure.. There was no aspect to the agreement that required IH to keep the technology secret, they certainly could have shared it with partners. Rossi retained exclusive rights for half the planet, except as he agreed with others. IH was granted a "right of first refusal" in those other areas, but this would not prevent him from making arrangements with others, only from neglecting the rights of IH.

to invest in other avenues of approach to LENR, and not to pursue Rossi technology.

not a fact

People get crazy about COP. If the device puts out heat, at least for a time, with no energy input, that would be infinite COP. It can be meaningless. For how long does it do this? Any system with feedback of power to provide whatever is needed to keep the system going will "self-sustain," which is infinite COP. Skepticism is appropriate because demonstrations of this are rare, but there is nothing terribly surprising. To get "infinite COP," insulate the reactor, and control cooling. If it is generating any power, pretty much, it could go "infinite" and still not be a practical device, for various reasons.

The "initial countersuit.". There is a reference to the IP in paragraph 9 of the Counterclaim.

This is correct. A lawyer pointed out that if there was a successful GPT, the $89 million would become a debt, but the license would not be cancelled if it were not paid. So the IP transfer occurred in 2013, and IH worked on attempting to make working devices until at least 2016, possibly beyond that. The Agreement did provide that Rossi would be their Chief Scientist, I think for a year. IH made the Lugano device, and Rossi was very proud of it. They made others, and tested them themselves. They seemed to work, then they accidentally mixed up an unfueled device with the lot, and it showed the same "XP". Oops! They called Rossi, and Rossi showed up, and together Darden and Rossi opened up the reactor. No fuel! This is in the Darden deposition. Rossi stormed out with "The Russians stole the fuel!" But it did not matter how the fuel disappeared (and this had been a deliberate dummy reactor, it appaers). What mattered was that the test method was defective. IH claimed that they never got confirmed XP.

This is what some miss: if this technology worked, they would never have let it go just to avoid more legal expenses. They had secured a commitment for $200 million from Woodford if needed. They were prepared to pay. So ... why didn't they pay? It's obvious, actually.

In mercato veritas, Rossi's favorite saying. Well, the market judged. The technology was worthless.

And that amendment (that's what it was) had actually failed. The 6 Cylinder unit thing was a formality that probably could have been considered irrelevant. The judge wanted to know more about it. She was incorrect, actually, but IH may not have been as clear as needed. The real issue was that the time had passed, and that the Doral test was not the GPT. No evidence appears that IH ever agreed that it was, and all that would have been necessary. If Rossi's technology was legitimate, he was incredibly sloppy. But I find no reason to believe it was legitimate, at all. He would have been a billionaire by now if it was. IH had the motivation and the access to funding, and was willing to give Rossi whatever. Up to a point!

The 1 year test did not happen timely. Rossi blamed IH, but IH showed that it was Rossi who rejected a local test, in North Carolina. arguing that a test in Florida with an "independent customer" would be much more convincing. , Further, the way the agreement was written, it doesn't matter whose fault it was (unless it could be shown that IH actively prevented it.) IH agreed with Rossi to allow a postponement to a future date, to be determined by written agreement of all the parties, but all amendments to the Agreement required the written agreement of all parties, and Ampenergo, a party, refused to sign. Rossi didn't mention that but I noticed it immediately from the copy he filed. I thought that this was his file copy, not the fully executed document. No, the amendment failed. So there was no possibility of an $89 million payment for a 1 year test unless IH voluntarily agreed to it. No evidence appeared that IH consented, they only consented to a sale of power.

False and misleading account, dense with error. Many other errors follow.

More or less my conclusion as well. Woodford's representatives visited the Doral reactor and were apparently not impressed. They were investing in LENR, long-term, not Rossi. Rossi claims to have been convinced by this that he should not work with IH. He wants to be the center of the LENR universe..

That is not what he said and not what he meant. There is no requirement that "the gist of the case be presented during discovery." The gist of the case is presented in the Complaint and Answer (and Counter-Complaint). Discovery is a period when the parties may demand and receive information from other parties. We saw so much evidence in this period because of many Motions supported by exhibits, some of which were obtained during discovery. At least that's how I understand it.

An actual lawyer here.

I am abandoning commentary on kevmolenr, unless someone else comments with something interesting.

'Right. But something has changed. Rossi's insanity in suing Industrial Heat has provided a trove of evidence as to Rossi's actual behavior, often in his own words, in his emails, and his testimony under oath in depositions. There is the same as well from those who did business with him, and paid him many millions of dollars. All this was, before, secret. And now Sifferkoll is claiming that there is a campaign to discredit Rossi. I have seen no signs of a campaign. IH is silent on Rossi (Dewey Weaver is not IH). I am a blogger interested in reporting fact, and I also report analysis, recognizing the difference.

(As I recall, Sifferkoll claimed before that I was paid by IH. I have not received a penny from anyone associated with IH, not so far, and I haven't asked for it.)

If people want fact, it is available. There is also opinion from real people with their real names associated, who testified under oath. And there are torrents of opinion from others, some of which is knowledgeable, much of which is not. Welcome to the internet.

It's a complicated issue. First of all, discussions should be conditional. It's all meaningless if he actually has no power to sell, except perhaps fraudulently, and the claim that this could not possibly be fraudulent misses some obvious possibilities. But if he actually has real reactors and if, for some reason, he cannot patent them or is otherwise worried about theft of the IP, multiplying up the number of customers would increase risk. Hence the strategy of, with limited production, making larger installations.

But at this point it is vaporware. Rossi claimed to have 20 KW units ready for sale in 2011, and his "1 MW reactor" was simply a pile of them. He could have been selling small units from 2011 on, but did not. He could have been selling power from then on, unless he was lying, but did not, except for a fake sale to himself. IH did not prevent him from proceeding, they could not.

I have annotated this with hypothes.is.

There is a reason why the IH partners can move billions, and so many simply move warm air. Krivit stated the obvious, with lots of polemic and inference. They needed to know, and relying on Krivit would not have created any benefit. They knew that Rossi could be a fraud. But a fraud could also have something real and be, as has been pointed out, "paranoid" and perhaps "unethical." They needed to find out, and they said that if there was even 1% chance of the Rossi Effect being real, it would be worth the investment. In hindsight, they obviously concluded that there was not even that chance (or they would never have let go of the license.) People who invest in long shots know that a long shot not working out is not proof of a mistake. Could they have known in a better way? Perhaps, but what they did, they could afford, and, in fact, it worked for them, so calling it a mistake is essentially stupid. They invested $25 million, and as a result of that bold move, made with eyes wide open, knowing that it could easily and even probably fail, they raised $50 milllion from Woodford, and Woodford, by that time, knew that Rossi success had become very unlikely. So they amplified their $25 million for research into $50 million, and Woodford committed to up to a total of $200 million. So Rossi's claims that IH never intended to pay and couldn't pay if they needed to, were all blowing smoke. What actually happened, and this comes out, and one would think that Lewan would realized the implications, is that they then started investing the $50 million in genuine LENR research, funding Kim, Hagelstein, and others. Rossi saw this and called it "investing in his competitors," and it then becomes an excuse for not cooperating. But, in fact, the failure occurred before then, when IH could not make devices that worked, unless they used the Rossi defective thermal camera calorimetry. Rossi has lied again and again, and continued to lie, to Lewan. Lewan rubs his chin, "Well, maybe."

They did not "ask for his IP in a civil case." This paragraph is dense with error. IH did not designate Penon as a "3rd party dude." Rossi wanted Penon to measure the heat, it was not the Guaranteed Performance Test, and it had no legal consequences, since the time for the GPT had lapsed and Ampenergo refused to allow an extension, and Rossi knew that, so he created a faux GPT, just like he created a faux customer. Since it was legally moot, they consented, they gave Rossi rope to hang himself with, one way of putting it. By that then end of that "test", Rossi had abandoned all cooperation and refused to allow IH to inspect their plant with their own engineer. Because the customer would not allow it. But he was actually the customer. This thing sucked sixty ways till Sunday, IH had effectively walked well before then. The idea that the sale of power would continue was a charade. Rossi had no intention of continuing a sale of power, and there never really was a purchase of power. Kevmolenr is making up Bad Things they did, cobbed together from Rossi's claims, apparently believing them.

The only way to persist in this, as Kevmolenr is doing, is to lie or to willfully maintain ignorance of the actual evidence, Rossi's emails, his own arguments at trial, the depositions, etc.

Not just IP. Both plants and all models. So, supposedly, a 1 MW plant existed, if it ever existed. Ready to be installed. Ready for sale of heat. Instead, apparently dismantled for scrap. Does this make sense? If nothing else, all he had to do was find a real customer, instead of a fake one. He could have been selling power in Sweden any time, the Agreement did not prevent that. He had half the planet for a market. (There was a right of first refusal for IH, which Rossi then claimed allowed them to interfere, but that's a misrepresentation.)

If he really had a product, he could have been making millions or more. The one plant was worth for sale of power at a reduced rate, maybe $300,000 per year, and cost $200,000 to build, he told IH. When the case settled in 2017, he then had it back, no need to make a new one, and with a working demo to be shown, easy to raise more money, and that was the argument he made to IH to induce them to agree to let him install the plant in Florida. I think that by that time, they were pretty burned out on Rossi, so . . . why not let him run that thing?

THH goes on with what is obvious to those who have studied the case.

Yeah, maybe they find the archive of Rossi v. Darden case documents. Planet Rossi was eager to provide those documents when they only showed Rossi's claims. But when IH answered and counterclaimed, and the evidence and depositions piled up, with Rossi admitting fraud, essentially, Planet Rossi stopped referring to the documents.

IH shows no sign of being concerned about Rossi any more. Dewey Weaver works for IH, but is also independent, and has his own opinions.

Sifferkoll confuses a claim with a "fact." We have no evidence that Rossi has ever sold any power. He claimed it about JMP in Florida, but what actually existed was an agreement to pay for a megawatt at $1000 per day, promised by the fake customer Rossi created. The customer, represented by Rossi's attorney (President of Leonardo Corp.) agreed to measure the power and provide information to IH so IH could invoice them. In fact, IH did not trust what was going on and never issued an invoice. The power delivered was provided by Rossi, there was no independent measurement. Rossi was setting up a situation where he could lose $30,000 per month, but then, he believed, make it back in spades when the "test" was over, but iit was never presented as a test, but as a sale of power.

So Rossi was willing to absorb $30,000 per month, a dead loss, to create an appearance so that he could collect $89 million.

Rossi: "I am open to selling heat to qualified customers." Business: "Sure. You install the plant, covering all costs, including connecting the system to our heating system, and we will pay you 50% of the market price of gas saved. We will keep our gas-fired boiler as a backup. Rossi: "Fine, but 80%." Business: "Okay. We will need insurance to cover any accidents." Rossi: "I'll get back to you."

See, "being negotiated." At this point, I would think there would be a standard contract worked out and customers would sign up or not. Rossi has not announced a standard contract. "Being negotiated" is vague, like most of his claims. He had claimed that he had sold the 1 MW reactor by the end of 2011, but obviously not. It was sold to IH in 2012, and actually delivered in 2013. Then he claimed that an independent customer was willing to buy power from that customer, and he claimed that this was actually happening. In fact, the "independent customer" was Rossi, all the way down. None of this is controversial any more.;

Rossi Says has been shown to be utterly unreliable. If Sifferkoll believes otherwise, he is welcome to invest in Rossi. Anyone is. I simply suggest becoming familiar with the real evidence, as distinct from paranoid conspiracy theories and ad hominem arguments with no factual basis.

As usual, Sifferkoll reports Rossi Says as fact.

I think he is talking about the heat exchanger. No, I don't think Dewey ever visited Doral. We do not know when it became obvious to IH that the reactor, if generating a megawatt, would have killed everyone. I think they did do some IR surveillance in some way, but there were difficulties with presenting it. (That warehouse would have lit up like a football stadium if imaged with the kind of surveillance used to detect marijuana growers. And that is with or without a heat exchanger.) Rossi had claimed, in public that no heat exchanger was necessary, because the heat was being "used" in an endothermic reaction. Then he claimed that cooling was accomplished with some broken ceiling fans, or the back door, and he later claimed to Mats Lewan that a megawatt of power would not be a problem, because the solar irradiance on the area of the warehouse was more than a megawatt. Totally misleading, and Mats knows enough physics to see through it, but did not question it, because, I infer, Mats knows what happens to people who question the Gospel According to Rossi. They are excommunicated.

Except he is not lying, though Dewey does, ah, "interpret" the facts with a certain color. It's obvious what is factual and what is not. What is not factual is interpretation, and Dewey does have a right, as we all do,.to interpret. He's actually an expert on Rossi, compared to nearly everyone commenting. He actually met him and saw him in action. Because Rossi took an immediate dislike to Dewey, because he pulled out a heat-gun (optical pyrometer), Dewey did not directly witness much, but he knows much from his friends and fellow investors. These are people who put millions of dollars into Rossi technology, and to discount their opinions is to discard "in mercato veritas." They actually bought the product, and worked with it for years.

Dewey has inside information on IH, but this is his imagination about Rossi. The analysis of the heat exchanger, though, appears to be factual. Because this discussion, like most continuing Rossi discussions, is about whether or not Rossi has an actual technology, this bears on whether or not claims from Rossi can be trusted, and they quite obviously cannot. Most importantly, he has lied to his fans, that became totally clear. But the fans then claim he needed to, because blah, blah. There is real evidence in the case documents for Rossi v. Darden, found here

It appeared in a Rossi deposition, never having been seen or mentioned before. The second Smith report covered the impossibility of it, and he only covered part of the problem. A 1 MW heat exchanger will be very, very visible. It wasn't. Also, Rossi claimed that he had hired the "guys off a truck" to install the heat exchanger, and that he bought the materials at Home Depot and did not keep receipts. He would have been asked how he paid for them. He might have said "cash." Statements like that can be checked, and this was a large purchase of piping, it would not be common. I think Lukacs, who had to convince Rossi to let of his $89 million that he had bragged he had absolute proof for, told him, "I know it's not fair, Doctor Rossi, but I am afraid that, to a jury, it is going to look like you made up this story to avoid the heat problem. And for that, you could go to prison."

The judge was not operating on that level, so it is not "obvious." I was reading every document filed, and looking up case law, etc. Kevmolenr is just pulling stuff out of a dark place.

(This is wrong on so many levels. The judge would not be looking for "blatant fraud," and, in fact, blatant fraud was revealed in the case documents. That is, Rossi blatantly defrauded IH in his claims about the customer in Florida, there was abundant and essentially uncontradicted evidence on this, and he did the same about the "independent customer." HIs filings in the Complaint were deceptive. The judge appears to have recognized some of the problems, but decided to give Rossi a full opportunity to show the substance of his case, or else she would have thrown the whole thing out. (She speculated on certain things, and was incorrect about them, they were irrelevant.).

IH Fanboy does not realize how a Ponzi scheme can work. The schemer can be losing money on every transaction and still run away with huge gains. Rossi is offering to sell power below market price. Consider this possible con: he has propane or some other conventional energy source in the Secret /Container, that supplements the power consumption. So he loses money during operation, but not that much. He could keep it up for quite a time! He would then claim that he needs much more money to manufacture devices. He can use testimonials from real customers to solicit this? Is that independent evidence that the technology works? And remember, this guy is known to lie. Even if he tells a really believable story, there is a high probability that he's lying.

Sure it is possible. Rossi had a 20 KW water heater, taking water up to boiling and maybe even boiling some. Such water would "steam," especially if the humidity were high. Remember that visible steam is below 100 C. Live steam is invisible. What Stokes saw was visible vapor, which cannot be above the boiling point.

There is no such proof, not even evidence. That charges are not filed -- this is not something that IH would do, it would be up to the prosecutor for that jurisdiction -- does not show that a filing would fail, it does not even show that a prosecutor considered the issue.

Kevmolenr is consistently ignoring the actual evidence, and imagining is evidence what is not, but only unwarranted and ignorant assumption.

Kevmolenr is simply searching for anything he can claim is wrong. Rothwell meant, "If this had gone to a jury, and if ..." The actual jury was dismissed because they settled. Instead of looking at the full context, the evidence presented, and the fact that Rossi had sued (not IH!) Kevmolenr is clearly arguing just for the sake of argument. He does not actually study the evidence, and consider what he would have decided if it were presented to him.

Non sequitur.

Blame the victims, eh? IH invested $25 million of their own money in Rossi, and they found out what they needed to know -- that there was no reason to believe that Rossi technology was real, that all the appearances were probably fake. The Swedes, it is disappointing that they did not open up. We don't know why. Maybe it was the wine at Lugano.

That is an independent issue. Frauds can have something real, but will they deliver it? Will they keep agreements? And if they lie about customers and other issues, why would we imagine them to be truthful about actual performance? This is why before investing anything in Rossi technology, a sane investor will want to see independent ocnfirmation, truly independent. That Rossi says that a customer is paying for heat? That's what he claimed about the Doral plant!

He is running the same con. What is remarkable is how many lap it up. Reading about con artists in The Confidence Game (Konnikova), it's normal, actually. People can be very, very reluctant to admit they were fooled. This is normal human psychology. Con artists become expert at manipulating it.

He is a fraud.

This is someone who has accepted the Rossi story, hook, line, and sinker. Rossi had sold the IP to IH, all of it, including future developments. They had a complete right to use it, and a legal expectation that Rossi would honestly disclose it. So what is the "squeeze"? They had paid $10 million for the IP. The Planet Rossi story is that Rossi decided they were out to cheat him, so he did not disclose the Secret to them. If so, he was in violation of the Agreement, yet he went to court to enforce the Agreement, except that the Agreement that he tried to enforce was actually an amendment that was not accepted by Ampenergo.

The argument is that if the IP was worthless, why didn't they accept Rossi's alleged offer to buy it back by returning their investment?

1. It is not clear that Rossi ever made such an offer, or, if he did, that it would even come close to providing a return of the investment, most of which did not actually go to Rossi, it went to the R&D effort to confirm the technology. Over double what they gave to Rossi, I estimate. So they had invested in a technology that they could not use. They were aware -- and this is mentioned in the motions -- that Rossi might really have a working Secret and that he was simply withholding it. If real, the technology was worth a trillion dollars. Why should they surrender the license for a few million? However, I'm sure this is the argument Lukacs made to them, when they went out to confer. I speculate: "You say this is worthless. Okay, my client is willing to settle with a walkaway, you return the license and the IP, and no money changes hands." IH had to make a choice: spend another few million in legal expenses to keep the licence (there was absolutely no ground for cancelling the license, that was all more Rossi smokescreen). These are long-term, high-risk investors. What was the probability of Rossi Reality. In spite of the high return if it was real, the probability, they assessed, it is rather obvious, was too low. So they walked.

In mercato veritas. The market looked, and rejected the technology, having been eager to make it work, hopeful that it would (which is something that Rossi emphasized, why were they so hopeful if it was all junk? -- because they were giving him the full benefit of the doubt, that's why, and we all know the appearances that were presented, the Swedish professors, etc.)

At this point, with the evidence available in Rossi v. Darden, anyone who invests in Rossi expecting to be treated fairly deserves to lose their investment, for lack of due diligence.

Probably. He had real estate, in his wife's name, I think. I don't think he was judgment-proof.

Kevmolenr has no idea what Rothwell needs. That someone would have settled does not show they had no proof, and if they had no proof, then the same argument would have applied in the other direction. If Rossi had proof that he had satisfied the Agreement, as he claimed, vociferously, when he filed the suit, then why did he walk away from $89 million, which he could certainly have used for further R&D?

That is a myth, a holdover. Much more correct would be that no mechanism is known to explain biological transmutation, no theory has been confirmed. The question at this point is whether or not it actually occurs, and this work was inadequate to show that, or, if it was adequate, it was insufficiently reported. There is no consistent effect reported; in fact, it may be the opposite, with, then, an ad hoc hypothesis proposed to explain away the contradictions.

Confirmation bias can be expected to create "many indications." That's how it works. Results are being, in this paper, as if the existence of an anomaly proves something. All that it proves is our ignorance, i.e., that our knowledge is incomplete, and, in particular, the ignorance may be of the actual cause of a result.

But once we have a "general field" in mind, like "biological transmutation," then we will assert that as an "explanation," when it actually explains nothing, it merely gives a name to some abstract possibility.

Simple cells with identical genetic coding can be expected to behave with high reliability, if conditions are identical.

Biological transmutation has been reported with yeast. Yeast cells are relatively simple, and industry depends on the reliability of clean, uniform cultures. That is where I would hope that more sophisticated work would be done.

I'm not looking for "proof" but for direct evidence, and in particular, I was looking in this paper for evidence that possible artifacts were considered. I see no sign of that.

There is no analysis of how much energy would be involved, and whether or not a low rate of transmutation would show the energy effects. "A lot of energy" is vague.

Obviously, the author prefers this explanation. Why? This is even more contradictory to basic nuclear physics than the biological transmutation idea, much more contradictory, since biological transmutation, per se, does not contradict basic nuclear physics, but a reversible transmutation has some severe thermodynamic problems.

Only summary data is provided, preventing any reasonable assessment of significance.

Performed with larger numbers of samples and reporting of the actual measured data, this could be interesting. But it wasn't, so it's not.

My proposal: it is only "interesting" because we don't normally look at trace element variations. With trace elements, stating percentages can be very misleading. This could be sampling variation. A trace element may not be evenly distributed throughout the experimental volume. To be useful, this experimentation would need to be far better designed.

Great reason not to work with them unless replicating prior work, and, if so, then it would be appropriate to exercise great care. "Difficult to germinate"? This is imprecise language, showing how ad hoc this all was.

In either case, we are seeing confirmation bias in action, with ad hoc theorization to explain away evidence that the results are artifact.

What is the variation in seed growth, if conditions are carefully controlled? That's basic data, apparently not gathered.

Palladium. Really? We are not shown the actual data, this is a synthesized summary, and with very small, trace elements, a single piece of dust landing in a cell, or some small adsorption onto the glass, could cause results like this.

To me, the palladium result is an indication that something other than transmutation is happening.

In shotgunning, we search for "anomalies," which are not defined in advance. Confirmation bias abounds in shotgunning. There is no description of the sampling procedure and exactly how the analysis was performed. This is a single experiment, with single measurements. There is no indication that the analysis was blinded to any degree.

Variation from light/heavy water or from the seeds and environmental conditions. No mention of environment, amount of light, no report of measures to ensure constant environment.

No way is provided of assessing the significance of this result.

Waste of good heavy water. Later, if an effect is established, varying the isotopic concentration of water might be interesting.

Data is not shown, and there is no analysis of "normal variation," i.e., between, say, flasks identically treated in all respects. Because this is shotgunning, there is no consistent effect being tested.

Not necessarily. Suppose the nitric acid encourages a mineral to be absorbed into or absorbed onto the flask used. That process would take time. Or vice-versa, suppose it caused minerals from the flask to be dissolved. Operating in open air can allow contaminants from the air to enter the flask, including dust and other materials.

Missing: assessment of sampling precision, because that is crucial, and any measurement can be incorrect for any of many reasons. Any measurement is "valid" if correctly reported, but reliance on "only one sample" is a classic error. Again, for an anecdotal report, fine. But we don't need more anecdotal reports.

"it reduces . . ."

It does not reduce the need for enough samples with controls to validate the measurement precision and accuracy.

see next

"Large amounts of experiments" showing some anomaly, vaguely defined, does not demonstrate validity, unless certain conditions are carefully imposed, most primarily defining the protocol and how the results are to be analyzed before the experiment, not after it. Exploratory work, what I call "shotgunning," is fine for discovering stuff to investigate more carefully, but is terrible for confirmation.

We are not actually shown error bars, and it is not clear that sufficient data was actually gathered to show them. Biberian is aware of how controversial this is, but does not address the more obvious possible artifacts and error sources.

Way too many to be useful. More is less. "Several experiments" would be too little to come up with results of significance. It's better than nothing, perhaps, but not if unwarranted conclusions are announced from them, as this paper does at the same time as it points out that it's not conclusive.

this is an odd expression. There would still be, for quantitative analysis,, a need for standard sampling, and for the kinds of results shown by Biberian, this could be crucial. A "test tube" is effectively a small flask, and the experiments are done in small flasks, so what is he talking about?

"could certainly do" is realistic as a possibility, not as any kind of certainty that biology can actually manage nuclear reactions. Given that we still do not know how metal hydrides can create transmutations, using words like "certainty" is misleading and likely to provoke severe skepticism..

Shanahan has formed a belief considering only the evidence that he thinks supports it, not all the evidence. Shanahan has been ineffective because he is attacking the work of experts in their fields of expertise, and he has not inspired experimental work to confirm his ideas. Some of his ideas have, in fact, been tested. Nice try, no cigar.

Again, this is part of the standard pseudoskeptical cant about F&P. Original reports are commonly published. They held a press conference, but their paper had already been accepted. They did not, in fact, violate scientific traditions, though they certainly made mistakes. "Easy replication" is not a requirement for science. Some replication is very, very difficult, even impossible. People make up rules in order to attack others for violating the rules they invent.

this contradicts his theory. His theory suggests that uncontrolled conditions in the material cause an unexpected heat artifact, what is generally accepted is that uncontrolled conditions in the material cause -- rarely! -- a heat anomaly. So Shanahan is not far from the LENR mainstream, in that respect. Except that his theory has, in fact, failed to match experimental results, and practically nobody is listening to him.

I don't recall them claiming that. But if they did, why would this arouse "ire." We don't sanely get angry if someone says something stupid, unless it actually threatens us in some way. The threat was? Then, once emotions are aroused, the mind will generate endless rationalizations for them.

THH changed his approach later. This reveals, again, a lack of familiarity with the evidence. Half of the 2004 DoE panel concluded in 2004 that the evidence for anomalous heat was "conclusive." That conflicts radically with "did not find any evidence."

The assumption that had there been any evidence, "reaction at the time" would have been different is obviously false. There was evidence and there was rejection of evidence, commonly without considering balance, and there were moving goalposts.

Classic ignorant pseudoskeptical comment, assuming something totally and obviously false, to troll the offensive. Off the top of my head, Miley, Takahashi, but there are many others. Further, the phenomenon discovered was seen in an electrochemical environment, hence it was found and early comfirmations (but not all) were by electrochemists.

My opinion is that new basic physics will not be necessary. Nothing that is actually well-known will be overturned. Rather, there was, in 1989, a general lack of imagination. It was not universal, many physicists realized that there might be unexplored possibilities. Most ideas fell away, because they did not match the experimental evidence. Some approaches remain on the table.

What is most exciting, recently, is that a previously unrecognized phase of palladium deuteride was discovered and announced in 1993, by Fukai, in which there are "Super Abundant Vacancies" (SAV). Some think that this material could be the Nuclear Active Environment, accidentally formed on the surface of Fleischmann-Pons cathodes. If this is the NAE, it may be much easier than has been thought to create working material (because it is known how to reliably create the SAV phase, and it is apparently stable). I expect to see results from experimental work with this within a year or so.

Dennis Letts has been funded by Industrial Heat, and is working as a consultant with them. Cold fusion in general, my opinion, is funded well enough for progress to be made. This remains a very difficult field, but there are new understandings appearing that may accelerate progress. Confident predictions have been wrong many times, though. News and analysis regarding cold fusion, and collections of sources, may be found on coldfusioncommunity.net.

Miles1998a (no space). The link is to a copy of the Britz collection, available privately, see coldfusioncommunity.net//Britz.

I had been promoting confirmation of heat/helium as Plan B for the transformation of public opinion and especially scientific opinion, for some years before writing this reivew. As it happened, in late 2014, a working group founded by Robert Duncan at Texas Tech University was funded with a total of $12 million to do this work (and a little other work with "exploding wires" a technique for testing materials for possible LENR activity.) As this is written, that work is still in process.

This is pure science,not pie-in-the-sky "free energy" research. Are anomalous heat and de njovo helium correlated? That's a basic question, answered by Miles and reported by many with, generally, fewer repetitions of experiments. So far, measurement with increased precision has narrowed the ratio, a strong sign of a real effect.

Jone1995a (no space). The link is to a copy of the Britz collection, available privately, see coldfusioncommunity.net//Britz.

more like 60%. This assumes no major escape of helium and no major escape of radiation or major creation of other products. Low levels of radiation and other products are often reported, but not at levels approaching what is seen with helium.

This is still unexplained. The finding has not been confirmed, nor disconfirmed.

citing

Shan2010 (no space). The link is to a copy of the Britz collection, available privately, see coldfusioncommunity.net//Britz.

Miles998b (no space). The link is to a copy of the Britz collection, available privately, see coldfusioncommunity.net//Britz.

Jone1998a (no space). The link is to a copy of the Britz collection, available privately, see coldfusioncommunity.net//Britz.

A Wikiversity bureaucrat, in 2017, decided to prohibit and remove all alleged "fringe science" content, radically departing from core Wikiversity traditions, and specifically went after some of the content I and many others had created.

(Wikiversity had always required neutral content, and substantial effort had been put into insuring neutrality. This was actually a personal attack, because a great deal of fringe content was ignored. But once a bureaucrat, it's a lifetime appointment, usually. Local protests, from administrators, were ignored, and the administrators threatened with removal.

However, this motivated establishing a dedicated wiki,l which creates many more possibilities with less hassle.

I was able to rescue most or all of the deleted content, with the help of administrators and Wikiversity data dumps.

The page cited here can be found on the CFC wiki. It is old, has not been maintained for some time. Most current activity is on the CFC blog,in an extensive hierarchy of pages, and it is planned to integrate this with the wiki.

This was unclear. What was available at that time was the bibliography, and the actual collection was sometimes provided on DVD. The collection is now hosted on a googledrive. Request access with a comment on coldfusioncommunity.net/Britz. If you request the comment to be private, it will be read and possibly actioned, but then trashed. It will not be published unless you already have an approved comment (which makes publication automatic), You could instead request an email contact.

A demonstration of an annotation on a closed page. I entered this logged-in, of course! The URL was a Google search for the original Fukai paper from 1993.

I wouldn't waste a dime on that. Well, maybe a dime.

If Rossi ever does something truly worthy of attention, it will become well-known rapidly. IH may have a back door to rights, but don't tell anyone. :-)

It's predictable from prior demonstrations. I'm not going to watch and will not be commenting on the demo, unless others not only comment, but point to something worth watching. In almost a decade, nothing has been worth watching. Rossi sometimes says things that people would do well to accept: in mercato veritas is one of them. But who is listening to the market? Instead, Rossifans listen to RossiSays, attempting to extract truth from a pile of bullshit. From history, they will continue this long after Rossi is gone, looking for the hidden secrets. This has been going on, in one form or other, for thousands of years.

Classic Lenr-Forum "debate." THH did not claim Occam's Razor as an axion to prove a point. This was discussion, and Occam's Razor is a heuristic, not a proof.

Actually, it is likely that LENR produces gammas, this is one of the two major branches of theory (i.e., nuclear emissions -- gammas -- or phonons, which is a very long shot, but maybe. However, the gammas produced are not hot enough to be readily detectred, and it appears that they are almost entirely absorbed in the materials and apparatus. Hence they show up as heat. "Gamma rays" and "X-rays" are the same objects, photons, but gammas are so-called when generated by nuclei, and X-rays when generated by electronic transitions. Jed would surely realize that there are an overwhelming number of "X-ray" reports from LENR.

I commented on that page.

They aren't Alan Smith,.obviously. I saw that comment. We are getting a series of apparently incomprehensible communications about the Russ George work. It's not surprising, from his history.

The claims were not false. It's an issue of definitions. It's not clear that anyone was actually misled where it made a difference.

So. The news here is that a company deleted an unimportant statement in a document, after Krivit complained about it. That's front page news? He must be desperate.

If successful (as planned), ITER will generate considerable net power, even with Krivits overblown analysis.

The purpose of ITER is not to generate electrical power, the system has too much overhead.

It is to demonstrate and test power generation, and specifically thermal power.

Accepting his figures, with 300 MW of input, the reactor will generate 536 MW of heat. That is not enough for commercial power generation, and nobody has claimed that it is. There is no "loss" of energy, however.

Rather, there will still be heat. If the heat could be sold (sometimes it can), then the system might actually break even. For a net input of 86 MW, it would generate 322 "extra" MW of low-grade heat (great for heating applications). (This would be elevated temperature in a coolant, perhaps water, perhaps steam could be piped to customers.)

The 50 MW -> 500 MW refers to the actual power input to the plasma, of course, which then releases ~500 MW of heat. I have not seen figures for other operating power, I think Krivit is using peak power instead of operating power. It will take considerable peak power to bring the superconducting magnets up to full field strength, but far less power to maintain them.

True break-even is complicated. An overall analysis would need to be based on energy, not power. In analyzing JET, Krivit included in power consumption the very high power needed to maintain the magnetic field, using ordinary electromagets. Magnetic fields essentially store power, it is not actually "consumed," but ordinary electromagnets generate heat from the current flow, which then loses efficiency. Superconducting magnets were always planned to replace the ordinary magnets. They require cooling, but how much cooling depends on insulation and how much the reactor itself will heat them. Krivit is just looking for statements he can call wrong and deceptive. He's been doing this for years.

ITER isn't planned to be a commercial reactor, it is an experiment, explicitly.

Krivit makes his imagination into a story, an excuse to present his warped interpretations over and over. Nothing happened here, but Krivit, Krivit, Krivit.

Well, the probability rises. This is Occam's Razor. Better to back up and look again. The complexity is not a proof, just an "indicator," as said. Some of us desperately want explanations, it's a juvenile reaction (i.e., normal for children). A more successful approach continues to observe, and sometimes to test (i.e., the scientific method). With more data, the pattern recognition engine gets more powerful. Trying to rush the cerebral cortex because of an amygdala hijack weakens the former, which will create something to justify the basic fears and desires of the amygdala. Often it stokes them.

This is not an "indicator," it is advice, a general heuristic.

What is "wrong"? A direction is just a direction. The evolutionary cause for these phenomena is obvious. It is not the "wrong direction:" If I see something on the ground that looks like a quarter, am I "wrong" to reach down and check it if it turns out to not be a quarter? We follow the pattern recognition information, and more often than not, it leads us somewhere useful. But there are obvious pitfalls.

Nice words.

People do make astonishingly obvious errors. Pointing them out is not a claim of being the only one who "understands." However, if nobody has pointed out the errors, he would be the "only one who pointed it out." But then Alan doesn't get to accuse him of hubris.

"E-cat" replicators were not repllicating, because they had no clear protocol to replicate. What they found does not stand out clearly from possible artifact and file drawer effect. Not until they achieve clear reproducibility -- as shown by independent replication of their technique and results -- is this information particularly useful. Until a clear and consistent correlation can be found between measurables, all this joins the vast pile of circumstantial evidence, which is inadequate to create progress.

Martin was correct about the effect that he discovered.

If someone is making substantial gammas, unless they are quite low energy, it's not the FP Heat Effect. There are gammas everywhere, so the idea that they "shouldn't be there at ALL" is, at best, incautiously stated. There is an issue of level and other correlations and possible artifacts.

If moderate levels of radiation are shown, the next question will be "so what?" We already know that nuclear reactions can happen in condensed matter.That some ignorant people don't know does not change the fact of what the literature amply shows. The heat/helium correlation, multiply confirmed, shows the reality of that effect. There is another effect, relationship unknown, that generates tritium, at low levels. Convenient to detect, as Jed wrote. X-rays (so-called, they could be gammas, there really is no difference except presumed origin) have also been widely reported under some conditions.

Unless multiple effects can be correlated, or the process generating an effect can be narrowly characterized and reliably and reproducibly created, finding some gammas is not terribly interesting.

There is no rule, and Jed's speculation is just that, speculation. There is plenty of evidence that something different is happening in condensed matter, it's actually overwhelming, but the conversation became politically charged and confusing. Few bother to actually study the source papers, instead they prefer endless argument.

The basic problem is that fusion, in the FP experiment, generates a lot of energy, and releasing that energy without creating charged particles above 10 keV (the "Hagelstein limit") is not easy to understand. I'd say nobody understand it yet. Storms' theory is preposterous. Takahashi TSC theory is not, but Takahashi also has no successful explanation for how the hot fused nucleus discharges the energy without creating charged particles. Even if 8Be manages to cool by a "BOLEP," burst of low-energy photons before it fissions, there would still be about 45 keV with each helium nucleus left. Too high, probably.

The basic message to convey to physicists is that there are examples of LENR that are not explained by present theory, as far as anyone has been able to show.l Not that the "dogma" is wrong. After all, maybe it's not "fusion." Nobody has a problem with "fusion" with element zero (neutronium, or a neutron). It does not normally generate charged particles, but "activation gammas."

It's easy to mess up the quotation formatting. Also easy to fix with a close-quote tag. That errors like this commonly persist shows that people don't go back and read their own writing.

of what?

This is quite misleading. I don't see the "2% figure." Staker reports this: "Fleischmann and Miles [44] showed recombination is either zero or too small to be a source of heat. There was visual monitoring of cell electrolyte level and exit gasses." It may be correct that Staker does not measure exit gasses. HIs schematic shows an open bubbler, not a measuring one. He explicitly relies on the conclusions of many electrochemists, including the source he references. Shanahan's oft-repeated theory, ATER (At the Electrode Recombination), is a real effect, but it does not occur at significant levels with the higher electrolysis currents involved. Researchers do not reinvent the wheel, necessarily, proving again and again what is already well-known. Fleischmann's response to Morrison's claim of recombination in Physics Letters A (1994). (from the lenr-canr copy, which I have not checked against the as-published paper)

Because Staker is using a similar design, he may reasonably assume that conditions are similar. Were his results extraordinary, it could be in order to review every detail, but they were rather ordinary excess heat measurements, and excess heat is properly considered as an established fact, by the preponderance of the evidence. Shanahan continuing to sputter for years does not shift this.

Shanahan has never engaged in a thorough and open discussion of his ideas, he bails when the going gets tough. The paper was not written to convince skeptics, and is not published to convince skeptics. Shanahan completely misses the point of the Staker paper, because to him it is all irrelevant, since Shanahan Is Right and everyone else is Wrong.

He is practicing science by assertion, what evidence does he cite? Does he point to a thorough discussion of the issue? No. If there is to be such, he is not about to create it, though he certainly could. One of the items on my agenda is to create such a thorough discussion, because Morrison also came up with this idea. I am working on that old debate on coldfusioncommunity.net, and participation is invited. Shanahan would be especially welcome. He has never accepted such invitations, but hope springs eternal.

100%, not 0. Gamma is the Faraday efficiency, how much of the charge transferred (current) is converted to the reaction product (i.e., the gasses). Recombination within the cell will reduce the efficiency, generating heat. If the assumption is made that the gases are released,but, in fact, they recombine within the cell, then there will be a source of heat in the cell. They generally assume 100% efficiency. The efficiency has been measured and it was only low when the current was very low, conditions then allowing substantial contact with the dissolved or circulating gasses and the electrodes such that recombination occurs. This is irrelevant with closed cells, where the gasses are recombined within the cell (so there is no allowance for energy escaping through the gases). Were recombination the source of "excess heat," as was claimed, and Shanahan repeats those claims, the excess heat would disappear when cells were closed. In open cells, substantial excess heat would appear with hydrogen as well as deuterium. These effects do not appear at levels adequate to explain anomalous heat. Not even close.

The paper was not designed or delivered to "convince a skeptic." The impact of the paper has mostly to do with his exploration of SAV theory, see my coverage of that paper and SAV and subpages. Shanahan tells the same story over and over. ATER was covered by Fleischmann and others many times. It happens. At a low rate, and mostly at currents well below those used in these experiments.

What technology? We are declaring that a "lab rat" is needed, a clear, reproducible experiment, that is actually confirmed and that works with substantial heat (I forget what figure McKubre has used. Maybe 10 watts). We don't have a "LENR technology." We have a pile of experimental results that collectively show that there is an "anomalous heat effect" and that it is nuclear in origin, as a matter of the preponderance of evidence. And we have many who announce this or that overblown claim, and there are some known frauds, and then lots of people with meaningless opinions.

This is not how McKubre started, so this is not "Director"'s experience. It's his shallow, knee-jerk, ignorant judgment. McKubre is not involved in any effort to maintain secrecy, but, given the work he did, and does, he is privy to secrets, which he keeps, as do I when that happens. (Nobody in the field is seeing "extremely positive results." Not that I know of, and I strongly suspect that's true for McKubre as well.) If you are, yourself, interested in "changing our civilization," start by cleaning up how you think. That could make a huge difference.

Shanahan repeats his ideas without looking at the real evidence, and as usual, there are no specific references. Yes, electrochemists commonly assume no ATER, because they are experts and ATER impacts Faraday efficiency, and they know the conditions under which it is signifcant and the conditions under which it is not. Readiing the old papers, Fleischmann was addressing this criticism as far back as 1990 or so. I'll be documenting that.

Actually, it was not clearly an explosion. It melted down and part of the palladium was vaporized, according to the report. It was not reported at the time, and materials were not kept. The biggest danger in current LENR work is exposure to nanoparticle metals.

I agree completely, and underscore "not working as well as they might." Reputation is important in science, but there are no formal structures to correct information cascade errors, and this is not just in science, it's all through how society functions and fails to function as well as possible. There is a place for what might be called "social engineers," building on the sociology of science.

Meanwhile, this piece and your name have been used to promote another apparent exaggerated promotion, Deneum.

That photo was certainly impressive. What happened to that reactor assembly? There were two, actually, both installed in Rossi's warehouse in Doral, Florida, the older one as a backup for the newer. When Rossi v. Darden settled, Rossi got them back, and dismantled them "for research." Meanwhile, there were allegedly customers waiting for these reactors, it's been claimed. Rossi moved on to a totally new design, demonstrated it last year with a demonstration that actually showed almost nothing, and he still has many fans. That photo looks very, very impressive, and that's what it was designed for. It is quite apparent that it didn't work as claimed. Not even close. Deneum and Synthestech, another Russian company, still use Rossi as promotion, now raising money through Etherium "tokens," which can attract millions of dollars from naive investors.

The "impossible" argument actually helps the scammers.

At this point, many assumed he was talking about Rossi. No, by that time he knew something was very, very off about Rossi's claims, IH had raised another $50 million, and it was not going into Rossi technology, and, in fact, this angered Rossi.

Yes. I do think Darden was a bit incautious in some of his comments about Rossi, or taken to be about Rossi. Nevertheless, because of what his company did in court, no investor in Rossi in the future can claim that they could not have known he was deceptive.

Rossi may continue his deception/insanity until he dies. Godes (Brillouin) has shown no signs of being near a major breakthrough (but that's a real company with serious investment). the Japanese may be getting a little closer, but nothing that would lead, as yet, to mainstream recognition, as far as I can see. A scientific breakthough -- without any immediate commercial implications -- could happen at any time, there is research under way, and well funded.

Key word: reliable. First of all, the FP approach is possibly inherently unreliable, extremely difficult to control, and "results" is not well defined. Some of their results were errors. But beyond that, it might take a billion dollars to accomplish this goal. That kind of money is not yet available. (Industrial Heat, as supported by Woodford, was prepared to put in over $200 million.) What is needed is basic research, and an X-Prize won't encourage that.

Dr. Price has said that twice now, but what is the huge cost? I call it the "lost opportunity cost." Assign a probability to the possibility of major commercial application of LENR. I put this above 50%, given enough time. (If someone wants to assess this, it will take some study!). So, then, the technology could be worth a trillion dollars per year as a rough idea. So delay in completing the research is costing a trillion dollars per year of delay. By the way, conclusively showing that the evidence for LENR is artifact, error, a mistake, would also be valuable. That never happened. The early "negative replications" were mostly wrong-headed. For example, they were looking for neutrons. No neutrons, no fusion, right? So ... suppose there is no fusion. So what? If there is heat, what is it coming from? (But, in fact, the evidence is overwhelming that nuclear reactions are happening, under some conditions, in unexpected places.)

They were not engineers. They apparently did figure out a way to get at least statistical reliability, but then most of that work was never published, and the history of cold fusion is full of insanities like that. There is experimental work of high interest that has never been confirmed. And then there are supposed confirmations that were extremely weak. There are supposed "Rossi replicators" out there, working on hints, and then the file drawer effect is in full operation. Nobody has actually confirmed major claims like that. I've been quite excited by certain work, such as, at first, Parkhomov. But then I looked closely at the data. The claim fell apart when examined closely. But who does that? Very few.

What is called "cold fusion" is real, though we do not yet know what is happening, beyond a general most-likely conclusion that deuterium is being converted to helium, process unknown, but with the energy release as required by the laws of thermodynamics from such conversion. That does not translate to reality for any particular claimant to commercial success. In fact, the problem is so difficult that knowing the possibility of a nuclear reactor utilizing these effects adds almost nothing to a claim, all claims in this area are suspect and sensibly require "extraordinary evidence."

Well, some research funding might be wasted, so the possible cost is limited to that, plus maybe some reputation damage.

Yes. In the 2004 DoE review, with an 18-member panel of experts on supposedly related fields (cold fusion, is this chemistry or physics?), half agreed that the evidence for anomalous heat was "conclusive." That was, however, after far too brief a review. The reality of the field is complex, and I don't see that people understand it from reading a few papers. It takes a lot more, generally.

I continue to be amazed by the quality of some of the research, and of some of the researchers, experienced and accomplished academics. There is also junk and even some junk from previously accomplished scientists who somehow lost it.It's all out there. And this is, quite simply, a social phenomenon. Simon's Undead Science points out that some of the condensed matter nuclear science research community's responses to rejection were themselves pathological.

"It" is sad. What is sad? People decide what to spend time on, it has always been this way. However, what is offensive -- not merely sad -- is when strong conclusions are drawn about others without examining evidence.

When this was written, there was not much public evidence about the Rossi claims, beyond what Rossi had himself had said, and what existed was flawed. Examples abound. There were many red flags, though.

Yes, indeed. However, it is also abused.

The argument, "such and such a famous scientist was wrong," is generally unconvincing to pseudoskeptics. Another example is Semmelweiss, who observed clear evidence, before Pasteur, that epidemics of peurpural fever, fatal for thousands of women, was attending physicians who autopsied cadavers and then examined the women. He was right, we now know, but he also was demented, which contributed to poor communication.

I.e., scientists are people. They do not fear that qua scientists, but simply as social animals. There is a real cost to becoming involved in LENR. It's not a joke. Yet there are people who have succeeded, who have made a career of it. And there are others who have made money, cheating investors. It's all happened.

"Rossi is not cold fusion" was a quick, easy argument. Rossi actually did not generally claim cold fusion. Does it matter? What, after all, is cold fusion. Even to say that some thing is "unlikely," we need to know what the thing is. This is the real objection: If nuclear reactions at low temperature were possible (fusion or something else), surely we would have seen them! That argument does have legs, but nobody was looking for such reactions, until Pons and Fleischmann reported their results. And then hundreds of scientists around the world started looking. And many possible effects where found, so, then, there is the "file drawer effect." That's a real problem with research that is difficult to replicate. To really understand the situation takes more than thinking about possibilities. I have now at least scanned thousands of papers, and I'm beginning to get some serious understanding. It is very obvious why cold fusion jwas rejected, it was partly social pathology, but partly real experimental difficulties. And the real reasons can easily sound like excuses. And people judge based on irrelevancies. Scientists, last I looked, are people.

This was actually well-known at the time. Much of the alleged history of cold fusion never actually happened. But who studies this? Well, some sociologists of science do. I'm collecting documents so that research is made easier.

Huw, this is nonsense. I don't need a justification to ignore something, because thinks do not come obligations attached. The basic justification would be "I don't know anyone who is telling me cold fusion is real, so I have no reason to investigate it. I see randome unknown individuals on the internet promoting it, it seems, but it's not in Nature and I pay Nature to let me know what to pay attention to. (That's actually been written to me. And the fellow,a PhD physicist, is certainly justified to rely on a publisher like that. Doesn't mean it's "right." Pseudoskeptics, however, often mistake a heuristic, a device for allocating time and effort, for a proof of something.

Yes, if the person is willing to listen and consider. Much of what I'd say about this is really obvious, if one knows the history and the actual experimental claims (I mean the data, not the interpretation. The interpretation of so-called "cold fusion" experimental results has often been premature at best, and just plain wrong on occasion. Science begins with the observation of what actually happens, and reality doesn't come with name tags attached.