Slashdot Mirror

See also a comment by "Rene" here: http://www.e-catworld.com/2017...

Here is an interesting interview with a Navy Physicist, published today, In which they explicitly state that they have working cold fusion devices and that they predict the behaviour of their cold fusion systems successfully with density functional theory calculations.

here

Take a deep breath, accept that you don't know everything and then go here and read about LENR/cold fusion which is about to change the world:
http://www.e-catworld.com/
Or just google it...

You can, if you want, allow yourself to be wowed by "man behind the curtain" fraud, but I've got better things to do. At least conventional fusion relies only on well-enunciated and well-accepted physics, something which cannot be said for the E-Cat. If Rossi actually possessed anything beyond ego and selfishness, he would have published and cooperated freely with the scientific community. If he possessed anything which anyone who matters considered worth anything, someone would have stolen his "secret" by now and it would actually be released in service to an energy-thirsty world.

... research instead, there would probably be plenty of material resource on the planet by now (or soon) for all to live like in the USA. Instead the USA spent that money to try to secure oil profits for a few and other various similar things.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...

But with a global economy of around US$80 Trillion annually, there is plenty to go around to invest in fusion and cheap solar and a variety of other research to create new resources of all sorts (energy, material, informational, social, spiritual, ecological, biological, etc.). Fusion research is really not that expensive compared to the possible benefits (although it makes sense to hedge bets with funding more solar research too and so on). As a chart here suggest, communications reinvests about 25% of domestic sales into R&D, and software 15%, while energy invests only 0.3%. No wonder we have energy issues if we fail to invest in R&D in it relative to the magnitude of the need. This is a marketplace failure, because most of the revenues are related to fossil fuels, but probably everyone knows the future of energy production will involve some other form (fusion, solar, wind, tidal, geothermal) and so current fossil fuel businesses have no emotional incentive to invest in these radical alternatives to coal, oil, and natural gas.
http://focusfusion.org/index.p...

As Julian Simon said, the human imagination is the ultimate resource:
http://www.juliansimon.com/wri...

But, imaginative people still need some form of life support to grow and have time to do stuff, and lab equipment is (not yet) free.

Of course, AIs will no doubt get more imaginative over time, too...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

Mainstream economics assumes things such as that demand for goods and services is infinite and that most humans will always be able to command wages for participation in the workforce. If demand for products and services is not infinite (as in diminishing and eventually negative returns on having more stuff), then eventually a few workers could supply all the demand through technological amplification. Or, even if demand was infinite, if most humans can't compete with AIs and robots, then "humans need not apply", which would wreck the underpinning assumption of mainstream economics that the right to consume for those without substantial financial capital is linked with receiving wages from a job.

I first saw the HBR article mentioned at "e-cat world", a site that discusses the potential of cheap energy from cold fusion:
http://www.e-catworld.com/2014...

Cheap energy from some sort of hot or cold fusion may also have some of the same effects on the economy, because often energy can substitute for human labor. For example, there is little need for humans to handle materials for recycling when you can break down trash into a plasma and use a mass-spectrometer-like system to separate it into constitute elements, as James P. Hogan suggested in "Voyage from Yesteryear" (a 1982 sci-fi book that discusses the clash of a scarcity-oriented cultural world view with an abundance-oriented one).
http://www.jamesphogan.com/boo...

Such a process could also eliminate most of the mining industry. Better designs, better materials, the accumulation of physical infrastructure, and the emergence of voluntary social networks (including discussion sites like Slashdot) also can displace a lot of paid labor in the exchange economy. So, there are multiple converging trends towards socioeconomic upheaval if (sane) human wants are somewhat limit

Caltech Vice-Provost on pyramid scheme: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg...

From 2004, and it has only gotten worse: http://www.villagevoice.com/20...

Still, also problems in science for anyone: http://philip.greenspun.com/ca...

More by me from 2009:
"[p2p-research] College Daze links (was Re: : FlossedBk, "Free/Libre and Open Source Solutions for Education")"
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...
"[p2p-research] The Higher Educational Bubble Continues to Grow"
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...

We can and should do better than this as a society.

My proposed solution: a "basic income" (as well as an expanded gift economy and better subsistence via 3D printing and cheap solar panels and cheap agricultural robots). Then anyone can live like a graduate and think and talk and publish all they want on whatever topic they like. Of course, if people want to afford lab space or equipment, that is more of a challenge, and they might have to do paying work. But so much can be done with cheap computers and cheap equipment now, that a lot of good tabletop research can still be done on a shoestring.
http://www.basicincome.org/bie...

One example (not saying it will work, but is it tabletop physics/chemistry on the cheap):
http://www.e-catworld.com/2014...

Even most millionaires would be better off with a basic income IMHO:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/basi...

Now if only the legions of unemployed humanities PhDs (and some unemployed law school graduates too) would just collectively take up this cause for a basic income and expanded gift economy etc. and write stories about it, write persuasive essays about it, write funny viral videos about it, lobby for incremental laws about it (Social Security for All from Birth), and so on. Then we might see some accelerating movement on it... My own attempts in that direction, which I'm sure those legions could vastly improve on:
"The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income "
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Nothing short of a big social shift like that is going to solve the fix academia is in, between the student load debt bubble about to burst and the collapsing pyramid scheme of the value of a PhD to train other PhDs. Instead we are seeing play out the ultimate folly of expanding cradle-to-grave schooling as a sort of arms race where parents invest vast amounts of money in hopes their offspring will have secure more credentials than someone else whose parents have less money and so get some coveted job in academia or elsewhere. All the while, AI and robotics are taking on more and more jobs -- even grading student essays and doing it so cheaply that, as in the parable above, humans need not apply.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story...

You are correct of course. Thanks for pointing that out. I should have written "proof". Likely Tart puts it better. To agree with you, from:
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/A...
"There are a few caveats to take into account to refine what a lack of supporting evidence says about a hypothesis. Absence of evidence is not necessarily strong evidence that outright disproves the hypothesis in the way that an observation that contradicts the hypothesis would be. ... As such, absence of evidence acting against a hypothesis is only a probabilistic approach and works best in a full Bayesian-style framework, which also takes into account other probabilities and other evidence."

== Some rambles on weighing the meaning of absence of evidence in US society

First, Tart claims evidence os paranormal activity from research studies. People may dispute that including by questioning the studies, so let's just assume there still is no evidence for the sake of discussion.

An important factor in weighing the meaning of the absence of evidence is the intense competition for research funds which is increasingly corrupting science. See: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg...
"Peer review is usually quite a good way to identify valid science. Of course, a referee will occasionally fail to appreciate a truly visionary or revolutionary idea, but by and large, peer review works pretty well so long as scientific validity is the only issue at stake. However, it is not at all suited to arbitrate an intense competition for research funds or for editorial space in prestigious journals."

For example, when Pons and Fleischmann submitted their "cold fusion" results to a peer review process for grant funding, it turned out one of the reviewers was working in the same area and was about to publish on it. This conflict (whoever is most at fault) ultimately lead to the press conference announcement (against the scientist's preferences) at the university wanted to claim priority on the discovery (via creating artificial scarcity through patents). A handful of hot-fusion scientists (especially at MIT) after fairly brief and limited attempts then claimed the results could not be duplicated an that failure to replicate was essentially proof that Pons and Fleischmann were wrong and "cold fusion" could not exists given popular conceptions of nuclear physics at the time. Pons and Fleishmann may have been wrong in several ways, including in calling it "fusion" of any sort and also in their neutron measurements. But these were expert chemists well experienced in heat measurements and that part of what they did was likely valid, and likely they did detect excess heat. But for *decades* any mention of doing cold fusion research became academic suicide based on the handful of failures to replicate by people whose short-term interests were served by not finding results. Only a few (mostly older, tenured) people continued to work on that. Related:
http://newenergytimes.com/v2/r...
http://www.e-catworld.com/2014...
http://undsci.berkeley.edu/art...

"Cold Fusion" (now LENR) Research has been picking up in the last few years though, such as with this LENR conference ironically at MIT:
http://world.std.com/~mica/201...

Another example is when Halton Arp was denied telescope time to pursue his "electric universe" ideas. Ignaz Semmelweis is another example from centuries ago, where his evidence of how to prevent disease by hand-washing was dismissed as in conflict with conceptions of health and disease at the time.

Good point on asking what's the noticeable difference. Although sometimes we don't notice a difference until we go looking for it. That may require imagination first -- or it might involve taking facts previously stumbled upon and ignored and discarded and arranging them in some new way. For example. as mentioned on slashdot recently:
http://science.slashdot.org/st...
From the article linked in the story: "And here is the rub: the culturally shaped analytic/individualistic mind-sets may partly explain why Western researchers have so dramatically failed to take into account the interplay between culture and cognition. In the end, the goal of boiling down human psychology to hardwiring is not surprising given the type of mind that has been designing the studies. Taking an object (in this case the human mind) out of its context is, after all, what distinguishes the analytic reasoning style prevalent in the West. Similarly, we may have underestimated the impact of culture because the very ideas of being subject to the will of larger historical currents and of unconsciously mimicking the cognition of those around us challenges our Western conception of the self as independent and self-determined. The historical missteps of Western researchers, in other words, have been the predictable consequences of the WEIRD mind doing the thinking."

Also along those lines, here is a book that discusses the systematic ignoring of observed homosexual behavior in animals by biologists for over a century:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
http://books.google.com/books/...

It turns out that most wildlife biologists for decades recorded their data to fit the assumption of heterosexuality in their studies. How many other times have scientists not seen (or reported) things that violate assumptions or cultural taboos? For example, look what happened with cold fusion. A quarter century ago, scientists funded by hot fusion grants claimed (after very little effort) that they could not replicate "cold fusion" and so it could not exist because it conflicted with current dogma, and the topic became verboten among academics. It could not be seen by most academics. Now, decades later, other MIT scientists teach a course on cold fusion and claim to be able to reliably replicate it.
http://www.infinite-energy.com...
http://www.e-catworld.com/2014...

When Google takes a long time to return a search result, is it because the Google servers are slow or because the universe simulation is deciding what the answer should be, including inventing a backstory? :-) Who is going to investigate that? And how? :-)

Also, as a counter example, does it really make a difference (in the short term to Earthly affairs) if there is just one galaxy of billions of them? Yet it is still somehow interesting to know and discuss that. Of course, that was based on verifiable observation. But no doubt there was speculation before that...
http://amazing-space.stsci.edu...
"In the early 1900s, astronomers were debating the makeup of spiral nebulae -- cloudy, spiral-shaped objects found throughout the night sky. Were they gas clouds located within our Milky Way galaxy, or were they vast groups of stars located far beyond our galaxy?
In 1919, American astronomer Edwin Hubble tackled the question. His keen astronomical knowledge was combined with a powerful tool - the Hooker telescope with its 100-inch mirror, on top of Mount Wilson in Cal

You can buy a 1Mw LENR reactor today. A 10 Kw that runs at 1200C and can operate a high-efficiency turbine is currently undergoing peer-review. http://www.e-catworld.com/2013/02/rossi-to-josephson-report-publication-probably-around-end-of-march/

Rossi's hot cat runs 1200C and can power a high-efficiency turbine generator. The peer review report is antipated in March: http://www.e-catworld.com/2013/02/rossi-to-josephson-report-publication-probably-around-end-of-march/

I hear there's this great new energy device called an E-Cat that's just coming into the market!

It was covered by Slashdot when the first demo plant went online.

It's now a year later, and the company is willing to sell units to anyone. Check here for details! Or this great WIkipedia article.

It sounds like a perfect high-tech replacement for old-style backup generators!

(For those of you who can only read English the way a compiler reads code: yes, I'm being sarcastic.)

http://www.e-catworld.com/ Thorium nuclear plants doesn't exist for now (and will probably never exist).

That's strange, because they built one in the 60's. I must be imagining that, then...

"Cajun Hell described the world as it is currently functioning today,"

Only some parts of it. Are most parents paid? How much of our economy is based on volunteerism of some sort? What about slashdot itself -- do people have to be paid to write all this great content? Were you paid to write your post? Do you ever cook your own meals without being paid? Do you and friends ever talk together or contribute to some potluck party without billing each other? Alternatives are possible; see for example this book:
"The dictionary of alternatives: utopianism and organization"
http://books.google.com/books?id=IKZVKMPEQCEC

Maybe we can't yet torrent uranium (interesting metaphorical idea) outside of Minecraft worlds, but we can share ideas about how to create alternative energy, which might be even better:
"On the Hunt For The Catalyst: Open Catalyst Crowd Project Forms to Advance Cold Fusion"
http://www.e-catworld.com/2011/12/on-the-hunt-for-the-catalyst-open-catalyst-crowd-project-forms-to-advance-cold-fusion/

On that general issue, see also an essay I sent Andrea Rossi (supposed inventor of a LENR device):
http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation
"The key point here is that breakthrough clean energy technologies will change the very nature of our economic system. They will shift the balance between four different interwoven economies we have always had (subsistence, gift, planned, and exchange). Inventors who have struggled so hard in a system currently dominated by exchange may have to think about the socioecenomic implications of their invention in causing a permanent economic phase change. A clean energy breakthrough will probably create a different balance of those four economies like toward greater local subsistence and more gift giving (as James P. Hogan talks about in Voyage From Yesteryear). So, to focus on making money in the old socioeconomic paradigm (like by focusing on restrictive patents) may be very ironic, compared to freely sharing a great gift with the world that may change the overall dynamics of our economy to the point where money does not matter very much anymore."

In any case, by decades of dedicated work (most not well paid), we will soon have fairly cheap solar panels:
http://cleantechnica.com/2011/05/29/ge-solar-power-cheaper-than-fossil-fuels-in-5-years/

What might we get soon with "Wikispeed" ideas applied to alternative energy?
http://www.wikispeed.com/the-process
"Team WIKISPEED uses methods developed by the fastest-moving software companies. In fact, in many ways we have more in common with Google or Twitter than with GM or Toyota. Manufacturing and old-thought software teams gather requirements, design the solution, build the solution, test the solution, then deliver the solution. In existing automotive companies, the design portion of that process alone takes three to twelve years, and then the vehicle design is built for five to fourteen years. This means it is possible to buy a brand new car from a dealer and that car represents the engineering team's understanding of what the customer might have wanted twenty-four years ago! Team WIKISPEED follows the model of Agile software teams, compressing the entire development cycle into one-week "sprints." We iterate the entire car every seven days, meaning that every seven days we reevaluate each part of the car and reinvent the highest-priority aspects, instead of waiting ten to twenty-four years to upgrade. This process enables a completely different pace of development."

"Practical cold fusion, or anything that delivers on the promises of cold fusion, would nail it."

On cold fusion, see:
http://www.e-catworld.com/2012/03/dr-george-miley-to-present-on-lenr-at-march-23-conference-will-awareness-of-new-energy-source-spread/
http://lenr-canr.org/wordpress/?page_id=522

The Widom-Larsen idea is that strange things happen at the surface of metals, where protons and electrons can become slow neutrons which then are absorbed which leads to conventional radioactive decay.

Or on solar panels, a commend by the director of GE's research lab:
http://cleantechnica.com/2011/05/29/ge-solar-power-cheaper-than-fossil-fuels-in-5-years/

In theory, to have space habitats, all we really need to do is launch one robotic seed factory to the moon, and then have it make all the space craft and habitats there. No need for CO2. And rising CO2 is really the least of our problems as a species -- it may already have forestalled another ice age we are due for. Much of it may have come from topsoil depletion by bad farming practices, too. That is solveable with relatively small amounts of energy and materials like so by grinding up rock: http://remineralize.org/

A little idea sketch I made about three years ago of what it would take to evacuate all humans from the Earth into space habitats:
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-August/004037.html
"Current launch costs are about US$10,000 a pound. People on starvation diets might weigh about 100 pounds. So, that's about US$1 million per person for launch costs using today's technology in small production runs. I feel it reasonable to assume that if we were going to launch billions of people into space, launch costs would come down by at least a factor of ten to US$100K per person, considering how people are already talking about such lower costs, and the actual energy to lift someone into space if you can do it really efficiently (space elevator) is maybe US$200 worth of electricity ... So, seven billion people soon, minus a few doomsters, times US$100K per person, is US$700 trillion. The world GDP is about US$60 trillion, so, in round numbers, this is about ten years of world economic output to put everyone into space. We can assume that with these self-replicating space habitat seeds that an entire space infrastructure is being prepared for free from sunlight and lunar ore and asteroidal ore (though it might take some time to produce it on an exponential growth curve). So, we only need to get people into low Earth orbit and shuttles can ferry people without luggage beyond low Earth orbit to a life of abundance produced with resources from space. Also, since we're evacuating the entire planet to leave it as a nature park, we don't need to do any upkeep on infrastructure as it is all abandoned. So, we can devote close to 100% of the industrial base to producing rockets. Also, people in space can still provide services to Earth like telemedicine or teleoperating mining equipment and launch control, so essential services can be kept going the whole time even as the last person goes on the last rocket (except the doomsters who want to stay :-)."

Of course, we could ask, how many times has this been done before over the last few billion years? :-)

Thanks for your other comment too (which this kind of addresses in part as well). Good luck with your robotics work. Robots could be a boon instead of a bane as long as we adjust our economy to a post-scarcity model. One example I put together:
"The Riches

I mentioned in my comment that group think could be related to both mainstream science and alternatives. As for the rest of your reply, I think you may want to consider a few key ideas;
* The placebo effect is real, it is actually getting stronger, and MDs regularly use it. So how can you say homeopathy, even if it were to be nothing more than the placebo effect, does not work?
* Nutrition and lifestyle choices are probably the major determinant of good health most of the time for most people, yet MDs have next-to-no training in understanding or discussing that, and they spend little time with patients counseling on those things in practice, and so if an alternative medical care provider like a homeopath spends an hour with someone and talks about those things, that customer is going to be way ahead in health compared to going to an MD in many (not all) situations.
* in practice, the Reagans (US president and first lady) turned to Astrology to set US policies for many years; I'm not saying that made it better, but it is funny in relation to that cartoon.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Reagan

To substantiate one other of those points:
"Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why."
http://www.wired.com/medtech/drugs/magazine/17-09/ff_placebo_effect?currentPage=all

Rossi may indeed have fooled himself (it remains to be seen), but there are many other much more reputable and experienced scientific staffers who have found similar effects. These people are not yet right because the money dynamics of basic research (fraught with much uncertainty) don't work that way. Even Bell Labs probably never made a dollar directly on inventing the transistor. People rarely make money from basic research because any related patents tend to expire before the multi-decade commercialization process for any truly new technology gets going. What is evil about what happened is the way the hot fusion scientists did bad science to discredit the cold fusion ones and keep the public funding for themselves. Yet another LENR claim:
http://www.e-catworld.com/2012/03/dr-george-miley-to-present-on-lenr-at-march-23-conference-will-awareness-of-new-energy-source-spread/
"Excess heat generation from our gas-loading LENR power cell (Figure 1) has been verified, confirming nuclear reactions provide output energy."
That success is after having skeptics cut his approved funding over a decade ago:
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/1999/09/21-03.html

Perhaps the biggest issue is that you are looking at this situation very narrowly -- is there currently a reliable materialistic scientific explanation for a specific practice? Real treatments always exist in the context of a practitioner/customer relationship (or friend-to-friend, or parent-to-child, etc.), which can affect the outcome. I'd encourage you to look holistically at the issue of overall systemic outcomes for homeopathy (including the psychological benefits of people being listened to and informed about some basics by someone who is compassionate, even if that person they are paying may indeed believe in what may be a bunch of nonsense). If you look a bit more holistically, you will have to admit that mainstream MD doctors spending ten minutes with patients with diseases caused by nutritional and lifestyle issues and then proceeding to prescribe some medication as a "permission slip" to keep doing the bad behavior is the worst kind of harmful pseudoscience, and yet, in practice, that is the system you are defending.

Examples:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/disease/BloodPressure.aspx

Firstly, NASA states in the last video on the post they have "Demonstrated" LENR. "It has the demonstrated ability to produce excess amounts of energy, cleanly, without hazardous ionizing radiation, without producing nasty waste." LENR is the more appropriate term for what we used to call "cold fusion" This is what the E-Cat uses. This tells me, NASA has devices that make energy with LENR. They refer to using Ni and H which Rossi is also using.

Also, the Rossi said in interviews that he is running his E-Cat at home, and other people in his team are running them. The link at e-catworld below refers to the interview where he stated this. http://www.e-catworld.com/2012/01/rossi-in-talks-with-home-depot-for-e-cat-distribution-interview-with-james-martinez-on-cah-flow-radio/

His e-cat is with Underwriting Lavatories and awaiting UL certification. This was stated on the latest interview with him. The PESWiki link links to the interview and has a partial transcript of the interview. http://pesn.com/2012/01/14/9602012_Momentous_Breakthroughs_Announced_During_Anniversary_E-Cat_Interview/

You can't forget about the 1MW plant that the customer paid $2 million for after the customer tested the unit.

Walt

And here are some more reasons I sent to Rossi: http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation
"The key point here is that breakthrough clean energy technologies will change the very nature of our economic system. They will shift the balance between four different interwoven economies we have always had (subsistence, gift, planned, and exchange). Inventors who have struggled so hard in a system currently dominated by exchange may have to think about the socioecenomic implications of their invention in causing a permanent economic phase change. A clean energy breakthrough will probably create a different balance of those four economies like toward greater local subsistence and more gift giving (as James P. Hogan talks about in Voyage From Yesteryear). So, to focus on making money in the old socioeconomic paradigm (like by focusing on restrictive patents) may be very ironic, compared to freely sharing a great gift with the world that may change the overall dynamics of our economy to the point where money does not matter very much anymore. ..."

Others calling to open source the eCat:
http://www.e-catworld.com/2011/11/open-source-the-e-cat/

By the way, the catalyst may be some variant on Potasium Carbonate:
http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/GernertNnascenthyd.pdf

Mentioned here by "Sojourner Soo", with the abstract from 1994:
http://ecatnews.com/?p=1144
"Anomalous heat was measured from a reaction of atomic hydrogen in contact with potassium carbonate on a nickel surface. The nickel surface consisted of 500 feet of 0.0625 inch diameter tubing wrapped in a coil. The coil was inserted into a pressure vessel containing a light water solution of potassium carbonate. The tubing and solution were heated to a steady state temperature of 249 C using an FR heater. Hydrogen at 1100 psig was applied to the inside of the tubing. After the application of hydrogen, a 32 C increase in temperature of the cell was measured which corresponds to 25 watts of heat. Heat production under these conditions is predicted by the theory of Mills where a new species of hydrogen is produced that has a lower energy state then normal hydrogen."

In the 1950s (or maybe 1930s) a Princeton physicist was talking about some similar things (forget his name offhand).

Rossi could have ended almost all dispute by just running two eCats side-by-side, one with the catalyst and one without. Or even just one with the hydrogen and one without, where people picked the one getting the hydrogen. That would rule out many things. (Maybe not all, but a lot.) The fact that he has not done that, which would be relatively easy, makes me more suspicious that it really works (although people have invented explanations for why he has not done that).

What has been said by Steven Krivit is the suggestion that LENR (cold fusion) does work, but not as well as Rossi suggests it does (and he has been still trying to get it to work well).

Still, it is so hard to be an innovator in our society, that I could cut Rossi a lot of slack. Just maybe not a check yet. :-)

But sooner or later we will get cheap energy, one way or another, so many people are working towards it. Even just from solar:
http://cleantechnica.com/2011/05/29/ge-solar-power-cheaper-than-fossil-fuels-in-5-years/

Or thorium, or hot fusion, or geothermal, or whatever...

But the eCat would be a great mobile power device.

Of course, if it does work, it is only one more reason we need to rethink our outlook on nature, technology, society, and economics:
htt

At one time called "cold fusion," now called "low-energy nuclear reactions" (LENR), such effects are now published in peer-reviewed journals and are gaining attention and mainstream respectability. The instrumentation expertise of NASA GRC is applied to improve the diagnostics for investigating the anomalous heat in LENR.

A herring by any other name would smell as fishy... in any event if LENR, as you put it, were a practicable possibility I'd expect to be hearing announcements from someone more reputable than this Rossi character. He claims to have invented not one but two cold fusion technologies*. Now this may be a terrible, terrible bit of prejudice against someone who may end up in the history books, but I tend towards a more cynical or pragmatic attitude when it comes to parting with my or the public's money.

*"The 1 MW plants have a totally different technology and engineering."

http://www.e-catworld.com/2011/10/e-day-thread-rossis-1-mw-e-cat-plant-tested-by-first-customer/

Latest update:
18:06 GMT
From PESWiki: Q & A just finished; reading of results; 470 kW maintained continuously during self-sustain; customer satisfied; sale made; more later. – SilverThunder 11:07, 28 October 2011 (PDT)

Still no independent confirmation, but they SAY they did great...

Andrea Rossi October 28th, 2011 at 10:37 AM

FIRST INFORMATION REGARDING THE 1 MW PLANT TEST:
WE SARTED REGULARLY THE TEST THIS MORNING . EVERYTHING IS GOING WELL SO FAR. THE 1 MW E-CAT IS WORKING IN SELF SUSTAINING.
TONIGHT I WILL PUBLISH THE NON SECRET REPORT THAT THE CUSTOMER WILL RELEASE.
WARM REGARDS, I HAVE TO RETURN TO THE PLANT. SORRY, I CANNOT ANSWER TO THE MANY COMMENTS I AM RECEIVING. I WILL PUBLISH THEM PROBABLY I WILL NEVER FIND THE TIME TO ANSWER.
WARMEST REGARDS TO ALL,
ANDREA ROSSI

Hush, filter, I know there are many capitalized letters there. That's what was posted. I wonder how much must be said which is not capitalized before the caps filter will quit whining and let the original be posted the way that it should be posted. This much, apparently.

The discussion for events happening today has been moved onto its own thread:

http://www.e-catworld.com/2011/10/e-day-thread-rossis-1-mw-e-cat-plant-tested-by-first-customer/

PES Network is going to be tweeting about it:

https://twitter.com/#!/PESNetwork

Prepare for some real-time cognative dissonance from Rossi et al.