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"Perpetual Motion DeLorean" Scammers Face $26M Judgment
An anonymous reader writes "Back in 2002, we discussed a story about the so-called 'Perpetual Motion DeLorean,' which could 'supposedly go "hundreds of miles" at speeds over 100MPH without stopping to recharge.' More than seven years later, the final shoe has dropped on this saga, with a $26 million judgment against Carl Tilley and his wife, who propagated this scam that ran for several years. Probably the height of its audacity was when Tilley told his shareholders in May of 2002 that GE had offered $2 billion 'sight unseen' to buy out the technology."
Did it go 88mph?
Without doubt that guy could be on the board or be CEO of a big company...
(I'm being serious!)
Vaseline? Where we're going, we don't need Vaseline.
They're doing the human race a favour. Really.
Evolution in action, baby. Anyone who is willing to not only believe in perpetual motion but invest money in it deserves whatever it is he or she gets from their particular brand of ignorance. A basic grade-school science curriculum should be sufficient armor against a scam of this type (well, at least in my day it was.)
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
It was a tax on people who don't understand the basic laws of thermodynamics.
This ain't rocket surgery.
Well, he figured if he was going to scam folks, why not scam folks in style?
The GP seems to think that these scammers did humanity a favor by removing large sums of money from the scammed (fools) who can't then use that money for other foolish purposes. Any crime could be justified along those lines by blaming the victim of the crimes for being unable to defend themselves against it. Social darwinism at its finest.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
I noticed that as well, apparently the blog is here. It'd be laughable were it not so sad. The human capacity for clinging to ignorance in spite of well-known facts really is an amazing thing.
Caveat Utilitor
The first sentence cracked me up:
"Those of you who have been in the Free Energy community for years have heard of Carl Tilley and his claim to have a battery charger technology that could keep a system running indefinitely, though in fact he stole the technology"
OH NO!! He stole imaginary technology!!
I remember following this story back in 2002 and there was a report of Carl Tilley being hampered by a lawsuit -- some other guy was claiming that *HE* invented the imaginary perpetual motion battery charging technology.
While I can see where you come from, this is still deception and should not be rewarded. Neither should the greed of the 'investors'.
A bit of information: I've followed the Tilley story from the day he and Doug Littlefield announced their first "free energy" machine. Yes, Doug Littlefield, the guy who provided the evidence against Tilley, was initially his partner. Once Tilley realized what a gold mine he had stumbled on with "free energy", he went his own way, created the Tilley Electric Vehicle, and began selling bogus stock. By most accounts, Carl Tilley scammed at least $500,000 from various individuals in Tennessee until he fled the state. I actually saw his demo at the Nashville Superspeedway. I went there because I was curious how he was going to back out of proving the TEV actually worked. The bogus wheel bearing failure on the 13th lap was absolutely no surprise.
As for Sterling Allan, he is a "true believer" in every sense of the word, in terms of his religious beliefs and his belief in free energy. He's never met a free energy claimant he didn't like, and will bend over backwards to give even the most bizarre claims every possible benefit of the doubt. If Doug Littlefield hadn't provided Allan with such an overwhelming amount of evidence that Tilley was a two-bit check-kiting con man, to this day Allan would still be writing hopeful articles about Tilley's "technology". You just about have to hit Sterling Allan over the head with a two-by-four to make him change his mind. Even now, if you look on Allan's web site, you can find him giving publicity to guys just like Tilley, but with a slightly more sophisticated sales job.
The power of self-delusion is enormous, and nowhere will you find it stronger than in the free energy community.
...just like muggers and other thugs who help to weed out the weak and elderly?
The real question is, if you asked 100 random people what 'random' meant, how many could define it correctly.
Sounds like one of them would not be you. You've just described a quasi-random sampling of people who fly commercially, which by definition creates a very biased sample and one which would likely overestimate the percentage of people who know what random means. People who fly would tend to be more educated and wealthier than the general population. At any rate, it's certainly not a random sampling of the general population.
I would argue that the "alternative energy/environmental impact" community has got to be a close second. There are still *plenty" of "alternative energy" people who think that the big car companies are suppressing 100 mpg carburetors and intentionally stifling innovation, despite the clearly suicidal reasoning that entails, not to mention the second-law-of-thermodynamics issues. There are plenty of people talking about space power systems despite the unknown technological basis and absurdly prohibitive economics (and, bizarrely, environmental impacts) of such a system. There are still people advocating orders-of-magnitude level of "conservation" despite the obvious economic and quality of life effects that this would have. There are still those advocating isolating human population to walled cities with limited external activity to "protect the world from people" People set SUVs on fire to protest environmental impacts of SUVs, and release more pollution in 1/2 hour than the SUV would have released in its entire existence.
Problems will not be solved by "true believers", precisely because they are true believers.
Brett
Because the H1B holders are as close to indentured servants as it gets these days. Their H1B visas are tied to their jobs -- if they lose their jobs, they have something like two weeks to find a new job or leave the country.
Employers like that bludgeon to hold against employees. Work your ass off for less pay, don't cause trouble, and in a few years you might be able to stay here on your own. I'd like to see a plot of how many H1B employees are laid off or fired vs time with the H1B. I bet there'd be a spike near the end. I bet a plot of hires vs time in visa would show hiring falling off near the end of the visa time. Why hire an H1B who only has a few months of servitude remaining? On the other hand, those within such close reach of a permanent visa might just be more desperate and more willing to take crappy terms.
Proper H1B reform would start with applying the visa to the employee, not the job. You'd see corporate interest in hiring H1B holders drop like a rock. That should tell you something.
Infuriate left and right
The core principle of capitalism is making mutually beneficial transactions.
If you buy something, the object was worth more to you than the money which was charged.
If you sell something, then that something was worth less to you than the price you got for it.
This isn't a flaw, it's the way that value is maximized.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
I hate how the racists always have to rear their ugly heads when topics like this pop up.
Newsflash: race has nothing to do with a country's prosperity. Culture does.
Since you brought up Haiti, let's look at it more closely. It shares an island, Hispaniola, with another country called the Dominican Republic. Check it out on Google Maps satellite view; you should be able to see the border quite clearly even without political boundaries shown, because the Haiti side is all brown and the DR side is all green. That's because Haiti destroyed all their natural resources (namely, their forests), while DR wisely preserved theirs before they were destroyed like that. Now, the DR has lots of tourism (such as from divers), fishing, etc. Haiti only has dumb liberals visit to take pity on everyone, but that's about it (until recently of course). See, when Haiti destroyed their forests, this also caused massive soil erosion, which destroyed all the offshore coral reefs, which are a vital part of the ecosystem (something stupid racist conservatives like you probably dismiss as unimportant in your quest for more oil). So, no coral reefs = no fish, and also no divers or snorklers. Economically, the DR is doing just fine, while we all know how bad off Haiti is. Now, how is this all relevant? They're the same race of people! They're both Spanish-speaking descendants of African slaves (probably mixed with some Native Americans from the area). But, they obviously have a different enough culture that they decided to split the island into two countries at one point, and had different ideas on how to run their countries. One hasn't been too bad, the other's been a disaster.
There's nothing genetically significant about white people. Genetically speaking, we're more closely related to Chinese, Australian aborigines, Arabs, and Native Americans than one tribe of chimpanzees is to another; we're practically inbred as a species, probably due to the near-extinction events in the distant past that have popped up on Slashdot recently. However, Westerners have developed a culture, over several thousand years (i.e. Greeks and Romans) that allowed them to be rather successful. Lots of other people have been able to adopt some of the better elements of Western culture and be successful as well, learning from our mistakes and successes. America certainly has a unique culture as well, going back several hundred years, that is distinct from others, and has been pretty good about accepting others as immigrants and assimilating them, allowing the culture as a whole to prosper. 100 years ago, narrow-minded people like you were complaining about Irish immigrants of all people, who no one today sees as anything but "white". The only problem we have now is a little too much unchecked immigration; 100 years ago, there was plenty of it, but it was controlled, people were brought in from many different countries (not just one large neighbor) so that none of them would grow too powerful and overrun the American culture, and they were all forced to learn English and assimilate, and that seems to be gone now.
White people don't need their own country; they already have a bunch, like Ireland, Iceland, Greenland, etc. However, Americans do need to do a better job protecting their own culture, though without closing it off altogether from immigrants.