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Bill Gates Sponsoring Palladium-Based LENR Technology
Baldrson writes Kitco.com reports that: "Low energy nuclear reactor (LENR) technology, and by extension palladium, is attracting the attention of one of the richest men in the world and a pioneer inventor of new technology... In a recent visit to Italy, billionaire business man, investor and inventor Bill Gates said that for several years he has been a believer in the idea of LENR, and is a sponsor of companies developing the technology... During his trip to Italy he visited the national agency for new technologies energy and sustainable economic development (ENEA) where scientists have made significant progress towards a working design for low energy nuclear fusion. The centerpiece of their design is the same as in Mitsubishi's, palladium. Creating palladium foil with just the right parameters, and managing stress levels in the material was a key issue, one that the researchers at EMEA were able to resolve several years ago."
It's good that he has a lot of money, because this is going down the toilet.
That sounds like a boondoggle, not something that would be useful in a productive environment.
I think this story really illustrates the fact the Gates was a very lucky man. He was in the right place at the right time (and with the right mother who was a friend of the Chairman of IBM) to be successful. Under any other circumstance it seems he would be pursuing a career in alchemy.
Whatever happened to Andrea Rossi? I was all excited about the E-Cat stuff from 2012, but since then he seems to have disappeared off the face of the Earth...
LENR means Low Energy Nuclear Reactions, and is most decidedly NOT fusion; the coulomb barrier is not applicable. The mechanism is completely different, the best theory so far is that of Widom-Larsen which explains it using Ultra Low Momentum neutrons. See http://news.newenergytimes.net for details, for the theory http://newenergytimes.com/v2/sr/WL/WLTheory.shtml .
640 Kelvin ought to be enough for anybody.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
I threw up my breakfast, you insensitive clod!
Stop this shit. Ever wonder why Gates still has his billions? Gates is not a sponsor, but an investor. The aim is to make profit.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2014/11/reports-from-italy-that-bill-gates.html
A fool and his money are easily parted.
There's a sucker born every minute.
The cold fusion scam rolls on.
Italy and Germany had nuclear power. We even had a large scale thorium berserk running here. Through the violent work of Maoist traitors, this threat to the oil and gaze industry has been killed.
Europe is a rotten place run by occupiers and traitors.
TFA calls Gates a pioneer. Well, the covered wagon part is right. Please name something of value that was invented by Gates himself. Give up? Ok, without looking it up.... name something of real scientific or technological value invented by Microsoft Research Labs. That lab allowed Gates to take enormous tax write-offs but never produced any scientific or tecnological break-throughs. But hey, it was all in good tax-dodging fun, right?
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
This smells like a scam of some sort - I can't find any credible sources that link Gates to LENR, and the linked page also includes predictions by a financial astrologer. All the related links I dig into go nowhere but the same set of fringe / crackpot cold fusion sites. Anyone have anything firm on Gates involvement?
The stopped just short of saying he was going to imbed an arc reactor in his chest. A superhero, he ain't.
Pretty sure ClearType came from them. There's also C#, though I suppose some would argue about its technological value. They also did a pretty heavy duty astronomy visualization program that I forget the name of.
I guess you have made my case. :) Fonts. A minor derivative language. Astronomy visualization. For these the US taxpayer sacrificed $billons in lost revenue that had to be made up from the taxes of hard-working creative folks who actually make useful things. Gates didn't build his monopoly the old fashiioned (and legal) way. Microsoft inherited an OS monopoly from IBM becasue IBM was arrogant enough to think that only IBM could sell operating systems. Microsoft stole their monopoly in internet browsers from Netscape, for which they were convicted and fined (not heavily enough). Microsoft could go away tomorrow and the world would be a better place.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
Maybe Striling will be Gates' adviser as he investigates all this kinda stuff. He might even get some money for some of the more "real" free energy devices out there before the big companies close them down.... ;)
The sad thing is that this richest man in the world would probably have achieved far more with his stated philantropic goals, if not his own endeavours, if he'd not pulled as much monies out of various markets with his overpriced underperforming software.
Good luck getting enough palladium, seeing as how Russia controls what 60% of the world's supply of the metal.
I had thought Woz from Apple invented Clear Type, but called it something else. Wasn't there some big legal battle over that specific thing between Apple inventing it and MS stealing it?
Nothing innovative about C# either. Java and VMs for running code already worked. JSP pages were already a thing. Delphi simple to program OO language was already in existence. C# just put that all together nicely.
Gates did make one of the original versions of Basic that ran on microprocessors. Don't think he invented it, but at its time I understand was at least one of the best if not the best. I'm not aware of anything he "invented" after that though.
"Research" was inventing (i.e: writing) code.
Microsoft core business is shipping it to customers. Microsoft has never been a software company, they are a delivery service.
This free Microsoft tool for automatically stiching images together to make a panorama is pretty freaking amazing, and I am no Microsoft fanboi for sure.
http://research.microsoft.com/...
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
Sub-pixel rendering was invented by Apple. Microsoft only patented there implementation called ClearType, which uses 3 sub-pixels instead of 2 sub-pixels, and is carefully worded around the existing Apple patent. The Apple patent is referenced in the Microsoft patent.
Woz did a text aliasing trick using RGB colors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
Palladium-based fusion reactor? Hmm... I wonder, is he secretly building an Iron Man suit in his basement?
Absence of proof != proof of absence.
The 'Tech Metals Insider' article contains a link to what it describes as another of its articles on Low Energy Nuclear Reactors, but it is actually about the hohlraums used in some inertial-confinement laser fusion research. The author is apparently unaware that this is a very different technology, and so cannot be regarded as a reliable guide on the subject.
Nowhere does Bill Gates, in his blog or elsewhere, explicitly state that he believes in and/or support so-called LENR.
This is just another one of many ongoing scams by the e-CAT/LENR conmen to fleece the credulous.
A side result is exposing the reality that most computer sci types / software programmers know bupkes about physics and chemistry.
Now that gold has tanked, they need to promote the sale of palladium to gullible investors.
Ok, without looking it up.... name something of real scientific or technological value invented by Microsoft Research Labs.
Kinect.
I still have the (free) original beta binaries from AutoStich (2003/2004). (and regularly us them)
I thought Microsoft hired the person behind AutoStich, and took over the project (AutoStich was deleted from the internet for many years),
but they are back now, and Microsoft seams to license there work: http://www.cs.bath.ac.uk/brown/autostitch/autostitch.html#licensing
In any case, it was effeminately not invented, not implemented first by Microsoft.
OK, Microsoft "invented" that sub-pixel font rendering could also be done with 3 sub-pixels instead of 2, and "invented" the "ClearType" name.
anything else?
TFA calls Gates a pioneer. Well, the covered wagon part is right. Please name something of value that was invented by Gates himself. Give up? Ok, without looking it up.... name something of real scientific or technological value invented by Microsoft Research Labs. That lab allowed Gates to take enormous tax write-offs but never produced any scientific or tecnological break-throughs. But hey, it was all in good tax-dodging fun, right?
Or, you could look up the definition of the word "pioneer".
Here you go: "among the first or earliest to enter a new field of inquiry, Enterprise, or progress."
Bill Gates and Microsoft clearly meets that definition regarding the personal computer
LENR means Low Energy Nuclear Reactions, and is most decidedly NOT fusion; the coulomb barrier is not applicable. The mechanism is completely different, the best theory so far is that of Widom-Larsen which explains it using Ultra Low Momentum neutrons. See http://news.newenergytimes.net for details, for the theory http://newenergytimes.com/v2/sr/WL/WLTheory.shtml .
Yes, it is fusion... okay maybe I should say "it would be fusion if LENR would work".
It might not be the normal fusion with the "high activation energy" we would expect, but the results are the same... you take two atoms and after the process you have left different atoms with a lower total mass... and you get the difference of the mass (mostly) in form of gamma radiation. This process is called nuclear fusion.
And that is (in my opinion) the reason why most (or all) LENR reactors are a sham... they don't produce the gamma radiation to explain the mass difference between their "fuel" and the "leftover" material. E=m*c^2 is a bitch, right?
You can heat your house with two tea candles and a couple clay flower pots:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Perpetual motion:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
There is a lot more. These guys and gals have us to the point of completely free energy.
But while the communist cabal of evil "real" scientists are all busy trying to shackle the world with their hoohaw global warming money and freedom grab when they aren't out killing puppies, and figuring out ways to break Jerry Sandusky out of jail - the true inventors working tirelessly in their garages have solved all our energy problems
WAKE UP AMERICA! from a cave in Idaho, where men are still men, and the sheep are pretty nervous
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Bad example: That's a "Primesense" technology. :/
I don't know if this was an invention, but it certainly was pioneering: Microsoft 8K BASIC. It was originally written by Gates and his buddy Paul Allen personally. (You've got to start somewhere.)
MS 8K BASIC came built in ROM with all of the microcomputers of a certain era: TRS-80, the Apple II, and my own beloved (but obscure) Ohio Scientific. Note that Apple's own Integer Basic, written by Woz, wasn't nearly the success on the Apple II, though it had its following. The Apple II wouldn't have been nearly the success it was without MS 8K BASIC to help make it mainstream.
I learned assembly language originally by studying Gate's and Allen's handiwork. My Ohio Scientific had a 6502 processor, and after reading a book on 6502 assembly language to learn some basic principles, I *really* learned 6502 assembly by studying disassembly listings of 8K BASIC. It was a marvel of clever assembly techniques. It may be hard to appreciate at this point the impact of that little 8K piece of code. It's what made the fledgling microcomputer business viable for hobbyists a few years before the IBM PC made "personal computers" viable for businesses and your grandma.
Oh, and let's not forget Gate's innovations as a monopolist. I don't know the details, but one can't logically disparage him as a monopolist without recognizing his pioneering innovations in the field of monopoly. For example, his ongoing rant at the time about "Microsoft needs the freedom to innovate", while having built a business on doing nothing but copying the (technical) innovations of others was actually kindda innovative, in a business sense. Of course, John D. Rockerfeller and others had pioneered monopoly a century earlier, but one can't help but recognize that Gates must have pushed the monopolist's state-of-the-art of a bit further. For example, Rockerfeller certainly didn't invent "embrace, extend and extinguish". So, let's give credit where credit's due.
(Note to moderators: before you down-mod me for saying positive things about Bill Gates here, please note the ironic undertone of the last paragraph.)
I first thought that these reactors were going to be based on "Microsoft Palladium", the infamous trusted computing technology from MS. Cold fusion with DRM, why not?
What ever happened to the TWR? I have heard Gates promote the idea since the TED Talks
I am willing to go out on a limb and quote a lot more than that:
1: Active Directory. Yes, it is Kerberos compatible, but it is the only infrastructure that can scale to millions, if not billions of users. OpenLDAP can't do more than just domains, and businesses need trees and forests for their organizational structure.
2: Exchange. IBM and Google are exceptions since they eat their own dog food, but every other big company has their messaging on Exchange.
3: GPOs. Try to manage thousands of desktops with another management system. Good luck.
4: BitLocker. It may not be as "cool" as TrueCrypt, but it not just has security, but flexibility to deal with eDiscovery rules in the enterprise.
5: Storage Spaces and ReFS. Linux still does not have a production filesystem that can detect and correct bit rot.
6: DHCP. MS invented this because there wasn't anything that was even comparable. BOOTP for thousands of desktops? Yeah, right.
7: IPSec. MS didn't invent it, but they did make a working implementation.
8: Offline file deduplication on the filesystem level. Still no other mainstream OS has this functionality. Yes, there are hacks that do this, but we are meaning production here, where deduplication on a share with backups on it can save a lot of space.
9: SMB. With SMB v3, one checkbox enables encryption for shares. NFS has come a long way, but nowhere near as secure, and V4 requires Kerberos for user functionality.
10: ActiveSync. It doesn't matter what the device is, if it hooks to Exchange, it can be remotely wiped. This functionality has been around longer than iOS or Android.
Someone please tell me something Gates invented other than how to lawyer your way to a billion.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
He's right you know.
I see a lot of "fool and his money" posts and it's nonsense or pseudoscience. And I see a lot of posts on "Fusion being 20, 30, or even 40 years away" from posters when stories on hot fusion are posted here.
So given the lack of progress in hot fusion after billions have been spent and decades wasted,...
Thermonuclear fusion has made progress - the evidence so far is that the tokamak system can be scaled up to commercial plant size. It is the only fusion technology to currently be in the running to do this. So there is progress. Unfortunately even if current plans pan out as expected it will be the most expensive energy in the world, exceeding the cost of every means of energy production currently in use (and some of them will be getting still cheaper in the mean time).
if a low cost fusion alternative can be found then it should be researched. After all what do you have to lose?
...
But given that the payoff for a relatively minor amount of funding is so massive, harsh criticism for research into the phenomenon is counterproductive. It should in fact be encouraged by anyone who considers themselves a person who supports clean energy.
Nothing wrong with investing effort in long-shot ideas, and questionable 'anomalies'. That definitely should go on. But there is a huge difference between legitimate scientific research, which requires well designed experiments with high quality controls, openness, peer review, providing the means to reproduce results, etc. and these claimed "trade secret" scams that share none of the traits of legitimate research, but are trolling for 'investors'.
Not all people working in this field are evident scamsters. There scores of researchers working in this area for decades - with no convincing results to show for it. The fact that there seems to be a mutual exclusion between well designed experiments and positive results suggest that this is a social phenomenon of marginal researchers finding something to do, not a scientific one.
Final point: we are still just looking for convincing evidence that some low energy reaction phenomenon actually exists. There is no reason to suppose that even if it does, we are looking at a promising new source of energy. That is a pitch line for someone selling snake oil.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
This item is simply hyping a press release from a rare metals sales firm. There is nothing to see here folks, move along.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Didn't he invented EEE (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish)?
Well, I can see part of your point, but there can be many kinds of pioneers. If anything, he was a pioneer in the consumer and business software and computing industry. Lots of people take tax write-offs. Not taking advantage of an opportunity like that is certainly laudable, but are we all supposed to become Harrison Bergerons to meet your arbitrary requirements for shared burden?
.. pa-ra-bo-la, pa-ra-bo-la, 2 pi R, 2 pi R, where's your latus rectum, where's your latus rectum, 2 pi R
My kingdom for mod points to rank this comment insightful +1!
.. pa-ra-bo-la, pa-ra-bo-la, 2 pi R, 2 pi R, where's your latus rectum, where's your latus rectum, 2 pi R
That lab allowed Gates to take enormous tax write-offs but never produced any scientific or tecnological break-throughs. But hey, it was all in good tax-dodging fun, right?
Tax write-off and tax dodging? What the heck? That's like you donating $100 to the Red Cross to get $15 back in tax refund. Not to even mention all the payroll taxes that people working in Microsoft pay. MS would be way better off just stashing the money like Apple does.
Your post is utterly moronic. What is it about Microsoft that turns otherwise smart people into f**king morons?
that abnormally sized penis came from?
Prior to Gates, the idea of selling "licensed" software was really not taking off. Once IBM gave him the keys to their PC OS kingdom, Gates was able to push this licensing sales scheme into mainstream.
Were it not for Gates, we may see all software as free (or as a component cost of it's hardware) still today. You can't give Jobs/Apple credit for this. Gates and Microsoft were instrumental to the concept of paying for software.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Wait a minute, I'm pretty sure Microsoft invented the internet.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
he should be investing into thorium companies as well.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Am I the only one who thought this had something to do with that palladium initiative Microsoft tried to implement some years ago?
CRAP!....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
I am disappointed with the slashdot crowd here. I assume that high energy physics people are real intent on making cold fusion/LENR look stupid.
But, it is way past doubt. Everyone who has studied the issue knows the answer. It isn't hard to find the data, if you want to do it. DOE's study of more than 10 years ago said it was solid science, early stage, hard to reproduce. Has anyone read the history of Boyle's vacuum pump? It isn't easy to reproduce science in the early stages, and isn't easy even now for a lot of biochem, for example
But, look at the recent MIT conference. Cold Fusion is reproducable. Surprise surprise, taking a new tech commercial isn't easy.
If you haven't studied the issue, if you can't cite that data, your opinion is worthless. If you can cite the data, you know the answer.
1. OpenLDAP + Samba can handle millions of _objects_ just fine. And tree structures are implicit in LDAP. Amazon even offers a hosted version of it!
2. Exchange is overrated crap.
3. Sure, if 'management' is limited to pretty much locking the desktop background. Try to install and configure non-trivial third-party software through GPOs. Hell, even try to install Microsoft's own VisualStudio.
4. BitLocker is indeed nice.
5. RefuseFS is still very experimental. BTFS supports integrity checking on the filesystem level and DM supports it on block level.
6. DHCP - the original RFC states that is was written by Ralph Droms ( droms@bucknell.edu ) in 1993, when Microsoft didn't even have their own IP stack!
8. BTRFS has dedup. NTFS doesn't support dedup, it's done on the block level.
9. Is anybody still even interested in file sharing?
I wouldn't go so far as to tar Microsoft as being a company that invented nothing of value. However, I don't think Bill Gates himself would qualify as an inventor of note. I mean, we generally don't say the microchip was invented by the stockholders of Texas Instruments?
Even if all he did was buy other companies (which initially wasn't the case... he wrote a lot of code in the early years), he had to be shrewd enough more often than not, to find the ones that would benefit Microsoft and be both technically and commercially viable. Just buying other companies wouldn't have cut it. A lot of companies trying this have failed because the people running them weren't smart enough to make good picks. He had to be smart enough to pick the right companies more than the stinkers. Just by this record alone, his choices should be noted and paid attention to.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Dumbest post I've read in 20 years. You, sir, just won the internet.
Didn't Microsoft 8K BASIC borrow heavily from DECUS BASIC, a copy of the source code Gates obtained from a DEC users group. ref ref ref
@AgentElrond: "This smells like a scam of some sort"
Here's more of the same, a device that generates 360 kWh from four gallons of water link.
--
Carl Sagan — 'You can't convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it's based on a deep seated need to believe'
There is a lot of snark going on here. NASA is also looking into LENR. I think we should step back and stop being close minded buffoons and just wait for some evidence.
If one follows the links, then there is no mention of Gates doing what is claimed.
Just another bogus press release helping the LENR + e-CAT scammers of Rossi et al.
Gold is down, so KITCO has to do something. That something is to make up bogus stories about palladium.
A lot of features of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler are paid for by microsoft research.
I was led to believe that Gates "borrowed" basic from Gary Kildall at Digital Research??
Yes it might be the boondoggle that cold fusion is but what the heck I'd like to see it in action. And if Bill Gates doubles his fortune so be it.
Dumbest post I've read in 20 years. You, sir, just won the internet.
Doesn't sound much of an advance on Hugin. Which is available Free and cross-platform. There are up-to-date portable versions too.
Since I move from system to system, from client to client, that last point is a mega-killer. If it takes 3 months to get a program installed through the IT department, and the project lasts 1.5 months, portability is an essential.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Maybe I'm missing something about Hugin, but it seems like quite a manual and thus rather tedious process to actually do. Please correct me if I am wrong, because I spent a limited time only, reading the documentation.
The Microsoft tool is fully automatic. Just drop a bunch of images in a window, or a video, and it does the math by itself and it spits out the panorama in seconds. And the result is amazing. This is one reason why I have virtual machines with Windows installed, (I get my Windows VMs as a result of the Microsoft Tax during new notebook purchases).
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
Is it drag'n'drop? No. Is it MUCH faster and easier than it used to be? Yes. Depending on your subject, the system will often automatically pick control points pairs between images (though you do need to make sure the images are correctly sequenced, particularly for 2d arrays). My photos, being almost abstract, of low contrast, and quite uniform colour really give the control point algorithm ("panostift", IIRC, I don't have bandwidth here to d/l it. Rebuilt laptop, toying with Tor) a hammering, but it still manages to get some points.
"Fully automatic" isn't a good phrase in my lexicon. It might be appropriate if you're taking city-scape panoramas, but I don't waste much time visiting cities unless I'm being paid. Microphotographs come up from time to time at work. Array panels of rock outcrops also need doing too - a few dozen images to document structural complexities.
Long story short - the system has improved a lot over the last few years. If you need to take detailed control of your photo stitching, then its certainly worth a look. I notice (from archaeology work last year, trying to produce 3-d models of archaeological artefacts) that there has been a lot of development in this whole area over the last half-decade or so. Definitely worth a shot.
Since the Hugin tool chain is all open source stuff, I'd be fairly astonished if the M$ people haven't been plundering it for ideas, if not code. Colour me cynical.
The PortableApps version is damned useful - it lives on my "get the fucking job done NOW" hard drive/ tool box. Only gets used every year or so, but when I need it, it's good.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Well what about research like Verve? A fully verified OS. Not just a verified microkernel like seL4 but a system with automated formal verification of the whole OS and applications. This had never been done before Verve. HeliOS a version of MSR's Singularity OS where you at runtime can migrate arbitrary parts of the OS or apps between different processors in the machine, be it migrate the running TCP/IP stack from a x64 chip to a NIC MIPS coprocessor. Other things include AI which enabled realtime natural language parsing and translation to enable multilingual Skype calls. There is a lot of research in OS design, AI, Learning Systems, parallell processing etc.