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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."
Are there any credible, scientific publications on LENR? Most articles on the subject are on Newenergytimes and E-catworld, which are hardly serious.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
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?
Thorium reactor. Android error correction....
Europe sends lots of money to Russia and Saudi medieval Stan. Our youth is out of jobs instead of building reactors. Rotten...
Look at China, they are not filled with oil industry bulls. Their engineers at the top build nuclear reactors. Lots of it. A rising nation with a strong army instead of a shit house.
Russia just commisioned a breeder reactor. They can do that because they don't have green Maoist forces in their countries. Because they are actually sovereign.
Visit E-Catworld if you want to read more about the E-Cat. Basically, Industrial Heat bought his business, then refined the E-Cat a lot, then a study revealing that the invention worked amazingly well was released at the exact same date that oil prices started to go down. Then IH installed the first operative plant which will let visitors come and see it, and shortly after that Bill Gates traveled to Italy to heavily invest in his technology.
Absolutely, and the skill and factors I mentioned are things that increase your chances of success, they by no means guarantee it. While I do believe that there's more to success than stupid luck, I also think that what we can learn from successful entrepreneurs is a great deal less than what MBA teachers and writers of business books lead us to believe. Perhaps Steve Jobs started in a garage at an early age, went for morning walks, always had cereal for lunch, and asked his mom for one piece of business advice every weekend, and made it a point to publicly humiliate at least one of his execs every week, or whatever (I made these up to make a point), but there's little point in blindly copying that behaviour to try and achieve our own success.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
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.)
Who published this "study" and how was it peer reviewed?