"You cannot be told about the Matrix. You must experience it."
In other words, you have to take the red pill.
But before that, you have to be given a red pill. Not everybody is offered one.
The red pill is the "gnosis," whence the name of the religion. Other details, such as the evil nature of the current reigning god and the possibility of redemption through the Gnosis, are also exact parallels. You really shouldn't offer criticism about something you know nothing about.
"The server has been walled up for four years because it was a bad, evil, wicked Novell server, not a friendly interactive server running Enterprise Micro$oft software. Pity its fate; for four years it toiled pitilessly in its wall changing packets, honoring requests for data, never knowing the gentle caress of a human finger on its RESET button or the jaunty anticipation of yet another upgrade. Don't let this fate befall your beloved hardware: With Enterprise $oftware from Micro$oft, you will always know where your server is."
You can rattle off a dozen reasons why it can't work, but can't think of one reason why it might.
I can rattle off one reason why it didn't work: No neutrons. (Thanks much to the guy who calculated how many would be produced. Even I did not know how bad it was.
The CF proponents are not just proposing a way to force two D nuclei together without using temperature/momentum, they are also proposing that their interaction in some magic way does not produce neutrons. Now while I certainly have an open mind for things which are "supposed" to be impossible, there are limits.
The original conception of CF, remember, is based on using an unusual method to trigger a known reaction, a reaction that will produce a whole shitload of neutrons. Today's CF proponents are adding to the first implausibility the much more implausible claim that they are getting, not these expected reactions, but some new magic kind of fusion that doesn't create neutrons.
I'm glad that none of you nay-sayers ever worked on developing lasers, semiconductors, or superconductors
When you look at those developments, almost always you will find they hinge on ONE revision of thought apiece, and that they quickly showed unambiguous results in experimental setups. CF is in no way similar.
Sure. But I look at the way I'm wasting my time, and the way you're wasting your time, and I'm glad I'm me instead of you.
In other news, I'm surprised that nobody seems to have come up with a Java Filter that is smart enough to just kill multiple and recursive popups and OnClose().
noodle.port5.com goatsex link
on
Review: Blow
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· Score: 2
Example 1: Every phone bill I recieve has an invitation to order a bevy of calling services, such as call forwarding, and voice mail. Yet the only invitations I recieve for DSL service are from service providers themselves (Even though the phone ocmpany does offer DSL service directly.)
That's odd, Bellsouth advertises their FastAccess DSL service very heavily in every medium I can imagine. They even have space in the pre-movie slideshow at all the local theatres, as well as the usual billboards, prime-time TV, and print ads.
Example 2: If I call the phone company and order phone service, I'll have a service call the next day, but if I order DSL, it's going to take a few weeks. Yet a DSL installation is not any more complicated than a standard phone installation! They just don't care to devote any resources to it, since they don't own the whole pie.
Actually the impression I get is that a DSL installation does involve a bit more, especially in a new market; if you order phone service, odds are it will involve nothing more than tapping some commands on a Telco computer to establish your connection. If your installation is brand new they might have to send a lineman out to punch down the line from your house in the local distro box.
With DSL, doesn't someone have to visit the CO to physically establish your connection? I am pretty sure we aren't all prewired to the DSL headers in the way we are to the standard telco equipment. Perhaps someone can enlighten us on this.
I ordered the self-install kit, and it took about 2 weeks to arrive; but then it had been custom packed with my installation info, a process which might not be do-able until the DSL header installation is made. In any case I was online with DSL within a few hours of the arrival of the package. (Would have been quicker, but I am sharing the connection with multiple machines.)
Bellsouth's service has been a tad impersonal but efficient -- rather like their phone service. Oddly, I have had the actual phone go out a couple of times while the DSL continued to work.
I get the impression that they want my business very badly, probably to head off the invasion of the cable modems. They did a very clever thing in New Orleans; while Cox Cable was busily wiring up the highly populous parish of Jefferson, BellSouth did an end-run and wired up the more affluent and rapidly growing suburb of Mandeville, where the percentage of people capable of affording broadband is almost 100%. Now that cable modems are coming to Mandeville DSL is firmly entrenched and most folks are happy with the service. Meanwhile, Cox has a miserable service record in Jefferson, which BellSouth is now exploiting to compete with them there.
Re:The (lack of) Evidence Behind the Effect
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Excess Heat
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· Score: 2
God knows there enough weird shit going on in a chemical bath to do this sort of thing. What about heavy fermionic electron effects acting as a catalyst, or fusion being catalysed by a heavy nucleus?
Muons can catalyze fusion because of the known reaction whereby the muon cancels out the electrical charge of one of the nuclei, which allows it to approach another nucleus with the same casual ease a neutron would. None of the stuff you suggests, including "a lot of wierd shit," really promises to cancel the electrical charge of a nucleus. Muons do that. Momentum overcomes it.
You need on the order of 100 MeV to push two protons close enough together for fusion. Chemical reactions supply at most 5 eV or so per atom. That's the bottom line. How are you going to push them together? We know how muons do it, and unfortunately muons are themselves enormously expensive and difficult to make. So what other mechanism do you propose is at work here?
Re:The (lack of) Evidence Behind the Effect
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Excess Heat
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Those two positively charged D nuclei are sitting in a huge bath full of various ions. Can you calculate the probability of fusion occuring in such a system, because I can't.
Zero. You have to overcome the electrical repulsion of the nuclei, which is simply enormous.
It might be worth noting here that merely chemical explosions are not even powerful enough to get fusion going; you have to use the chemical explosive to set off a nuclear explosion, and use the energy from that to set off the thermonuclear (fusion) reaction.
but muon catalysed fusion also proceeds in a similar way (as far as I can tell).
Only because the muon cancels out the charge of one of the protons, so they can approach one another. Unfortunately, muons are themselves enormously difficult and expensive to make.
A nucleus does not know what phase it is in
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Excess Heat
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However, supposedly there is another reaction that produces gamma rays and helium that can only occur in a solid phase.
Nuclei do not know what phase of matter they are in. Solid/liquid/gas/plasma are determined by the electron shells of atoms, not nuclei. There is absolutely no difference between how a nuclear reaction will proceed just because it is in a different electrochemical state. This is why Lithium-6 Deuteride can be used in H-bombs -- the chemical bond between the Lithium and Deuterium is completely irrelevant in a nuclear reaction.
"Supposedly" there is a big dinosaur-like animal in Loch Ness, too. Take it with an equivalent grain of salt.
makes you wonder how we ever made it to color TV, doesn't it?
Actually, that's pretty simple. The color signal took no more bandwidth and was 100% compatible with the old B&W receivers. Broadcasters needed no extra bandwidth to add a signal which would not drive away their old customers, but which would attract the new customers who sprung for color TV sets.
By contrast, HDTV requires a totally new infrastructure of camera, recording, editing, and broadcasting equipment which is not compatible with the 300,000,000 or so existing TV sets. Bear in mind that amplifiers and editing equipment built for B&W will generally work with color, but nothing built for standard TV will work with HDTV. And HDTV only works for standard signals if it is essentially "dual mode," much more of a leap than the added expense of designing color circuitry into what was originally a B&W design.
There is also a much larger infrastructure of this more incompatible equipment than there was during the adoption of color. Someone has to toss out the first dollar and so far neither the producers, broadcasters, nor public have been willing to take the risk that they will be caught holding the next generation's version of a Beta VCR.
Re:Some Other Observations
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Review: Blow
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· Score: 2
Was it worth it to spend a mojority of your life lonely and broke for ~10 years of living like a king?
Not only that, but he'd still be living like a king if he'd sheltered his money better. He had quit the business when his money was seized by the Panamanian government, and only returned to the business because he was newly broke. Some of us think we could have handled the situation a bit better, had we landed in that position...
Re:The (lack of) Evidence Behind the Effect
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Excess Heat
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· Score: 2
Typical emotional response. When the establishment lackeys...
Pot, Kettle, Black.
It's helpful to remember here exactly what cold fusion is attempting to do, and why it should be so easy to prove.
Fusion occurs when two D nuclei get close enough together for the strong nuclear interaction to take effect; they combine into a 3He nucleus, discard a neutron, and oh yeah give off about 3 MeV of energy, which is the point.
But your two D nuclei are both positively charged, so they repel each other very strongly until you get them close enough for the strong force to take over. This is why very high temperatures are necessary; you get the nuclei moving fast enough, and sheer momentum overcomes their mutual electrical repulsion until they are close enough to complete the reaction.
Now, the point behind cold fusion is to use the molecular structure of the electrode and the force of the electrical current to push the two nuclei together without relying on momentum (high temperature). I have always had trouble believing in this, but some of the math seems to say it is possible, so whatever. OTOH once you get the two nuclei together, by whatever method, guess what should happen? Yep, 3He + n + 3.07 MeV, just as if you had done the same thing with high temperatures.
Now, it's important to understand how many neutrons you are going to get. 3.07 MeV is a lot of energy from one atom, but it's not a lot of energy. You have to pop quite a few of those puppies before you start making a noticeable effect on a macroscopic thermometer. I don't know exactly what kind of temperature rise is being claimed, but if it's noticeable at all you will have thousands of neutrons per second. That is not a difficult flux to detect at all. And explaining them away is no small matter; once a free neutron is formed it tends to sail right through ordinary matter for some distance until it happens to get close to another nucleus.
We understand these reactions well enough to blow very impressive holes in the landscape, and the claim that fusion is occurring without neutrons is far, far more unbelievable than the basic premise of cold fusion itself, which is already on pretty shaky ground IMHO.
To me, with a background in physics and engineering, this is how the website reads: "We are working hard on this pill to turn water into gasoline, and we have gotten the car to consistently coast further than should be physically possible based on the energy we used to push it. Furthermore, isn't it wonderful that our tests on this new gasoline from water also show that it doesn't create greenhouse gases."
That isn't emotion speaking, it's training and experience. No chemist worth his salt would swallow the gasoline from water story, and no physicist worth his salt swallows fusion, cold or otherwise, without neutrons.
Re:The (lack of) Evidence Behind the Effect
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Excess Heat
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From the website linked:
The great blessing of our experiments is that so far NO energetic penetrating radiation signatures including neutrons and gammas have been observed in our unique SSDR experiments.
In other words, whatever they are doing it isn't fusion. But they do use a lot of big words:
These reactions have been profoundly demonstrated using experiments including those involving catalysis, nano-technology, electro-chemistry, glow-discharge, and ultrasonic cavitation.
Ooooh I am sooooo impressed. Actually the tipoff is "nano-technology," a buzzword sure to impress the readers of Popular Science but which has absolutely no meaningful application in research like this.
I didn't go deep enough into their claims to see if they're just deluded or running a scam, but when the first thing center top is the revelation that you have no neutrons, then it's obvious you have no fusion.
And puh-leeze don't give me the usual rap about some "mysterious new form" of fusion. These reactions are pretty well understood; there aren't that many ways a few light elements can be made to combine. If the phun pholx who gave us H-bombs were that ignorant, you can trust me, we would not have H-bombs.
was the research done by another scientist at the same time-- his (plausible) theory of why the earth gives off more heat than it takes in from space centered around the idea that "cold fusion" is responsible
We know exactly why the Earth gives off more heat than it takes in -- its core is full of radioactive elements which give off energy when they decay. This energy balance is considered an important clue to the age of the Earth and the composition of its interior. No "cold fusion" is necessary to explain this phenomenon.
The comparison of cold fusion to Nessie is very apt, until someone finds neutrons being emitted from an assembly. Meanwhile, work also continues on a pill to turn water into gasoline...
Re:Cold Fusion Research
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Excess Heat
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It appears that making a productive electrode is extremely difficult, and after about 10-80 days, an electrode stops being able to drive "fusion". ...
Producing electrodes (which appear to need to contain palladium, rhodium, and several other trace elements) would be quite expensive, and would produce only a very limited amount of energy.
If this isn't complete BS then it sounds exactly like a chemical reaction which eventually uses up whatever component of the "productive" electrode is supplying the energy. This is certainly more believable than claims of fusion without neutron production.
It's not the calorimetry, it's the neutrons
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Excess Heat
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The reason the physics community leapt on Pons and Fleischmann so quickly is simple: Nobody found neutrons. If the physicists who tried to duplicate their experiment weren't up to their standards of electrochemistry, then neither were Pons and Fleischmann up to the standards of a person with a physics background.
Fusion does not work by magic. There are specific reactions and side reactions which occur depending on the fuel and the manner of combination. Now, as it happens, all of the candidate reactions using deuterium as a fuel generate neutrons as a side product. It doesn't really matter how you combine the Deuteriums, whether you combine them with other Deuteriums or with Tritium, or how you manage to overcome the electrical repulsion of the nucleus. If you induce fusion in the fuels they used, you will get neutrons. A lot of neutrons.
And nobody, not Pons or Fleischmann, not any of the people who attempted to duplicate their work, detected neutrons. Ipso facto, whatever they may have been measuring, it wasn't fusion.
Perhaps there is some obscure chemical reaction which was catalyzed by their setup; if so, it is finicky and not a source of large amounts of energy, as fusion would be. The mistake Pons and Fleischmann made was announcing their finding as fusion, rather than "mysterious extra energy release." They might have been credited with discovering a new catalytic property of platinum instead of become laughing stocks of the physics community.
While the idea behind cold fusion is certainly worth investigating, claiming that it has occurred when you have no neutrons is, to a physicist, like telling a chemist you have invented a pill to turn water into gasoline. He doesn't have to hear the details of your scheme to know it won't work; he knows it won't work because it would violate a lot of well established principles if it did.
Let's see, he stole some passwords which he didn't even use. That's worth $70,000 and 5 years of his life? You have one fucked up idea of "humane," my friend.
This Oregon law is the bastard father of DMCA. The problem isn't whether the guy did or didn't do something he wasn't supposed to, it's that nobody proved that he actually did anything damaging and the penalties are so draconian.
The most disturbing thing is the restitution award, which was fortunately overturned. If someone breaks into your house that's bad, and it's punished, but not as harshly as if someone breaks into your house and actually steals or destroys your stuff. It's clear that Intel wanted to make an example of the guy, and poured money and effort into a prosecution which the police wouldn't have been capable of mounting on their own.
That bothers me. A lot.
There are no end of recent examples that merely staying innocent of wrongdoing is not sufficient to keep you out of jail, if you get unlucky or piss off the wrong people. Any new opportunities for putting people behind bars when they haven't noticeably harmed other citizens should be resisted on general principle. Do you really want the insane War on Some Drugs to be extended to Some Hackers? Friends, if this goes much further it's time to sell the computer and take up the violin.
Just today, our physics teacher was describing how our "moon" is actually more of a planet, and we revolve around each other.
I would disagree with this. Earth's Moon has no metallic core, as one would expect of a body its size which formed like a planet; and the most recent theories suggest that it was formed in a massive collision between two very large proto-Earth chunks in the final stages of Earth's formation. It was tossed out in a very near, fast orbit, and spiralled out to its current location through tidal effects.
None of this suggests that the Moon is "more of a planet." Rather, it suggests that the Moon is very different from a planet and distinctly "Moony."
Oh, and the center of gravity of the Earth-Moon system is inside the Earth, about 2/3 of the way from its center to the surface.
Slashdot Mirror
In other words, you have to take the red pill.
But before that, you have to be given a red pill. Not everybody is offered one.
The red pill is the "gnosis," whence the name of the religion. Other details, such as the evil nature of the current reigning god and the possibility of redemption through the Gnosis, are also exact parallels. You really shouldn't offer criticism about something you know nothing about.
"The server has been walled up for four years because it was a bad, evil, wicked Novell server, not a friendly interactive server running Enterprise Micro$oft software. Pity its fate; for four years it toiled pitilessly in its wall changing packets, honoring requests for data, never knowing the gentle caress of a human finger on its RESET button or the jaunty anticipation of yet another upgrade. Don't let this fate befall your beloved hardware: With Enterprise $oftware from Micro$oft, you will always know where your server is."
New 20 gig hard drive: $150
Cabling from sound card to stereo: $40
1500 songs: Priceless
Some things still cost money. For everything else, there's Napster. :-)
I can rattle off one reason why it didn't work: No neutrons. (Thanks much to the guy who calculated how many would be produced. Even I did not know how bad it was.
The CF proponents are not just proposing a way to force two D nuclei together without using temperature/momentum, they are also proposing that their interaction in some magic way does not produce neutrons. Now while I certainly have an open mind for things which are "supposed" to be impossible, there are limits.
The original conception of CF, remember, is based on using an unusual method to trigger a known reaction, a reaction that will produce a whole shitload of neutrons. Today's CF proponents are adding to the first implausibility the much more implausible claim that they are getting, not these expected reactions, but some new magic kind of fusion that doesn't create neutrons.
I'm glad that none of you nay-sayers ever worked on developing lasers, semiconductors, or superconductors
When you look at those developments, almost always you will find they hinge on ONE revision of thought apiece, and that they quickly showed unambiguous results in experimental setups. CF is in no way similar.
...cold fusion, what else?
...to the TV series Miami Vice?
Sure. But I look at the way I'm wasting my time, and the way you're wasting your time, and I'm glad I'm me instead of you.
In other news, I'm surprised that nobody seems to have come up with a Java Filter that is smart enough to just kill multiple and recursive popups and OnClose().
TSIA
That's odd, Bellsouth advertises their FastAccess DSL service very heavily in every medium I can imagine. They even have space in the pre-movie slideshow at all the local theatres, as well as the usual billboards, prime-time TV, and print ads.
Example 2: If I call the phone company and order phone service, I'll have a service call the next day, but if I order DSL, it's going to take a few weeks. Yet a DSL installation is not any more complicated than a standard phone installation! They just don't care to devote any resources to it, since they don't own the whole pie.
Actually the impression I get is that a DSL installation does involve a bit more, especially in a new market; if you order phone service, odds are it will involve nothing more than tapping some commands on a Telco computer to establish your connection. If your installation is brand new they might have to send a lineman out to punch down the line from your house in the local distro box.
With DSL, doesn't someone have to visit the CO to physically establish your connection? I am pretty sure we aren't all prewired to the DSL headers in the way we are to the standard telco equipment. Perhaps someone can enlighten us on this.
I ordered the self-install kit, and it took about 2 weeks to arrive; but then it had been custom packed with my installation info, a process which might not be do-able until the DSL header installation is made. In any case I was online with DSL within a few hours of the arrival of the package. (Would have been quicker, but I am sharing the connection with multiple machines.)
Bellsouth's service has been a tad impersonal but efficient -- rather like their phone service. Oddly, I have had the actual phone go out a couple of times while the DSL continued to work.
I get the impression that they want my business very badly, probably to head off the invasion of the cable modems. They did a very clever thing in New Orleans; while Cox Cable was busily wiring up the highly populous parish of Jefferson, BellSouth did an end-run and wired up the more affluent and rapidly growing suburb of Mandeville, where the percentage of people capable of affording broadband is almost 100%. Now that cable modems are coming to Mandeville DSL is firmly entrenched and most folks are happy with the service. Meanwhile, Cox has a miserable service record in Jefferson, which BellSouth is now exploiting to compete with them there.
...redirects to the goatsex link, should you notice that as a destination when you hover a link. FYI.
TSIA
Muons can catalyze fusion because of the known reaction whereby the muon cancels out the electrical charge of one of the nuclei, which allows it to approach another nucleus with the same casual ease a neutron would. None of the stuff you suggests, including "a lot of wierd shit," really promises to cancel the electrical charge of a nucleus. Muons do that. Momentum overcomes it.
You need on the order of 100 MeV to push two protons close enough together for fusion. Chemical reactions supply at most 5 eV or so per atom. That's the bottom line. How are you going to push them together? We know how muons do it, and unfortunately muons are themselves enormously expensive and difficult to make. So what other mechanism do you propose is at work here?
Zero. You have to overcome the electrical repulsion of the nuclei, which is simply enormous.
It might be worth noting here that merely chemical explosions are not even powerful enough to get fusion going; you have to use the chemical explosive to set off a nuclear explosion, and use the energy from that to set off the thermonuclear (fusion) reaction.
but muon catalysed fusion also proceeds in a similar way (as far as I can tell).
Only because the muon cancels out the charge of one of the protons, so they can approach one another. Unfortunately, muons are themselves enormously difficult and expensive to make.
Nuclei do not know what phase of matter they are in. Solid/liquid/gas/plasma are determined by the electron shells of atoms, not nuclei. There is absolutely no difference between how a nuclear reaction will proceed just because it is in a different electrochemical state. This is why Lithium-6 Deuteride can be used in H-bombs -- the chemical bond between the Lithium and Deuterium is completely irrelevant in a nuclear reaction.
"Supposedly" there is a big dinosaur-like animal in Loch Ness, too. Take it with an equivalent grain of salt.
Actually, that's pretty simple. The color signal took no more bandwidth and was 100% compatible with the old B&W receivers. Broadcasters needed no extra bandwidth to add a signal which would not drive away their old customers, but which would attract the new customers who sprung for color TV sets.
By contrast, HDTV requires a totally new infrastructure of camera, recording, editing, and broadcasting equipment which is not compatible with the 300,000,000 or so existing TV sets. Bear in mind that amplifiers and editing equipment built for B&W will generally work with color, but nothing built for standard TV will work with HDTV. And HDTV only works for standard signals if it is essentially "dual mode," much more of a leap than the added expense of designing color circuitry into what was originally a B&W design.
There is also a much larger infrastructure of this more incompatible equipment than there was during the adoption of color. Someone has to toss out the first dollar and so far neither the producers, broadcasters, nor public have been willing to take the risk that they will be caught holding the next generation's version of a Beta VCR.
Not only that, but he'd still be living like a king if he'd sheltered his money better. He had quit the business when his money was seized by the Panamanian government, and only returned to the business because he was newly broke. Some of us think we could have handled the situation a bit better, had we landed in that position...
Pot, Kettle, Black.
It's helpful to remember here exactly what cold fusion is attempting to do, and why it should be so easy to prove.
Fusion occurs when two D nuclei get close enough together for the strong nuclear interaction to take effect; they combine into a 3He nucleus, discard a neutron, and oh yeah give off about 3 MeV of energy, which is the point.
But your two D nuclei are both positively charged, so they repel each other very strongly until you get them close enough for the strong force to take over. This is why very high temperatures are necessary; you get the nuclei moving fast enough, and sheer momentum overcomes their mutual electrical repulsion until they are close enough to complete the reaction.
Now, the point behind cold fusion is to use the molecular structure of the electrode and the force of the electrical current to push the two nuclei together without relying on momentum (high temperature). I have always had trouble believing in this, but some of the math seems to say it is possible, so whatever. OTOH once you get the two nuclei together, by whatever method, guess what should happen? Yep, 3He + n + 3.07 MeV, just as if you had done the same thing with high temperatures.
Now, it's important to understand how many neutrons you are going to get. 3.07 MeV is a lot of energy from one atom, but it's not a lot of energy. You have to pop quite a few of those puppies before you start making a noticeable effect on a macroscopic thermometer. I don't know exactly what kind of temperature rise is being claimed, but if it's noticeable at all you will have thousands of neutrons per second. That is not a difficult flux to detect at all. And explaining them away is no small matter; once a free neutron is formed it tends to sail right through ordinary matter for some distance until it happens to get close to another nucleus.
We understand these reactions well enough to blow very impressive holes in the landscape, and the claim that fusion is occurring without neutrons is far, far more unbelievable than the basic premise of cold fusion itself, which is already on pretty shaky ground IMHO.
To me, with a background in physics and engineering, this is how the website reads: "We are working hard on this pill to turn water into gasoline, and we have gotten the car to consistently coast further than should be physically possible based on the energy we used to push it. Furthermore, isn't it wonderful that our tests on this new gasoline from water also show that it doesn't create greenhouse gases."
That isn't emotion speaking, it's training and experience. No chemist worth his salt would swallow the gasoline from water story, and no physicist worth his salt swallows fusion, cold or otherwise, without neutrons.
The great blessing of our experiments is that so far NO energetic penetrating radiation signatures including neutrons and gammas have been observed in our unique SSDR experiments.
In other words, whatever they are doing it isn't fusion. But they do use a lot of big words:
These reactions have been profoundly demonstrated using experiments including those involving catalysis, nano-technology, electro-chemistry, glow-discharge, and ultrasonic cavitation.
Ooooh I am sooooo impressed. Actually the tipoff is "nano-technology," a buzzword sure to impress the readers of Popular Science but which has absolutely no meaningful application in research like this.
I didn't go deep enough into their claims to see if they're just deluded or running a scam, but when the first thing center top is the revelation that you have no neutrons, then it's obvious you have no fusion.
And puh-leeze don't give me the usual rap about some "mysterious new form" of fusion. These reactions are pretty well understood; there aren't that many ways a few light elements can be made to combine. If the phun pholx who gave us H-bombs were that ignorant, you can trust me, we would not have H-bombs.
We know exactly why the Earth gives off more heat than it takes in -- its core is full of radioactive elements which give off energy when they decay. This energy balance is considered an important clue to the age of the Earth and the composition of its interior. No "cold fusion" is necessary to explain this phenomenon.
The comparison of cold fusion to Nessie is very apt, until someone finds neutrons being emitted from an assembly. Meanwhile, work also continues on a pill to turn water into gasoline...
Producing electrodes (which appear to need to contain palladium, rhodium, and several other trace elements) would be quite expensive, and would produce only a very limited amount of energy.
If this isn't complete BS then it sounds exactly like a chemical reaction which eventually uses up whatever component of the "productive" electrode is supplying the energy. This is certainly more believable than claims of fusion without neutron production.
Fusion does not work by magic. There are specific reactions and side reactions which occur depending on the fuel and the manner of combination. Now, as it happens, all of the candidate reactions using deuterium as a fuel generate neutrons as a side product. It doesn't really matter how you combine the Deuteriums, whether you combine them with other Deuteriums or with Tritium, or how you manage to overcome the electrical repulsion of the nucleus. If you induce fusion in the fuels they used, you will get neutrons. A lot of neutrons.
And nobody, not Pons or Fleischmann, not any of the people who attempted to duplicate their work, detected neutrons. Ipso facto, whatever they may have been measuring, it wasn't fusion.
Perhaps there is some obscure chemical reaction which was catalyzed by their setup; if so, it is finicky and not a source of large amounts of energy, as fusion would be. The mistake Pons and Fleischmann made was announcing their finding as fusion, rather than "mysterious extra energy release." They might have been credited with discovering a new catalytic property of platinum instead of become laughing stocks of the physics community.
While the idea behind cold fusion is certainly worth investigating, claiming that it has occurred when you have no neutrons is, to a physicist, like telling a chemist you have invented a pill to turn water into gasoline. He doesn't have to hear the details of your scheme to know it won't work; he knows it won't work because it would violate a lot of well established principles if it did.
Let's see, he stole some passwords which he didn't even use. That's worth $70,000 and 5 years of his life? You have one fucked up idea of "humane," my friend.
...to avoid creating posts like this one.
The most disturbing thing is the restitution award, which was fortunately overturned. If someone breaks into your house that's bad, and it's punished, but not as harshly as if someone breaks into your house and actually steals or destroys your stuff. It's clear that Intel wanted to make an example of the guy, and poured money and effort into a prosecution which the police wouldn't have been capable of mounting on their own.
That bothers me. A lot.
There are no end of recent examples that merely staying innocent of wrongdoing is not sufficient to keep you out of jail, if you get unlucky or piss off the wrong people. Any new opportunities for putting people behind bars when they haven't noticeably harmed other citizens should be resisted on general principle. Do you really want the insane War on Some Drugs to be extended to Some Hackers? Friends, if this goes much further it's time to sell the computer and take up the violin.
I would disagree with this. Earth's Moon has no metallic core, as one would expect of a body its size which formed like a planet; and the most recent theories suggest that it was formed in a massive collision between two very large proto-Earth chunks in the final stages of Earth's formation. It was tossed out in a very near, fast orbit, and spiralled out to its current location through tidal effects.
None of this suggests that the Moon is "more of a planet." Rather, it suggests that the Moon is very different from a planet and distinctly "Moony."
Oh, and the center of gravity of the Earth-Moon system is inside the Earth, about 2/3 of the way from its center to the surface.