The entire premise of a class action lawsuit is that the harm is so negligible at an individual level that nobody would ever sue.
Yep. All those people who were permanently crippled in Bhopal as well as losing large numbers of their friends, neighbours and relatives were only mildly inconvenienced.
Italy doesn't, technically, have its own nukes. It's a nuclear weapons "sharing" arrangement under NATO. I think pretty much the way it works is that another NATO country (OK, the US) with nukes keeps some on one of its own bases in Italy or otherwise under some sort of lock and key. In the event of something requiring their use, they get released or unlocked somehow and Italian soldiers take over. Of course, Germany is another country that participates in the nuclear sharing program so the comparison the GP made between them based on one having nukes and the other not having nukes is a little baffling.
On the air conditioning thing, there are fairly good reasons for the existence of such a smart grid system. It's far worse to have a brownout than to ration power. Ideally, the smart grid would extend to houses and the actual appliances within them so that, in such a situation, the air conditioner turns itself down from high to medium based on an alert from the power grid that usage in the area is critically high (although obviously there would need to be some sort of interactive scheduler the devices communicate with, otherwise you start burning houses down). Whether or not such a system should have an override is an interesting question. In the interests of freedom, having the air conditioner obey such instructions over its owner isn't very appealing. On the other hand, every social experiment ever conducted on the Commons Dilemma in anything other than small, tightly knit social groups shows that, with a manual override, most people would turn on the manual override. Then again, just having a default setting to obey requests from the grid but with a manual override to reverse that if it happens, would probably be sufficient. Enough people would either want to act for the common good, be comfortable even with the A/C turned down a notch, be too lazy to do anything about it, not even be home at the time, or not know how to operate their A/C controls that an impending brownout could probably be averted.
The method of operation the quote seems to imply would seem to be a little unfair, essentially picking homes on some criteria to experience an individualized brownout. Still probably better than a widespread brownout, but really fair. The criteria would probably be based on some sort of average use case which would end up ignoring other factors, such as how many people are actually living in the house, how far it is from the junction, how well insulated, if the occupants are elderly or unhealthy, etc. Far better for the system to just be an emergency general alert to homes that, if they don't cut power usage, complete loss of power is imminent.
Obviously either way, if such a thing triggers frequently, there's a serious supply or grid problem that needs to be dealt with. When all the rolling blackouts were happening in California, it turned out to mostly be intentional manipulation by Enron, which they seem to have used both for financial gain and to help get the governor kicked out of office. A smart grid would probably help make such manipulations either difficult or extremely obvious as manipulations.
As for the government shutting off power to individual homes for other reasons, they can already pretty much do that it's just that they need some linesmen to do it by hand for the most part at the moment. They would still need to provide a reason.
I, for one, don't believe the US can create any sort of smart grid system or, at least, probably not in my lifetime. It could be done as an open standard... HAH!!! Just see that get adopted. It could be developed from the private sector, in a thousand competing flavors designed not to work together, or it could be created by the government, which would bog it down with a million designed-by-comittee requirements that would cripple it, then it would still be farmed out to a private sector crony "bidder" who would manage to retain all ip rights despite the development being funded by government money at several times the cost it should be. If the project were even ever completed before being abandoned, the private ownership of related patents, copyrights and trademarks would make adoption an expensive nightmare.
I've always slathered Vegemite and Marmite like peanut butter and I like it that way. I've always been a little odd when it comes to foods with strong flavours, though.
I'm just curious, in your scenario, does the defense attorney go back to his office afterward, close the door, then laugh maniacally for a few minutes?
Maybe he's trying to say "Google: just like IBM". IBM, of course, provided the Nazis with the data technologies of the day for tracking Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and political undesirables. Then the Nazis rounded up those people into concentration camps and systematically murdered them.
Well sure, but this discussion is us -humans- talking about our behaviour with an eye towards adjusting it (not that we're going to have much success doing it in an online forum. By the same definition of natural you're using, us discussing the problem and imposing restrictions on behaviour, etc. is also natural.
In my edition of that book, the genius US editors "corrected" that to "How many whales can you watch in one week?" Because why would a research ship be catching whales? Obvious error. They also inexplicably changed the scene where Crowley's demonic superiors communicate to him through Woody on _Cheers_ to Rose on Golden Girls. Apparently they were worried that US readers would be unfamiliar with _Cheers_.
The Fine Article explained why the GP probably thinks of the pits as unpredictable. The collision detection is at the pixel level, so if any pixels of the ET sprite touch a pit, ET falls in. The problem is that the sprite itself is on more of a side view, so you intuitively feel that ET shouldn't fall in as long as its feet are on the ground. So, whether you fall into a pit or not seems to be unpredictable.
The point was that they didn't have anything to lose until, all of a sudden, they did. They had to buy the games up front, but were guaranteed to be able to return those they didn't sell for a refund. But then the fly by night companies selling on that model packed up shop and couldn't or wouldn't honour returns. I wouldn't be surprised if Atari itself started taking longer and longer to actually honour its refunds as well.
David Tennant played Barty Crouch Jr and the Doctor, Michael Gambon played Dumbledore and Kazran Sardick, Helen McRory played Narcissa Malfoy and Rosanna Calvierri, John Cleese played Nearly Headless Nick and had a cameo in an older episode, Zoe Wanamaker played Madame Hooch and Lady Cassandra, Toby Jones played Dobby and the Dream Lord, Bill Nighy played Rufus Scrimgeour and a Van Goph expert, Roger Lloyd Pack played Barty Crouch Sr. and John Lumic, Shirly Henderson played Moaning Myrtle and Ursula Blake, Adrian Rawlins played James Potter and the Ood sympathizer from _Planet of the Ood_, David Bradley played Argus Filch and the Shansheeth in the old series, Derek Deadman played Tom the innkeeper and a Sontaran in the old series, Elizabeth Spriggs played the Fat Lady and was strangled to death in an episode of the old series, Jeff Rawles plays Amos Diggory and played Plantagenet in an episode of the old series, Jessica Hynes played the voice of Mafilda Hopkirk and played Joan Redfern and one of her descendants, Jimmy Gardner played the Knight Bus driver and Idmon in the old series, John Atterbury played Phineas Nigellus Black and some monsters in the old series, Julian Glover played Aragog and Richard the Lionheart and Scaroth in the old series, Terence Bayler played the Bloody Baron and Yendom in the old series.
Jim Broadbent played Horace Slughorn and also played the Doctor in _The Curse of Fatal Death_, but that's not really canon. Aside from that, Dudley Dursley and Dean Thomas are played by descendants of the 2nd doctor and one of the first companions respectively.
So, that's quite a few crossover actors. I knew some of those off the top of my head, but obviously I found a web site listing them for all of that. It's possible they may have missed some. In any case, it's not too surprising. The Harry Potter series has used a lot of British actors and so has Dr Who and there are only so many of them.
If it's not The Curse of Fatal Death (which had Rowan Atkinson, Richard E. Grant, Jim Broadbent, Hugh Grant and Joanna Lumley as the Doctor) that you saw, then maybe you're confusing the Doctor with the Rani. She was a renegade Time Lady fond of unethical experiments and had her own TARDIS.
I assumed that he was meant to be the Valeyard, who showed up in the series as the prosecutor when the Time Lords put the Doctor on trial. He was revealed to be a future incarnation of the Doctor who really has it out for himself. He's not necessarily exactly one of his normal regenerations, but may instead actually be an intermediate form like the Watcher. The Watcher was a mystery masked figure who semi-stalked the Fourth Doctor right before his death and regeneration and who actually became the new Doctor at the moment of regeneration. Another Time Lord featured in the series whose name I can't remember right now actually had his own future incarnation working for him as a sort of butler/apprentice until his own death. So, the Valeyard was meant to be possibly something similar from the Doctor's 12th regeneration (back when there was a supposedly firm limit on the number of regenerations), but evil and intent on destroying the Doctor and achieving a completely independent existence.
Through the entire series since its revival there has been a running theme that's popped up of repressed self-loathing the Doctor keeps under the surface. There was an episode where Rory and Amy were either living in an alien-infested small village or on the Tardis with the Doctor about to plunge into a "cold star" and had to figure out which was a dream and which was real. There was a creepy dream-lord villain plaguing them through the whole thing and the Doctor made a comment to him at one point that he had figured out who he was since there was only one person in the Universe who hated him that much. It turned out to be an aspect of the Doctor's unconscious mind. So, unless they're pulling some other big twist, then this new "Doctor" is probably that aspect of his mind incarnate, probably as an intermediate form produced as part of a regeneration.
Better than break even energy production is somewhat irrelevant at the atomic scale.
The reason I brought up the atomic scale is because it's relevant to the whole discussion as you pointed out. It's a starting point where you can ask, "can a fusion reaction produce more energy than the energy required to start it?" and the answer is "yes". I suppose I'm trying to start with a base case and reason inductively from there. You're right though, I suppose, that I don't need that to issue a giant "Huh!?" to your statement that:
Having a nuclear fusion reaction, in other words a nuclear synthesis reaction, is orthogonal to having break even energy production.
All I really need to do is point to all the extant examples of fusion reactions with better than break even energy production. In the natural realm, we have stars as the obvious example. In the technological realm, the best example is probably the hydrogen bomb. Way better than break even. There are also plenty of examples of fusion that isn't break even. So, really that's all it takes to demonstrate why I thought that what you said didn't make any sense.
Having a nuclear fusion reaction, in other words a nuclear synthesis reaction, is orthogonal to having break even energy production.
Sorry, why would that be? At the level of individual collisions, a collision producing a fusion reaction is pretty much guaranteed to be break even (if there's more energy in the collision than would be released by the fusion it's probably too energetic to produce fusion). If fusion doesn't occur, the collision is elastic, and, depending on the setup, the same energy can end up in another (or a billion other) collisions, one of which may produce fusion. The basic idea behind promoting fusion is creating a situation where there are a sufficient number of collisions, with sufficient energy, to make fusion statistically likely before the energy diffuses away. Stars achieve this with gravitational confinement and they produce break even fusion. Laser ignition and Farnsworth Fusors and sonoluminescence try to accomplish this with intense, concentrated energy and, typically, are not break even (although I think laser ignition has managed to achieve this in some experiments now). Other ideas like magnetic confinement try to copy stars by creating intense pressure and heat and insulating it so that the same energy is used over and over and over to generate collisions.
In any case, there are clearly methods that produce nuclear fusion reactions, in other words nuclear synthesis reactions that are break even and others that are not breakeven. Given that both types exist, it seems odd to claim that that nuclear fusion reactions are orthogonal to break even energy production.
Actually, most of the things people are talking about here aren't nuclear reactors at all. A nuclear reactor has to, by design, promote a nuclear reaction. Just letting a bunch of nuclear material decay at its natural rate such as in an RTG isn't a reactor.
As for fusion currently being only experimental. Anything approaching break-even is experimental. All kinds of fusors, however, have been around for years. The Farnsworth Fusor is about 50 years old and is a pretty proven technology, it just doesn't produce net positive power.
Nader is not a good example at all, as it's likely that had he not siphoned votes away from Gore, bush the lesser would never have been president, butterfly ballots and hanging chads notwithstanding.
This is called the spoiler effect. Vote for Nader, Bush wins, vote for Perot, Clinton wins. It's the serious flaw of simple plurality voting where each voter gets one vote to cast for one candidate in a single pass election. It's the perfect voting system when there are exactly two choices and the most seriously flawed voting system for any greater number of choices. Any nation using it for their elections doesn't have a real democracy.
The Democrats and Republicans recognize that democracy, as practiced in the US, doesn't work under the current system, which is why they run primaries. In a properly functioning democracy, the two major parties could throw all of their candidates into the general election.
Not to even mention the pedestrian uses; people will be more likely to heat their pool, turn down/up their thermostats, drive larger vehicles, get a second vehicle, build houses with less insulation, and the list just goes on.
All those things wouldn't raise energy usage enough to make energy a scarce resource again in the scenario we're talking about. There are basic limits you'll run into. I've seen some pretty poorly insulated houses, and the energy bills, while high, are still manageable. What are you proposing? That people will build houses without walls and rely solely on their home heating system in winter? There are other practical constraints on that. Those poorly insulated houses I talked about tend to have uncomfortably hot areas and uncomfortably cold areas, and not a lot of just right areas. Having infinite energy wouldn't fix that. Larger vehicles likewise have other constraints on them. We couldn't all drive around 400 ton tanks on public roads for a host of reasons. We also couldn't all get twenty cars and drive them all the time because one person can only drive one car at a time (unless they're in a stunt show) and plus, where would you park them.
Yes, you could be more wasteful of power if there were a readier source. Once you have your lights on 24 hours a day, heat your pool and driveway, air condition the whole house and spend 16 hours a day driving 20 miles over the speed limit on the highway, there just isn't that much more you can do to waste power unless you're actively trying to waste it.
Oh, I'm certainly among those discounting the shady snake oil salesmen you find sliming around ideas like this. There's also the delusional crazies to discount as well. Then there's the delusional crazies who, despite being crazy, manage to be sleazy snake oil salesmen at the same time. I think a lot of these guys really do at some level believe in their perpetual motion machines while simultaneously sneaking a dwarf into the hidden compartment to wind the crank.
My response, however, was to a post by SuricouRaven who wrote:
There isn't much legitimate research because cold fusion violates some very well-established laws regarding energy requirements
I tend to prefer if people back up such statements by detailing which laws they're talking about.
Slashdot Mirror
I've looked, and have thus far been unable to find a retailer supplier of tinfoil.
You can certainly get it online though, from scientific supply houses. You just have to be willing to pay through the nose.
The entire premise of a class action lawsuit is that the harm is so negligible at an individual level that nobody would ever sue.
Yep. All those people who were permanently crippled in Bhopal as well as losing large numbers of their friends, neighbours and relatives were only mildly inconvenienced.
Interesting. In the US, on a wide scale, I still don't see it happening in my lifetime.
Italy doesn't, technically, have its own nukes. It's a nuclear weapons "sharing" arrangement under NATO. I think pretty much the way it works is that another NATO country (OK, the US) with nukes keeps some on one of its own bases in Italy or otherwise under some sort of lock and key. In the event of something requiring their use, they get released or unlocked somehow and Italian soldiers take over. Of course, Germany is another country that participates in the nuclear sharing program so the comparison the GP made between them based on one having nukes and the other not having nukes is a little baffling.
On the air conditioning thing, there are fairly good reasons for the existence of such a smart grid system. It's far worse to have a brownout than to ration power. Ideally, the smart grid would extend to houses and the actual appliances within them so that, in such a situation, the air conditioner turns itself down from high to medium based on an alert from the power grid that usage in the area is critically high (although obviously there would need to be some sort of interactive scheduler the devices communicate with, otherwise you start burning houses down). Whether or not such a system should have an override is an interesting question. In the interests of freedom, having the air conditioner obey such instructions over its owner isn't very appealing. On the other hand, every social experiment ever conducted on the Commons Dilemma in anything other than small, tightly knit social groups shows that, with a manual override, most people would turn on the manual override. Then again, just having a default setting to obey requests from the grid but with a manual override to reverse that if it happens, would probably be sufficient. Enough people would either want to act for the common good, be comfortable even with the A/C turned down a notch, be too lazy to do anything about it, not even be home at the time, or not know how to operate their A/C controls that an impending brownout could probably be averted.
The method of operation the quote seems to imply would seem to be a little unfair, essentially picking homes on some criteria to experience an individualized brownout. Still probably better than a widespread brownout, but really fair. The criteria would probably be based on some sort of average use case which would end up ignoring other factors, such as how many people are actually living in the house, how far it is from the junction, how well insulated, if the occupants are elderly or unhealthy, etc. Far better for the system to just be an emergency general alert to homes that, if they don't cut power usage, complete loss of power is imminent.
Obviously either way, if such a thing triggers frequently, there's a serious supply or grid problem that needs to be dealt with. When all the rolling blackouts were happening in California, it turned out to mostly be intentional manipulation by Enron, which they seem to have used both for financial gain and to help get the governor kicked out of office. A smart grid would probably help make such manipulations either difficult or extremely obvious as manipulations.
As for the government shutting off power to individual homes for other reasons, they can already pretty much do that it's just that they need some linesmen to do it by hand for the most part at the moment. They would still need to provide a reason.
I, for one, don't believe the US can create any sort of smart grid system or, at least, probably not in my lifetime. It could be done as an open standard... HAH!!! Just see that get adopted. It could be developed from the private sector, in a thousand competing flavors designed not to work together, or it could be created by the government, which would bog it down with a million designed-by-comittee requirements that would cripple it, then it would still be farmed out to a private sector crony "bidder" who would manage to retain all ip rights despite the development being funded by government money at several times the cost it should be. If the project were even ever completed before being abandoned, the private ownership of related patents, copyrights and trademarks would make adoption an expensive nightmare.
I'm going to go and have a lie down now I think.
Right. Can you imagine if a remotely-piloted drone were constantly transmitting?
I've always slathered Vegemite and Marmite like peanut butter and I like it that way. I've always been a little odd when it comes to foods with strong flavours, though.
Ok, I definitely have to grant you that, although the car might be some other expensive manufacture.
I'm just curious, in your scenario, does the defense attorney go back to his office afterward, close the door, then laugh maniacally for a few minutes?
Maybe he's trying to say "Google: just like IBM". IBM, of course, provided the Nazis with the data technologies of the day for tracking Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and political undesirables. Then the Nazis rounded up those people into concentration camps and systematically murdered them.
Whaling could have been this supposed billion dollar industry if there were no moratorium, so what is the point?
It really couldn't have been you know. We would have wiped out most of the remaining species by now. Don't even try to pretend we wouldn't have.
Well sure, but this discussion is us -humans- talking about our behaviour with an eye towards adjusting it (not that we're going to have much success doing it in an online forum. By the same definition of natural you're using, us discussing the problem and imposing restrictions on behaviour, etc. is also natural.
In my edition of that book, the genius US editors "corrected" that to "How many whales can you watch in one week?" Because why would a research ship be catching whales? Obvious error. They also inexplicably changed the scene where Crowley's demonic superiors communicate to him through Woody on _Cheers_ to Rose on Golden Girls. Apparently they were worried that US readers would be unfamiliar with _Cheers_.
The Fine Article explained why the GP probably thinks of the pits as unpredictable. The collision detection is at the pixel level, so if any pixels of the ET sprite touch a pit, ET falls in. The problem is that the sprite itself is on more of a side view, so you intuitively feel that ET shouldn't fall in as long as its feet are on the ground. So, whether you fall into a pit or not seems to be unpredictable.
The point was that they didn't have anything to lose until, all of a sudden, they did. They had to buy the games up front, but were guaranteed to be able to return those they didn't sell for a refund. But then the fly by night companies selling on that model packed up shop and couldn't or wouldn't honour returns. I wouldn't be surprised if Atari itself started taking longer and longer to actually honour its refunds as well.
David Tennant played Barty Crouch Jr and the Doctor, Michael Gambon played Dumbledore and Kazran Sardick, Helen McRory played Narcissa Malfoy and Rosanna Calvierri, John Cleese played Nearly Headless Nick and had a cameo in an older episode, Zoe Wanamaker played Madame Hooch and Lady Cassandra, Toby Jones played Dobby and the Dream Lord, Bill Nighy played Rufus Scrimgeour and a Van Goph expert, Roger Lloyd Pack played Barty Crouch Sr. and John Lumic, Shirly Henderson played Moaning Myrtle and Ursula Blake, Adrian Rawlins played James Potter and the Ood sympathizer from _Planet of the Ood_, David Bradley played Argus Filch and the Shansheeth in the old series, Derek Deadman played Tom the innkeeper and a Sontaran in the old series, Elizabeth Spriggs played the Fat Lady and was strangled to death in an episode of the old series, Jeff Rawles plays Amos Diggory and played Plantagenet in an episode of the old series, Jessica Hynes played the voice of Mafilda Hopkirk and played Joan Redfern and one of her descendants, Jimmy Gardner played the Knight Bus driver and Idmon in the old series, John Atterbury played Phineas Nigellus Black and some monsters in the old series, Julian Glover played Aragog and Richard the Lionheart and Scaroth in the old series, Terence Bayler played the Bloody Baron and Yendom in the old series.
Jim Broadbent played Horace Slughorn and also played the Doctor in _The Curse of Fatal Death_, but that's not really canon. Aside from that, Dudley Dursley and Dean Thomas are played by descendants of the 2nd doctor and one of the first companions respectively.
So, that's quite a few crossover actors. I knew some of those off the top of my head, but obviously I found a web site listing them for all of that. It's possible they may have missed some. In any case, it's not too surprising. The Harry Potter series has used a lot of British actors and so has Dr Who and there are only so many of them.
If it's not The Curse of Fatal Death (which had Rowan Atkinson, Richard E. Grant, Jim Broadbent, Hugh Grant and Joanna Lumley as the Doctor) that you saw, then maybe you're confusing the Doctor with the Rani. She was a renegade Time Lady fond of unethical experiments and had her own TARDIS.
I assumed that he was meant to be the Valeyard, who showed up in the series as the prosecutor when the Time Lords put the Doctor on trial. He was revealed to be a future incarnation of the Doctor who really has it out for himself. He's not necessarily exactly one of his normal regenerations, but may instead actually be an intermediate form like the Watcher. The Watcher was a mystery masked figure who semi-stalked the Fourth Doctor right before his death and regeneration and who actually became the new Doctor at the moment of regeneration. Another Time Lord featured in the series whose name I can't remember right now actually had his own future incarnation working for him as a sort of butler/apprentice until his own death. So, the Valeyard was meant to be possibly something similar from the Doctor's 12th regeneration (back when there was a supposedly firm limit on the number of regenerations), but evil and intent on destroying the Doctor and achieving a completely independent existence.
Through the entire series since its revival there has been a running theme that's popped up of repressed self-loathing the Doctor keeps under the surface. There was an episode where Rory and Amy were either living in an alien-infested small village or on the Tardis with the Doctor about to plunge into a "cold star" and had to figure out which was a dream and which was real. There was a creepy dream-lord villain plaguing them through the whole thing and the Doctor made a comment to him at one point that he had figured out who he was since there was only one person in the Universe who hated him that much. It turned out to be an aspect of the Doctor's unconscious mind. So, unless they're pulling some other big twist, then this new "Doctor" is probably that aspect of his mind incarnate, probably as an intermediate form produced as part of a regeneration.
Better than break even energy production is somewhat irrelevant at the atomic scale.
The reason I brought up the atomic scale is because it's relevant to the whole discussion as you pointed out. It's a starting point where you can ask, "can a fusion reaction produce more energy than the energy required to start it?" and the answer is "yes". I suppose I'm trying to start with a base case and reason inductively from there. You're right though, I suppose, that I don't need that to issue a giant "Huh!?" to your statement that:
Having a nuclear fusion reaction, in other words a nuclear synthesis reaction, is orthogonal to having break even energy production.
All I really need to do is point to all the extant examples of fusion reactions with better than break even energy production. In the natural realm, we have stars as the obvious example. In the technological realm, the best example is probably the hydrogen bomb. Way better than break even. There are also plenty of examples of fusion that isn't break even. So, really that's all it takes to demonstrate why I thought that what you said didn't make any sense.
Having a nuclear fusion reaction, in other words a nuclear synthesis reaction, is orthogonal to having break even energy production.
Sorry, why would that be? At the level of individual collisions, a collision producing a fusion reaction is pretty much guaranteed to be break even (if there's more energy in the collision than would be released by the fusion it's probably too energetic to produce fusion). If fusion doesn't occur, the collision is elastic, and, depending on the setup, the same energy can end up in another (or a billion other) collisions, one of which may produce fusion. The basic idea behind promoting fusion is creating a situation where there are a sufficient number of collisions, with sufficient energy, to make fusion statistically likely before the energy diffuses away. Stars achieve this with gravitational confinement and they produce break even fusion. Laser ignition and Farnsworth Fusors and sonoluminescence try to accomplish this with intense, concentrated energy and, typically, are not break even (although I think laser ignition has managed to achieve this in some experiments now). Other ideas like magnetic confinement try to copy stars by creating intense pressure and heat and insulating it so that the same energy is used over and over and over to generate collisions.
In any case, there are clearly methods that produce nuclear fusion reactions, in other words nuclear synthesis reactions that are break even and others that are not breakeven. Given that both types exist, it seems odd to claim that that nuclear fusion reactions are orthogonal to break even energy production.
It produces neutrons. There are practical uses in all sorts of fields.
Actually, most of the things people are talking about here aren't nuclear reactors at all. A nuclear reactor has to, by design, promote a nuclear reaction. Just letting a bunch of nuclear material decay at its natural rate such as in an RTG isn't a reactor.
As for fusion currently being only experimental. Anything approaching break-even is experimental. All kinds of fusors, however, have been around for years. The Farnsworth Fusor is about 50 years old and is a pretty proven technology, it just doesn't produce net positive power.
Nader is not a good example at all, as it's likely that had he not siphoned votes away from Gore, bush the lesser would never have been president, butterfly ballots and hanging chads notwithstanding.
This is called the spoiler effect. Vote for Nader, Bush wins, vote for Perot, Clinton wins. It's the serious flaw of simple plurality voting where each voter gets one vote to cast for one candidate in a single pass election. It's the perfect voting system when there are exactly two choices and the most seriously flawed voting system for any greater number of choices. Any nation using it for their elections doesn't have a real democracy.
The Democrats and Republicans recognize that democracy, as practiced in the US, doesn't work under the current system, which is why they run primaries. In a properly functioning democracy, the two major parties could throw all of their candidates into the general election.
Not to even mention the pedestrian uses; people will be more likely to heat their pool, turn down/up their thermostats, drive larger vehicles, get a second vehicle, build houses with less insulation, and the list just goes on.
All those things wouldn't raise energy usage enough to make energy a scarce resource again in the scenario we're talking about. There are basic limits you'll run into. I've seen some pretty poorly insulated houses, and the energy bills, while high, are still manageable. What are you proposing? That people will build houses without walls and rely solely on their home heating system in winter? There are other practical constraints on that. Those poorly insulated houses I talked about tend to have uncomfortably hot areas and uncomfortably cold areas, and not a lot of just right areas. Having infinite energy wouldn't fix that. Larger vehicles likewise have other constraints on them. We couldn't all drive around 400 ton tanks on public roads for a host of reasons. We also couldn't all get twenty cars and drive them all the time because one person can only drive one car at a time (unless they're in a stunt show) and plus, where would you park them.
Yes, you could be more wasteful of power if there were a readier source. Once you have your lights on 24 hours a day, heat your pool and driveway, air condition the whole house and spend 16 hours a day driving 20 miles over the speed limit on the highway, there just isn't that much more you can do to waste power unless you're actively trying to waste it.
Oh, I'm certainly among those discounting the shady snake oil salesmen you find sliming around ideas like this. There's also the delusional crazies to discount as well. Then there's the delusional crazies who, despite being crazy, manage to be sleazy snake oil salesmen at the same time. I think a lot of these guys really do at some level believe in their perpetual motion machines while simultaneously sneaking a dwarf into the hidden compartment to wind the crank.
My response, however, was to a post by SuricouRaven who wrote:
There isn't much legitimate research because cold fusion violates some very well-established laws regarding energy requirements
I tend to prefer if people back up such statements by detailing which laws they're talking about.