"Perpetual Motion DeLorean" Scammers Face $26M Judgment 243
An anonymous reader writes "Back in 2002, we discussed a story about the so-called 'Perpetual Motion DeLorean,' which could 'supposedly go "hundreds of miles" at speeds over 100MPH without stopping to recharge.' More than seven years later, the final shoe has dropped on this saga, with a $26 million judgment against Carl Tilley and his wife, who propagated this scam that ran for several years. Probably the height of its audacity was when Tilley told his shareholders in May of 2002 that GE had offered $2 billion 'sight unseen' to buy out the technology."
Re:Admirable traits for a respectable CEO (Score:3, Informative)
Darl McBride, ex-CEO of SCO.
Re:Free energy community? (Score:5, Informative)
I noticed that as well, apparently the blog is here [peswiki.com]. It'd be laughable were it not so sad. The human capacity for clinging to ignorance in spite of well-known facts really is an amazing thing.
Re:Open the borders (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Free energy community? (Score:5, Informative)
A bit of information: I've followed the Tilley story from the day he and Doug Littlefield announced their first "free energy" machine. Yes, Doug Littlefield, the guy who provided the evidence against Tilley, was initially his partner. Once Tilley realized what a gold mine he had stumbled on with "free energy", he went his own way, created the Tilley Electric Vehicle, and began selling bogus stock. By most accounts, Carl Tilley scammed at least $500,000 from various individuals in Tennessee until he fled the state. I actually saw his demo at the Nashville Superspeedway. I went there because I was curious how he was going to back out of proving the TEV actually worked. The bogus wheel bearing failure on the 13th lap was absolutely no surprise.
As for Sterling Allan, he is a "true believer" in every sense of the word, in terms of his religious beliefs and his belief in free energy. He's never met a free energy claimant he didn't like, and will bend over backwards to give even the most bizarre claims every possible benefit of the doubt. If Doug Littlefield hadn't provided Allan with such an overwhelming amount of evidence that Tilley was a two-bit check-kiting con man, to this day Allan would still be writing hopeful articles about Tilley's "technology". You just about have to hit Sterling Allan over the head with a two-by-four to make him change his mind. Even now, if you look on Allan's web site, you can find him giving publicity to guys just like Tilley, but with a slightly more sophisticated sales job.
The power of self-delusion is enormous, and nowhere will you find it stronger than in the free energy community.
Re:2002? Delorean? (Score:2, Informative)
No, he got the reference to BTTF, but pointed out the OP's obliviousness to the statement quoted in TFA.
Re:They should be given medals, not prison sentenc (Score:3, Informative)
The real question is, if you asked 100 random people what 'random' meant, how many could define it correctly.
Sounds like one of them would not be you. You've just described a quasi-random sampling of people who fly commercially, which by definition creates a very biased sample and one which would likely overestimate the percentage of people who know what random means. People who fly would tend to be more educated and wealthier than the general population. At any rate, it's certainly not a random sampling of the general population.
Re:2002? Delorean? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:2002? Delorean? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:2002? Delorean? (Score:3, Informative)
Err, unless it was modified - no. The factory produced DMC-12 used a 170HP PRV [wikipedia.org] engine (a Peugeot-Renault-Volvo design) without a catalytic converter, which when fitted with one as per US regulations lost further 40HP for a grand total of 130HP. Not exactly a racetrack terror given the car's weight of 1.2 metric tons.
Re:100's of miles at 100 mph? strange example to u (Score:3, Informative)
Gearing and volumetric efficiency of the engine play a huge part in highway speed mileage. Some cars really do get better mileage at higher speeds because of those effects. I usually rent this model of car when in SoCal/Nevada because of the comfort over long stretches, the ability to take 3-5 people with me, tons of luggage space (or, in my case, demo products for CES and NAMM) and the great mileage on LONG highway runs. Add in the 19 gallon tank and you can get 400+ miles on the highway before having to refuel.
And when you rent a white or dark blue one, people tend to get out of your way when you come up behind them, since the only people who actually buy such cars are either retirees who putter along at 50 MPH or police who typically patrol that stretch of road at 80-90 MPH speeds (for those not familiar with the LA-LV road, the speed of traffic is typically 75-80 MPH, with a good 30-35% of the traffic moving at 90 MPH).
Re:Open the borders (Score:3, Informative)
I disagree, completely. First of all if we opened up the boarders everyone would come to Europe and the US and the place would quickly degenerate into a filthy cesspit just like the overpopulated filthy infested impoverished ratholes that they left behind.
Furthermore what you are asking would make it impossible for any country to implement and enforce its laws. A country that implements good laws that protects its peoples freedoms and rights and create prosperity would be punished by a flood of immigrants, so it would be impossible for them to implement these laws. This would end up requiring a global government just to do anything enforceable. The fact we have had seperate countries is a good thing, it has allowed us to see what fails and what works and as well, the US and Europe have shown that democracy, secular government, and freedom does work and that when you regulate corporations in workers favor you end up with a growing middle class. The US has strayed from this recently and so we can see it is running into problems.
But it is clear that the combination of free enterprise and welfare state, stable population levels, religious freedom and secular state, with democracy and freedom works, and a strong regularioty government and employee unions, has created both a prosperous, safe and freedomful environment inside OECD countries. The low population growth in OECD countries has assured these countries have plenty of resources for these people and have not driven themselves into poverty with overpopulation. The free enterprise allows for individual creativity but government regulations prevent corporations and people from ruthlessly and brutally exploiting others (in principle at least).
If you like how our success looks, you should get to work in copying it in your own countries, work honestly and dilligently, stop reproducing yourself into an overpopulated ecological, disease, and resource depletion disaster, instead of wanting to flood us, instead of holding on to your fascist backwards dictatorships, pathetic barbaric state religion and brainwashed population who cannot question the status quo and the illogical behaviours such as burkha wearing that turns people into irrationalists who cannot act or think for themselves, and corrupt policies.
Re:They should be given medals, not prison sentenc (Score:4, Informative)
The core principle of capitalism is making mutually beneficial transactions.
If you buy something, the object was worth more to you than the money which was charged.
If you sell something, then that something was worth less to you than the price you got for it.
This isn't a flaw, it's the way that value is maximized.
Re:Open the borders (Score:5, Informative)
I hate how the racists always have to rear their ugly heads when topics like this pop up.
Newsflash: race has nothing to do with a country's prosperity. Culture does.
Since you brought up Haiti, let's look at it more closely. It shares an island, Hispaniola, with another country called the Dominican Republic. Check it out on Google Maps satellite view; you should be able to see the border quite clearly even without political boundaries shown, because the Haiti side is all brown and the DR side is all green. That's because Haiti destroyed all their natural resources (namely, their forests), while DR wisely preserved theirs before they were destroyed like that. Now, the DR has lots of tourism (such as from divers), fishing, etc. Haiti only has dumb liberals visit to take pity on everyone, but that's about it (until recently of course). See, when Haiti destroyed their forests, this also caused massive soil erosion, which destroyed all the offshore coral reefs, which are a vital part of the ecosystem (something stupid racist conservatives like you probably dismiss as unimportant in your quest for more oil). So, no coral reefs = no fish, and also no divers or snorklers. Economically, the DR is doing just fine, while we all know how bad off Haiti is. Now, how is this all relevant? They're the same race of people! They're both Spanish-speaking descendants of African slaves (probably mixed with some Native Americans from the area). But, they obviously have a different enough culture that they decided to split the island into two countries at one point, and had different ideas on how to run their countries. One hasn't been too bad, the other's been a disaster.
There's nothing genetically significant about white people. Genetically speaking, we're more closely related to Chinese, Australian aborigines, Arabs, and Native Americans than one tribe of chimpanzees is to another; we're practically inbred as a species, probably due to the near-extinction events in the distant past that have popped up on Slashdot recently. However, Westerners have developed a culture, over several thousand years (i.e. Greeks and Romans) that allowed them to be rather successful. Lots of other people have been able to adopt some of the better elements of Western culture and be successful as well, learning from our mistakes and successes. America certainly has a unique culture as well, going back several hundred years, that is distinct from others, and has been pretty good about accepting others as immigrants and assimilating them, allowing the culture as a whole to prosper. 100 years ago, narrow-minded people like you were complaining about Irish immigrants of all people, who no one today sees as anything but "white". The only problem we have now is a little too much unchecked immigration; 100 years ago, there was plenty of it, but it was controlled, people were brought in from many different countries (not just one large neighbor) so that none of them would grow too powerful and overrun the American culture, and they were all forced to learn English and assimilate, and that seems to be gone now.
White people don't need their own country; they already have a bunch, like Ireland, Iceland, Greenland, etc. However, Americans do need to do a better job protecting their own culture, though without closing it off altogether from immigrants.
Re:Can we include Moller on this? (Score:3, Informative)
The SkyCar Guy.
http://www.moller.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=49&Itemid=57 [moller.com]
Re:They should be given medals, not prison sentenc (Score:3, Informative)
No. The core principle of Capitalism is Greed, transactions are simply a mechanism to satisfy that greed. There is no requirement that the transaction are "mutually beneficial" and one can easily see that by the way they are conducted in real life: most consumers are ripped off on a regular basis and many transactions are benefiting only one side, the other being coerced or bamboozled into the action.
The standard cop-out of the True Believers is that "buyers should be informed and they should beware", which is of course in practice impossible in majority of cases with most transactions.
Thus fleecing is far more the practical norm than any "mutual benefit".
No, usually it is because you have no clue as to actual (or even relative) value of anything and all you can do is to engage in flawed, mis-informed gambling. To further ensure that you remain clueless, most sellers engage in elaborate obfuscation and mis-information campaigns and because they usually are far better financed and experienced at it then you, they usually win with you ending up buying something at 100x price of an identical (literally or with just a different label made in the same plant on the same assembly line on the same day) product in a warehouse two blocks down the street. Since the products are identical, it is impossible to pretend that their value (even subjectively) is somehow vastly different. Yet this is par for the course for majority of transactions.
See above. If you manage to con someone out of 10x the value (even the value you estimate yourself) most sellers would gladly do it. This conning and mis-information are again Standard Operating Procedure in majority of transactions.
Yea, right. What is being "maximized" is the ability to manipulate buyers, value having remained wholly elusive and unquantifiable. No "maximizing" of it is going on. Case in point: most utterly destructive and counter-productive consumer practices, such as borrowing at 30% interest are also the most popular, leading to "maximizing" of utterly non-productive sections of economy, such as fictitious "derivatives" and other "financial instruments", which then collapse (repetitively, every few decades) requiring panicked influx of vast amounts of cash to stop the whole rickety pyramid of nonsense from collapsing outright.
Capitalism as espoused by fundamentalist believers is an Utopian ideal that might be operative in a world of idealistic, "honest" small-town bakers and shoe-makers but like all similar simplistic ideologies (like Communism) it falls apart as the scale grows, eventually (and inevitably) imploding into oligarchic-kleptocratic-pseudo-feudalism (which is what we are experiencing now). And before some fundamentalists start whining about "government interference", it is worth pointing out that most multinational corporations are larger and better financed (sometimes by few orders of magnitude) than many nations.
Re:They should be given medals, not prison sentenc (Score:2, Informative)
It is my view that all of these 18th century, simplistic ideologies were never capable of scaling up from a "rustic town" level to gigantic industrial nations and global economies. Capitalism "works" (kind of) when shoe-makers, bakers, smiths and flour mills are the largest industrial entities around. As the size and power (and numbers of employees and the depths of managerial pyramids) increases, the thing is increasingly shaky finally imploding completely at the present levels, resulting in de-facto oligarchic-kleptocratic-neo-feudalism, which is what we get now.
The only feasible cure is to limit the size of possible entities in operation (to a fraction of their current size), and thus to return the thing to a more stable (and also vastly more equitable) scenario. Unfortunately the way things are going it is not unlikely that in a 100 years or so a few mega-corporations will end up owning 99%+ of global assets and become practical rulers of the planet, absolute kings and emperors in all but name. This trend is already well advanced, last statistical data indicating that the "top" 5% of global population already has 90%+ of global assets (and the trend is accelerating towards further consolidation).
Re:Open the borders (Score:3, Informative)
One big point... you state that "Haiti destroyed their natural resources (forests)". This shows a basic lack of knowledge of history. Haiti was a Spanish then a French colony (hence the French language). Like all colonies it was exploited... natural resources were plundered. Even after they had a revolution, they were forced to pay reparations to the French leading to the destruction of the remainder of their forests, among other things.
This was followed by a series of interventions by other colonial powers (primarily the US but also including the British, French, and Germans) which prevented them from forming effective government. Every time an effective independent government was formed which threatened to be too independent from world economic powers, foreign governments sent in the marines or engineered a coup by more "business friendly" (and exploitative) leaders. This pattern continues to the current day.
Haiti is a good example of the evils of colonialism that continues to this day.