"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."
2002? Delorean? (Score:5, Funny)
Did it go 88mph?
It did and then the electric system blew out (Score:2)
It did and then the electric system blew out.
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The De Lorean can go much faster than 88 mph. It uses a Ford 351 Cleveland engine, IIRC.
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170HP without a catalytic converter. US regulations required one and so it lost around 40HP on top of that in the US version. 200HP was the design specs which they could not actually meet in production.
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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.
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Huh? Maybe the actual car in they used for filming had an engine swap, but the regular DMC-12s had 2.8l V6 PRV engines.
Still, even with that shitty engine, there is no way it 88 mph is above its top speed. I drive a much larger and heavier car with less power than the DeLorean had, and I easily get it to go faster than that every day on my way to work. The problem might be in acceleration, as it would probably take it at least 1/4 miles (and 15-16 seconds) to get up to this speed.
Re:2002? Delorean? (Score:4, Insightful)
I guess you never went to the movies.
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No, he got the reference to BTTF, but pointed out the OP's obliviousness to the statement quoted in TFA.
Admirable traits for a respectable CEO (Score:5, Interesting)
Without doubt that guy could be on the board or be CEO of a big company...
(I'm being serious!)
Re:Admirable traits for a respectable CEO (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Admirable traits for a respectable CEO (Score:5, Funny)
flat, sexy and will revolutionaise the tablet market
Yes, it's Apple's new iBLT.
Re:Admirable traits for a respectable CEO (Score:5, Funny)
The revolution will not be kosher!
Re:Admirable traits for a respectable CEO (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Admirable traits for a respectable CEO (Score:5, Interesting)
Serious? Really? How are most technology CEO's scammers on a level that this guy is on? Can you name a legit technology CEO that you think is at that same 'scam level'?
Well, "scammer" is a relative term. Certainly a number of U.S. CEO-types have scammed their employees out of their jobs, and have been scamming the government for years (H1B allocations, outsourcing, not enough capable American workers, TARP, etc. etc. etc.) so a comparison of the level of ethics involved is entirely reasonable.
Open the borders (Score:2, Interesting)
Well, "scammer" is a relative term. Certainly a number of U.S. CEO-types have scammed their employees out of their jobs, and have been scamming the government for years (H1B allocations, outsourcing, not enough capable American workers, TARP, etc. etc. etc.) so a comparison of the level of ethics involved is entirely reasonable.
H1B is a scam? I believe in open immigration. Unless we can prove you are a criminal, we should let you in. Where you were born is random chance, so it hardly seems fair for me to hoard the benefits of living in the USA.
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H1B has nothing to do with immigration. If H1B workers were citizens they wouldn't drive down salaries.
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Re:Open the borders (Score:5, Interesting)
Because the H1B holders are as close to indentured servants as it gets these days. Their H1B visas are tied to their jobs -- if they lose their jobs, they have something like two weeks to find a new job or leave the country.
Employers like that bludgeon to hold against employees. Work your ass off for less pay, don't cause trouble, and in a few years you might be able to stay here on your own. I'd like to see a plot of how many H1B employees are laid off or fired vs time with the H1B. I bet there'd be a spike near the end. I bet a plot of hires vs time in visa would show hiring falling off near the end of the visa time. Why hire an H1B who only has a few months of servitude remaining? On the other hand, those within such close reach of a permanent visa might just be more desperate and more willing to take crappy terms.
Proper H1B reform would start with applying the visa to the employee, not the job. You'd see corporate interest in hiring H1B holders drop like a rock. That should tell you something.
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An excess of supply over demand would drive down salaries irrespective of whether the surplus applicants came from Indiana or India.
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An excess of supply over demand would drive down salaries irrespective of whether the surplus applicants came from Indiana or India.
Yes, and the normal cycle is that a shortage causes salaries to rise until sufficient workers are trained in order to alleviate the shortage. Then salaries drop. The point is, you see nothing wrong with a deliberately manufactured surplus of certain classes of traditionally well-paid workers instituted for the express purpose of driving down wages? How is that any different from what the oil companies did back in the seventies by manufacturing an "energy crisis" for the express purpose of raping our wallets
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If you follow your logic to the extreme then we should close the borders and allow zero immigration. Is that what you advocate?
"If we follow your logic to the extreme" ... what the hell does that mean? The GP made a reasonable (and, I might add, valid) point. It also had nothing whatsoever to do with immigration.
Your transparent attempt to discredit his perspective by carrying it to the point of ridiculousness says a lot more about you than anything else. If you have a legitimate argument as to why America (or any other nation) should simply allow itself to be dismantled and sold off piecemeal to the rest of the world, please ma
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Fixed that for you.
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The people who are willing to leave one country to live in another are the hardest working and most creative, the very ones an immigration policy should encourage. The ones who were born here and want to shut the doors are the dumbest and least imaginative and the most likely to cause grief for employers by demanding what's theirs by birthright. Following that logic, policy should be to welcome immigrants and require natural born citizens to prove they deserve the benefits of living there or being evicted
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The whole "but our ancestors worked and fought for it" argument is kinda pointless.
On the other hand, the whole "we are working hard and fighting for it" is relevant. It's completely fair and moral for a country's citizens to have their own culture, government, and economy.
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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,
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I would also like toi add while i agree with free enterprise i also believe that a non market component of the economy is also important to, i believe in a mixed system. It is clear that the US became great with the help of government agencies such as NASA and many great technologies were developed, which would not be possible in a market economy, in non market environments which however can allow for creativity, perhaps even more so than the market environment. I think government law, with the focus on ind
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Naive attitude. This is a sovereign nation with borders and the right to self-preservation so placing controls on who can enter falls entirely within those rights. You are advocating opening the flood gates and creating a free-for-all by letting anyone in who merely requests entry--essentially nullifying the impact of controlled, selective, and orderly immigration. A massive, sudden swell of immigrants is a disruptive force on the economy due to the finite availability of jobs, housing, and public services.
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Your utopian plan will never be adopted by Americans because it is just plain stupid.
I believe you misspelled "dystopian".
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.
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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 th
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Some would argue that most governments scam their citizens to some degree. In the US's case, the scam was TARP ("to save the economy") as the banks themselves did not have the power to steal themselves a trillion without the government using its authority to remove that sum from the citizenry.
Even the economy its self can be viewed as fraudulent as it has been constructed (inflationary FED practices, stimulus packages, corporate welfare etc.).
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It's easy to bash the bankers - heck, a lot of politicians are making a career out of it.
But given that the banking industry basically underpins all the others, there were very few options but to bail them out. Not saying I like or agree with it, but I'm calling it how it is.
In consequence it comes down to this - when the banks hold a pistol to their heads, they're pointing a fucking big howitzer at everyone else.
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It's easy to bash the bankers - heck, a lot of politicians are making a career out of it.
But given that the banking industry basically underpins all the others, there were very few options but to bail them out. Not saying I like or agree with it, but I'm calling it how it is.
In consequence it comes down to this - when the banks hold a pistol to their heads, they're pointing a fucking big howitzer at everyone else.
Two things went wrong: improper Clinton-era deregulation (yes, this has been going on for a while now) and bank management that immediately began to exhibit the very behavior the original regulation was designed to prevent. Much as some of us detest the thought, the reality is that there is no such thing as a workable "free market", those with power cannot be trusted to wield it with anything but their own best interests in mind, and because of that we do need the institution of government.
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These banks used the money in large part to buy out their competitors. The ones that should otherwise have failed due to their own stupidity and greed continue to exist as a result of TARP. This shit will happen again and again and again because these banks know that the government will not allow them to fail anymore. The federal government has no right what so ever to use taxpayer money to bail out failed banks! It is the worst possible wealth transfer imaginable: one from the taxpayers to the wealthy.
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Really? Name one.
It wasn't a "wealth transfer", it was a loan, which is largely paid back already. The objective was to improve the economy for the benefit of all. Or would you prefer 25+% unemployment? Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face.
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Darl McBride, ex-CEO of SCO.
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Darl McBride, ex-CEO of SCO.
Well, to be fair he did say "legit" technology CEO.
Extraordinary claims... (Score:2)
...require extraordinary evidence.
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...require extraordinary evidence.
I always hated that statement, and real scientists should avoid it like the plague. Yes, I know Carl Sagan said it, doesn't mean he was correct. There are no levels of "evidence", there is only evidence or non-evidence. The claim itself will define what evidence is required, there's no special additional evidence that fantastic claims require...just plain old EVIDENCE.
Marty, get in the car! (Score:4, Funny)
Almost forgot (Score:2)
So that reminds me, we all need to start wearing our multiple ties [wikia.com] and chrome sunglasses [reelmovienews.com] so that they are in fashion by the time 2015 [wikipedia.org] is here. And Nike, where are my power shoelaces?!
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So that reminds me, we all need to start wearing our multiple ties [wikia.com] and chrome sunglasses [reelmovienews.com]
This is Slashdot. Most of us refuse to wear one tie, never mind two. Although the Doc Brown chrome glasses would let us sleep at work without anyone knowing, currently only possible if one goes though the trouble of learning how to sleep with one's eyes open.
You may be on to something here.
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learning how to sleep with one's eyes open
Powerpoint.
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It wasn't a scam (Score:5, Insightful)
It was a tax on people who don't understand the basic laws of thermodynamics.
Funny, I was thinking insightful (Score:3, Insightful)
Seems fair enough to me :-)
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the "Steorn" guys/scammers here in Ireland are still at it
http://boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2055768261 [boards.ie]
with their machine that creates energy out of nothing :D
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If you could tap into non traditional energy sources on board ( like heat, sunlight, cosmic rays, etc ) the car would be for all practical purposes perpetual ( until physical entropy took over and the wheels fell off. ).
And while i agree NOTHING last forever, in this game its all relative. If you can outlast mankind ( like our sun will ), might as well call it perpetual.
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the proper use of the overpotentials in these double surfaces can produce current that moves against the voltage.
in addition to the external charges of molecules and atoms that they normally consider, there are also ongoing a huge variety of nuclear currents and charging that presently do not appear in any book on batteries
Again, we leave further analysis along that line to the experts, only appealing to them that time-reversal effects must also be considered.
[Emphasis mine]
... that is, before the author gets into the whole "Big Energy is going to buy us and silence us or kill us!"
And that is just scratching the surface, here: http://www.greaterthings.com/News/Tilley/how/bob_colvin_bearden.htm [greaterthings.com]
Another BTTF joke (labeled for your convenience) (Score:4, Funny)
Well, he figured if he was going to scam folks, why not scam folks in style?
Stealing the imaginary (Score:5, Funny)
"Those of you who have been in the Free Energy community for years have heard of Carl Tilley and his claim to have a battery charger technology that could keep a system running indefinitely, though in fact he stole the technology"
OH NO!! He stole imaginary technology!!
I remember following this story back in 2002 and there was a report of Carl Tilley being hampered by a lawsuit -- some other guy was claiming that *HE* invented the imaginary perpetual motion battery charging technology.
Pikers (Score:2)
They should have convinced people that they could move out of the dirty city and into the country. Then, they should have overbuilt the country to the point where it no longer had any rural character, thus negating the first part but requiring them to take long train rides into the cities they moved out of. Then they should have bought up the trains and closed them down, forcing them all to drive cars. Then after a while they could rebuild the trains; but this time at a much greater cost since the lines w
Captured by the Long Arm of the Law... (Score:2)
Captured by the Long Arm of the Law... ... of Thermodynamics.
I'm still trying to think of the equivalent voice over that's at the beginning of each episode of COPS, "COPS is filmed on location with the men and women of law enforcement. All suspects are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law."
Investors rarely know what they invest in (Score:3, Insightful)
Ever tried to get funding for something? You'd be amazed how little investors know about your project. How little they actually want to know. Confront them with the technical side and their eyes will glaze over before you're halfway through. They don't care.
Make wild promises and call it revolutionary technology, then break directly to investment plan and projected revenue, and you're set. I'm not kidding here. They'd invest in a machine that turns shit into meat if you make it sound halfway scientific (use cyanobacteria you genetically engineered with a retrovirus, that's 3 hard to spell words that kinda sound like they could sorta do the trick), but don't spend more than 5 minutes with the technical side, then go immediately to the part where you promise them lots of riches.
Give the man a break (Score:2)
when Tilley told his shareholders in May of 2002 that GE had offered $2 billion 'sight unseen' to buy out the technology.
The man was clearly a visionary. After all, the US government has handed out billions of dollars to SOME companies (cough GM, AIG, Citi, Fannie and Freddie) "sight unseen"... so it DOES happen!
Ob (Score:3, Interesting)
[mode = evangelical german christian with 98 kids] Who are we to say that perpetual motion is impossible? Thermodynamic laws are just theories, like evolution and gravity.[/]
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I do actually consider it a possiblity that some new breakthrough at CERN will come up with a better understanding, which shows that for example the conservation of energy does not always hold. Like when most people though physics was pretty much understood and Newton's laws of motion were the absolute and final truth, until Einstein came along and showed them to be only an approximation. In that sense, the laws of thermodynamics are very much a "just a theory". [disclaimer: IANAP]
But I am quite sure no suc
Perpetual Scam (Score:2, Interesting)
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And the thing keeps going on and on...today Steorn was supposed to showcase their overunity device.
Can we include Moller on this? (Score:2)
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The SkyCar Guy.
http://www.moller.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=49&Itemid=57 [moller.com]
There was supposed to be an electric bike (Score:2, Interesting)
Free energy scam , there are dozen a penny (Score:3, Interesting)
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They're doing the human race a favour. Really.
How do you figure? The "revelation" that this was a scam won't make the fools any smarter. They'll just find someone else to trick them. These people aren't looking for truth, they're looking for belief.
Re:They should be given medals, not prison sentenc (Score:5, Insightful)
The GP seems to think that these scammers did humanity a favor by removing large sums of money from the scammed (fools) who can't then use that money for other foolish purposes. Any crime could be justified along those lines by blaming the victim of the crimes for being unable to defend themselves against it. Social darwinism at its finest.
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Eating too much? crime. Smoking? crime. We've tried that. A crime is harming other people (fraud, theft etc.) not harming one's self.
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.
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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 Tr
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"These people aren't looking for truth, they're looking for belief."
People who do so deserve to be visibly and mercilessly crushed by events as examples to others.
Unless there is a punishment for being like that, it will spread to no good.
They worked hard to be in desperate craving gullible denial. Fuck 'em.
Re:They should be given medals, not prison sentenc (Score:4, Insightful)
They're doing the human race a favour. Really.
Evolution in action, baby. Anyone who is willing to not only believe in perpetual motion but invest money in it deserves whatever it is he or she gets from their particular brand of ignorance. A basic grade-school science curriculum should be sufficient armor against a scam of this type (well, at least in my day it was.)
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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.
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Ha ha ha.
oh. You were serious.
You know, just because he got a patent on it doesn't mean it really worked as advertised.
And, no, that wasn't AC power. It was pulsed DC at a specific frequency (or pattern actually). AC would just give you warm water. :) Been there, done that, have the lab notes to go with it. The "mystery" frequency doesn't exist anywhere but in fantasies and stories.
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It's nothing to do with the frequency. You just need the right catalyst. It's 68% unicorn horn, 29% santa claus whiskers and 3% JWSmythe brain.
Ironically, the minor component is proving the most difficult to find.
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It's nothing to do with the frequency. You just need the right catalyst. It's 68% unicorn horn, 29% santa claus whiskers and 3% JWSmythe brain.
Ironically, the minor component is proving the most difficult to find.
Well, there are some technical challenges with getting the frequency of (-3 + 2i)pi kHz...
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Perhaps in your world-view but I have to say that, before being modded to +5 Interesting, being at the Flamebait level had it straight-up right.
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a favour? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Your thinking is the broken window fallacy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window [wikipedia.org]
Your thinking is the same thinking as 'tax the rich more'. Which is a fallacy too as the 'rich' do not keep their money in big stacks sitting around their house. They keep it in stocks, bonds, bank balances, etc. They basically loan the money out to others to use for a fee. So people can have newer things now. With a tax the rich that money can not be reloaned out (thus helping build more things). It is
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: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.
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The power of self-delusion is enormous, and nowhere will you find it stronger than in the free energy community.
“If you want something badly enough, and believing the truth will take it away from you, you will see the truth as error. and remain enslaved to your wants.” -J Piper
Re:Free energy community? (Score:4, Insightful)
I would argue that the "alternative energy/environmental impact" community has got to be a close second. There are still *plenty" of "alternative energy" people who think that the big car companies are suppressing 100 mpg carburetors and intentionally stifling innovation, despite the clearly suicidal reasoning that entails, not to mention the second-law-of-thermodynamics issues. There are plenty of people talking about space power systems despite the unknown technological basis and absurdly prohibitive economics (and, bizarrely, environmental impacts) of such a system. There are still people advocating orders-of-magnitude level of "conservation" despite the obvious economic and quality of life effects that this would have. There are still those advocating isolating human population to walled cities with limited external activity to "protect the world from people" People set SUVs on fire to protest environmental impacts of SUVs, and release more pollution in 1/2 hour than the SUV would have released in its entire existence.
Problems will not be solved by "true believers", precisely because they are true believers.
Brett
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Right, assuming that GE actually paid him the $2B, even though when contacted they said they haven't heard of him and that they always do due diligence when investing in anything, especially for that much.
In other words, $2B sight unseen offers do not exist. This should have been obvious to anyone he told that to. Anyone investing $2B into anything is going to do quite a bit of research to make sure their investment is going to pay off.
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...so potentially $2,000,000,000 - $26,000,000 = $1,974,000,000 = Not bad even when you lost in court IMHO. And certainly *not* counting what ~7 years worth of foreseeable built-up interest on $2B either.
You should invest in free energy. You're exactly the kind of savvy investor they're looking for.
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Actually, going 300+miles on a standard tank at 100+ mph is rather difficult, speeding tickets notwithstanding. Very few passenger vehicles have the combination of fuel efficiency and tank size which affords such a feat. Remember that at 100mph, you'll likely be burning fuel at a rate roughly double that at normal highway speeds (air resistance being dominant, and a with a squared relationship between speed and drag). If, say, you had a very fuel efficient car with 40mpg at 65, and 20mpg at 100mph, you'd
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Here in London, 7MPH is a great achievement - traffic was faster when horse drawn. There is no real need for > 100MPH vehicles. Parking spaces would be more use!
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Most cars are made to travel approx 300 to 400 miles per tank of gas at their expected operating speeds.
As far as operating at 100mph, that's dependent on not just aerodynamics, but the available power and effective gear ratio. Most gas automobile engines are most efficient between 1700 to 2200 RPM.
For example, a lot of cars are already running at 3,000 RPM at 70mph. That would put them at at about 4,500 RPM at 100mph.
My car (and ones like it) ar
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It might not be as trivial as it seems at the first glance, but going for 300 miles on a tank is pretty easy, even my Euro-barge of a car can do it. The tank is around 60l, and fuel consumption at this speed should be somewhere below 12 l/100 km, giving me a range of 500km = 310 miles.
Re: (Score:2, Redundant)
I hear that amazing iPad has a near-perpetual 10 hour battery too!
I heard you only have to recharge it every 28 days or so, for 3 to 5 days and it gets bitchy as hell just before so that's when you know you have to plug it in...