Free Republic

"But this isn’t the “bang for the buck” that the terrorists want."

I dunno, Boston effectively shut down for a few days, estimates are billions in lost economic activity, scores of people with lifelong injuries, four dead. And it cost them a couple of thousand bucks worth of materials and only two young inexperienced men (so far at least).

Frankly, I'm appalled by the bang they got for their buck. We have to do better. The clues were there, the Russians warned us about the older brother. We were asleep.

"Highly-sophisticated bombs that killed 3 people?"

The bombs were placed at street level, where they caused mainly severe leg injuries, including numerous amputations. Had they been placed higher, those would have become head injuries and decapitations... in other words scores of deaths.

It was the placement of the bombs that made them less deadly. The triggers and hardware worked reliably, and did show expertise. I'm pretty sure the investigation will turn up that a pro either trained them or handed them the triggers ready made.

There is at least one death reported directly due to the sabotage of phone lines by Verizon union workers(elderly person unable to get 911 help). There were over 90 acts of sabotage. A verizon manager told my wife that in some cases they literally took an ax and hacked up equipment.

This is now murder. It is identical to terrorism. If Al Queda cut off phone lines then homeland security and the FBI would be wiretapping and putting pressure on people to talk to find the perps.

But because it’s union thugs, I guess there’s no chance of any justice in the Obama administration for those who were inconvenienced, and in at least one case, killed.

There is an increasing sense of lawlessness in this country, and it comes from the top. Today it’s wanton cutting off of phone lines and flash mobs looting stores. Tomorrow it could be roving death squads. The step from one to the next is really not all that far once the direction is set and there is no effort to enforce laws at the top.

I have been without phone service for days and they are telling me 1 to 2 weeks before service is restored. Towns all over NJ are experiencing the same thing.

Can somebody tell me why this is not considered TERRORISM. Doesn’t the Patriot Act specifically call out attacks on communications infrastructure as terrorism?

What if an elderly person who doesn’t have a cell phone has a heart attack and dies becuase there is no way to phone for help? Isn’t that MURDER?

I’m for tapping these union’s phones, finding who is doing this, and shipping them off to Gitmo.

Excellent. To earn your keep for today, please succinctly explain how to eradicate the monster called Obamacare....

Hey man, it's ok to expect miracles from me, but not EVERY DAY.

This is all very simple:

Step 1: Sell off all national land, parks, etc., to china.

Step 2: Use proceeds to pay off 14.3 trillion in debt.

Step 3: Nationalize all the stuff you sold off in Step 1.

There, I've earned my pay for another day.

I've seen this before, yes. They claim 400 million in investments in order to lure more people to jump on the bandwagon. Yet they do not mention a single investor by name, it is always kept secret. They claim a lot of things that cannot be verified, hoping those claims will simply be echoed without analysis in the news, then they point at the news articles for some kind of circular logic proof that what they said were facts. I've seen scams that put out press releases just like this in practically every detail. Only the names and the technology varies in some details.

Did you actually view the video of the swedish skeptics society? They don't really confirm anything. They say only that they cannot rule it out. In fact they say flat out that they are relying only on information the inventor provided and therefore they cannot confirm anything without further details. They most certainly did not say it was nuclear.

Again, in scams like this it is common to take the words of established experts out of context and claim they are "endorsing" the technology, when in fact they are not. Someone with credentials says it looks "interesting" and all the sudden the press release says it was endorsed by them.

Why are you so emphatically caught up in this? You seem to take it all very personally.

Gee, nothing like resorting to name calling to prove your point. Yeah that certainly makes you seem more credible.

As far as my qualifications, I ran a renewable energy company a few years back, and I saw so many energy scams I cannot begin to recount them all to you. All I am saying is, this one fits the exact pattern I have seen many times before. To the letter.

So, we’ll see what happens in October.

The article on the NASA guy is extremely weak. He makes an offhand comment about the technology. Even says he doubts it is fusion, throwing cold water on that aspect of it. Nowhere does he say he’s going to “invest” in it as you say. Bushnell appears to be mainly overseeing climate projects. Yeah lots of credibility there.

The navy article is a little better, at least it shows there maybe something there. But it has to be replicated by an independent lab, of course. Plus nowhere does that prove you get more energy out than you have to put in.

But why argue? According to the inventors we’ll have a prototype up and running and cranking out the kilowatts by october.

So, sit back, have a nice summer! If greece has the world’s first fusion plant up and running by fall I will gladly congratulate you on this find. I just think it’s far more likely this fades into the sunset after a bunch of investors pour money into it, like has happened dozens of times before.

This is the normal pattern for this kind of scam. Find a few people willing to say it’s possible, then put spin on that to make it seem like they have blessed it. No scientist would ever say anything is “real” unless it was independently reproduced by multiple labs, apparently not the case here. That should be your first clue.

Three months will come and go, and nothing will be apparent other than pleas for “just a little” more funding. This is how they get investors to throw good money after bad and keep the scam going. Seen it over and over again, it is a standard playbook.

In the end, to avoid prosecution, they will claim the big energy companies conspired to destroy them. Again, standard playbook. The truth is: the big companies would be the first to license this if it were real. They would be falling over themselves to bid for it.

These kinds of articles appear every few months, and so far they’ve all proven to be scams.

Hey, they say they’ll have product in just a few months. Let’s wait and see what surfaces by October. My prediction: they will be just on the cusp if they only can get a little more money.

made by two Italian scientists from the University of Bologna

Yeah it sure sounds like Bologna to me.

This is moronic. Oil prices have been coming down in recent months, from a high of $115 per bbl to around $94 yesterday, and there were no signs that it was going to spike back up over $100 anytime soon. So he releases SPR when oil is nearly 20% off its recent highs? Why didn’t he release it when oil was $115?

The SPR was supposed to be an emergency supply in case we were at war and reserves were cut off. Now we’re squandering it with no real emergency (the small disruptions we’re seeing obviously were not even enough to keep it over $100 per bbl so that’s a load of bs.)

I predict a lot of uses of the word “unexpected” in all financial articles over the next year.

The new word is "transitory." Of course eventually they will use both in the same sentence, such as: "it was unexpected that the problems were not transitory."

Good to know the guy who is creating trillions of dollars out of thin air now admits he’s just “winging” it.

No wonder that everytime this guy speaks the markets tank.

It consisted of billions of lost socks that somehow wound up behind jupiter. Turns out drier manufacturers accidentally placed a “sock wormhole” in every unit manufactured since 1948.

PVs use the light from the sun these use heat.

In that case, I call double-BS, because the laws of thermodynamics put very strict limits on how much energy can be extracted from heat, which is a disorganized form of energy. Unless he is running at an enormously high temperature he can't get to 95% efficiency using a heat engine of any kind. And enormously high temperatures bring extreme engineering challenges that probably render such an engine impractical.

In fact, he'd be better off claiming to convert the light, since there is no theoretical limit on the conversion efficiency (up to 100% that is), because light, unlike heat, is an organized form of energy.

I call BS based on this from the article:

Within five years, the research team believes they will have a product that complements conventional PV solar panels.

This is weasel-wording, pure and simple. If his technology is nearly 5 times as efficient, and as the article says can be cheaply manufactured, then there is no need for convential PV panels anymore, they are totally obsolete. So why would he say his project "complements" them?

Read between the lines and you can learn a lot of what is not being said here. That quote tells me there is some fatal flaw with this technology and the article is not revealing that flaw.

There is no branch of science, none whatever, that predicts that matter can “feel” things. If you hit a computer with a hammer it does not feel pain, for example. A computer attached to a video camera so it can “see” does not experience the color red, it only interprets bits coming in off a data feed, a series of numbers. These are simply facts: there is not even the beginnings of any theory that explains conscious experience and its associated sensations, and there is no analogy to that in the computer world whatever.

Even if I programmed a robot to say “ouch” when I hit it with a hammer, do you really feel sorry for it? No, because you know it was simply programmed to say “ouch” and you know it really has no sensations at all, it is merely responding to electrical signals. Our brains are also responding to electrical signals coming from our nerves, but something wonderful and unexpected happens: those signals also cause sensation, feelings, colors, smells. Furthermore, for those atheists who claim that human beings are really only complex machines, fine, tell me how anything in science, anything at all, predicts that machines, no matter how complex and no matter whether chemically/biologically based or otherwise, would experience sensations, see colors, feel pleasure or pain... and why would any of that even be necessary in the universe? Clearly I could program a complex machine to survive and do all manner of things biological beings do without them having to feel pleasure or pain or actually experience colors or sounds, don’t you think?

That, Mr. Hawking, should be the hint that makes you rethink your theory. Sensation is not only totally unnecessary in a purely physical world, it is also totally unexplained by anything in science. Even researchers on this topic have essentially given up trying to explain sensation. They search for “physical correlates” to sensoria, but they have no idea why such a thing should even exist. It seemingly arises out of nothing at all according to totally unknown rules.

Does the existence of sensation prove there is a god? Maybe not. But it does prove—very emphatically—that what you call science does not even scratch the surface of what the universe is all about. That should at the very least give you some pause to consider there are other things you do not know for sure.

We will soon realize we have to treat these cyber attacks for what they are: acts of war. And we have to respond “asymmetrically”.

This is just another example of how liberals treat acts of war and terrorism as law enforcement events and not military events.