Do you think I’m some kind of MONSTER?!? (But, seeing as it’s Futurama, I’ll have to watch it 
)
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A decade ago I encountered another “free energy” company which was just a few weeks away from producing their proof of concept: a science toy. Sadly they somehow got beaten down by the powerful oil and gas industry and never got it produced.
I will say they have the right idea for plausibility… why not just produce $10 device that blinks an LED forever instead of a $1200 device that is just as unfeasible.
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Listen Michael Farrier, cognitive scientist. If I say I’ve found it trivial to build the world’s first human equivalent artificial intelligence, and my only proof is to let you interrogate it by passing messages to it in a locked room, do you believe me?
This device is not new. See here for instance:
And it’s still bullshit.
Showing a violation of conservation of energy is not just a high bar to pass. According to Noether’s theorem, any field which possesses time translation symmetry (i.e. it behaves the same today as it did yesterday and will do tomorrow) MUST conserve energy. It is not optional. Maxwell’s equations, which govern all electromagnetic effects, have this symmetry.
Because of that, I can say this device is bullshit with thousands of times greater certainty than you would be able to say about my AI claims.
Please either stick to claims that are in your wheelhouse, or at least talk to someone who knows what they’re doing.
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Heh. I was wondering about how to fit a reference to that book in here somewhere.
Asimov’s (not very good) attempt to write about sex.
But the parallel universe energy pump stuff is good.
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I am really looking forward to the teardown of this thing and finding out what batteries it has inside.
Is there perhaps some sort of no taking apart clause in the purchase?
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This is exactly how I expect it to work. All they need is, like, 10 product purchasers to say “it works” and they will be able to drown the hundreds who say they’re full of shit.
And if they can’t find 10 regular people to say it works, they’ll hire a hundred shills to say it works. It doesn’t actually have to work, because they will get paid by creating confusion. It’s the same way they’ve attracted VC money: confusing people.
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Tomorrow on BoingBoing: all the latest news about the hottest homeopathic remedies!
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Wait a minute, here, that can’t be true!
Let me just check…
http://www.ebay.com/itm/121834650139
http://www.ebay.com/itm/281263068556
Huh. $0.65 per gram vs $0.60. Wouldn’t ya know, it checks out!
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Well, if we didn’t bleed heat off into space, you’d be right.
(But we do. And this “free energy” would likely put less heat into our atmosphere than, I dunno, burning stuff.)
Yes, mine too. Haven’t heard this for a long while. Very glad to rediscover it.
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If it’s a fraud, they will keep doing it until (a) people stop giving them money, or (b) they’re arrested. I could believe that it’s partly delusion rather than malice-- that’s true of a lot of “miracle” scams-- but I’m pretty sure that if a rational person looked over all the accounts and all the data, they’d conclude that Steorn has taken a lot of money and never had a plan to pay it back or deliver products.
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A rechargeable battery, some weird spinning magnet thing, and a very, very, very specific set of operating instructions.
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If the US fixed their current public health spending it could well be effectively free - currently the US spends more per capita on public health than pretty much any other developed country, they’re just so inefficient due to the Republican allergy to anything that looks like public services that it doesn’t do anything.
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Or, they can just rely on people like you to think that nobody would have the balls to just lie to your face and to the media, peddling a blatantly impossible product for an outrageous price. Just to show you that your assumptions about taking the money and running are naive, check out the case of the multi-million dollar fake bomb detector scam, that sold dowsing rods, gussied up with some non-functional parts, and sold them for tens of thousands of dollars each as bomb detectors for use in war zones, to the tune of $80,000,000 in fraudulent sales.
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Not only was it fraudulent, but it literally is still costing people’s lives:
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This is a decisive moment for Steorn; once they start taking payments
for orders, they’re legally obliged to deliver the miracle they’ve
claimed, or else they’re on the hook for fraud.
Ha ha. That’s so cute.
As far as I can see, nobody gets prosecuted for fraud any more, as long as you do it on a large enough scale and through a corporation.
On the strength of their earlier failure to demonstrate anything, Steorn has already successfully taken in roughly $20 million of investor money. I’m sure that’s paid some very healthy salaries, perks, and bonuses. They have already succeeded at their fraud. If things start looking bad, I predict Steorn will just declare bankruptcy and complain of unspecified “engineering problems” but at $1000+ per USB charger they can probably pay a few more whopping bonuses before they are regretfully forced to close up shop.
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Or they can just do “warranty repairs” (shipping not included) on the USB slow batteries perpetual motion energy devices when they run down, and claim they had some unspecified issue, but that it is to be expected in bleeding edge technology.
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