That’s very different from building your technology, demonstrating the technology (however much one wants to denigrate the elegance of the demonstration), and then, after giving a customer the independent opportunity to test the technology (however much one wants to claim they know better than the customer how the technology should have been tested and evaluated), licenses the technology to the customer for them to physically take back to their own place of business and put through its paces.Who is the customer? We only have Rossi's claim that there is a customer.
I have real trouble with the idea that if this were a real "pre-sale approval" type demonstration for a real company that wished to keep it a secret, that they would make it public. It would be far more practical and reasonable to keep it secret until they were willing to go public.
However, if the purpose was to plant the idea among potential marks that this was "legitimate", then it makes perfect sense.
There are plenty of people who believe that Rossi is legitimate and that we are on the brink of a revolution comparable to the industrial revolution. I'm just not one of them. If some company starts selling "Mr. Fusion" in the near future, then that will prove my speculation wrong.
However, if there are throngs of people willing to give Rossi money to get on his "secret" waiting list (why not have a secret waiting list; everything else about it is secret), then I would say his efforts over the last year will pay off, whether he's legitimate or not. According to Kevmo (in an earlier post), Rossi has a five-year backlog of orders for the E-Cat. That's a lot of potential chumps.
Therefore, it interests me that so many seem willing to rush headlong (from my reading of the "evidence") into calling this a hoax and a scam.
Sure, it may be. But I don't see the telltale marks of that at the moment; in fact, quite the opposite.
I have real trouble with the idea that if this were a real "pre-sale approval" type demonstration for a real company that wished to keep it a secret, that they would make it public. It would be far more practical and reasonable to keep it secret until they were willing to go public
It seems to me, from my limited reading, that the demonstration had two purposes: (1) to license the technology to a company that was going to work on developing it or perhaps coming up with applications for it, and (2) through the licensing process, to obtain funds to finance privately the two-year academic study at the Universities of Bologna and Uppsala (Sweden) into, explicitly, "how" and "why" Rossi's catalyst works.
So, to the extent Rossi is also pursuing public academic research into his process, I could see that it would be helpful for it to be public. In fact, I could see the universities "suggesting" that consistent with the counter-needs of the company to remain secretive. This would bolster their research project considerably and may even attract other favorable attention.
However, if the purpose was to plant the idea among potential marks that this was "legitimate", then it makes perfect sense.
I guess.
But SO many people would have to be in on this. At some point the argument is the same as OJ's: that the entire LAPD and the forensic labs and the neighbors and so on were in a conspiracy to frame him for the murder of his wife and her friend.
I seriously doubt the universities in question would agree to engage in a deliberately faked research project. That's not to say they might not find flaws in the technology, even ones that a fatal to eventual commercialization. But it's doubtful they'd be complicit in outright fraud.
There are plenty of people who believe that Rossi is legitimate and that we are on the brink of a revolution comparable to the industrial revolution. I'm just not one of them.
Nothing wrong with being skeptical. I'd just be more inclined to agree with you if you had a basic science rationale or if I could see the hallmarks of a scam. I just don't at this point.
I mean: Rossi could be wrong in the end. But that doesn't automatically make this whole thing a scam.
However, if there are throngs of people willing to give Rossi money to get on his "secret" waiting list (why not have a secret waiting list; everything else about it is secret), then I would say his efforts over the last year will pay off, whether he's legitimate or not. According to Kevmo (in an earlier post), Rossi has a five-year backlog of orders for the E-Cat. That's a lot of potential chumps.
Too many logical leaps here for me, sorry.
Even if it's true that there's a waiting list or a backlog of orders "for the E-Cat," you've identified the catch right there.
Of course there would be many, many people (and, I would think, governments) who would like to be first in line to get this technology IF and when it is actually commercialized and deployed.
This is no different than people lining up or going on waiting lists to get the next iPAD or whatever. They may or may not have confidence that the technology will pan out the way it's being hyped, but the important thing is that NO ONE CAN FORCE THEM TO BUY IT.
They are signing up for the opportunity to get it first, if and when it becomes a consumer product. SO WHAT? It still has to be satisfactory to them before they buy it. And it still has to meet some inherent and explicit standards before it can be categorized as a salable item.
If Steve Jobs had advertised that he'd come up with an iPAD that allowed users to engage in time travel, there might be some people who got on a waiting list for it, thinking, well, you know he just might pull that off and, if he does, cool, I'll be first in line.
If two years later Jobs says "okay, here's the time travel iPAD" and it turns out it's a Timex watch with a MP3 player in it, is he really going to be able to rip off a bunch of people with that? Is he really going to be able to enrich himself off that scam? Are people on his waiting list just going to go, "oh, okay, Steve, whatever you say, here's my money?"
Nope.
We only have Rossi’s claim that there is a customer.
***Also the claims of the others who were there.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2800077/posts
Unfortunately, if Rossi hired a bunch of actors to pretend to be the customer reps, created an elaborate year-long special-effects-derived series of demos, bribed, hypnotised or otherwise fooled Focardi, Levi, Kullander, Essen, Bianchini, Stremmenos and convinced a bunch of Greek crooks to set up a dummy company called Defkalion to pretend to fight with him over the non-existent eCat, to perpetuate the illusion and spin it off into a competing mirror-scam and convinced his former partners to set up another company called Ampenergo to pretend that they had a contract for The Americas for a substantial sum or that they just did this with no proof because they have worked with Rossi and trust him because he’s such a fine fellow, arranged for Piantelli, Miley and a host of others to try to fool the world into thinking that cold fusion was real, got NASA, SPAWAR, The Defense Threat Reduction Agency and The Defense Intelligence Agency to say nice things about the field, got Bushnell to make a fool of himself, sold his profitable company to his ex-partners in order to spend that wealth on a multi-million dollar scam; certain that once he got all the above ducks in a row he would pretend to sell the first device and then reel in the true target of his dastardly plan – the second (this time genuine) buyer of a 1MW plant that will net him $2 million dollars until they want their money back or sucker a $100 million dollar deal under the table because he has experience in pulling the wool over all these idiotic eyes and knows that they will just take his word for it and not want to test if his 1MW plant can heat a small village without truckloads of coal or oil or a big fat electric cable coming into the container from beneath the floor (no you can’t lift the carpet!) and that, in order to pull this off, Rossi had to risk discovery by interviewing all the people he subsequently fooled so that he could only invite the gullible Professors and not the brilliant anonymous posters on the Internet who surely would have found him out – then all bets are off and I’m with the guys who think that Rossi is an idiot and they are all geniuses .