No we're not "playing the odds" We don't have to measure the fraud in a lab to know it's a fraud. The universe has certain underlying laws/principles or whatever you want to call them. No gadget built or observed process has EVER violated these laws. One of them is the first law of thermodynamics which says in essence "you can't get something for nothing." Perpetual motion of the first kind claims, as does this article, that you can get something for nothing. You can't. Dressing it up with "RF not electricity" is just snake oil sales pitch.
I simply observe that you haven’t seen it and cannot know for sure until you have,
Wrong again. I don't need to see an "antigravity generator" to know it's a fraud. I don't need to see a "pill that when you drop it into a tank full of water" will run your car. I don't need to see the crime rate in gun control cities to know that disarming the victims doesn't reduce crime.
Something like this (which btw has been cropping up regularly in one form or another since the mid 1800's - look up history of perpetual motion) is not physically possible. Those who are unaware of physics or slept through chemistry might say "well it MIGHT work" Nope not a chance in hell. What you have is one of two things: either an imbecile who is not measuring his energy inputs and outputs correctly or (much more likely) a con man looking for those people who did sleep through their chemistry and physics with money to "invest"
The email from Nigeria you got from DOCTOR MBUTU'S WIFE WHO NEEDS YOUR HELP IN GETTING $25,000,000 OUT OF AFRICA AND WILL GIVE YOU 10% IF YOU JUST SEND HER YOUR BANK ACCOUNT INFORMATION MIGHT get you $2,500,000, but getting that 2.5 million is infinitely more likely than this thing working.
Over the centuries people have thought they knew what the ‘underlying laws’ were a number of times. The fact is those understandings were not static. I have no reason to think that the understandings we have today will remian static. To claim that we do know all there is, is as silly today as it would have been at any other time. We simply don’t know all there is to know. From time to time we find new loopholes, or discoveries that throw things we though were static on their head.
For that reason, I don’t discount something until there has been adequate investigation. At some point, much of what we understand today was considered hearasy. Why couldn’t what we think of today fall into that category when future discoveries are made? Why do you close that door? I acknowledge that you aren’t the only person to adopt this trait, so I’m not trying to say you’re in the ether zone. Far from it. I just don’t think that’s a particular good position to be in.
At other points in history, folks have thought they had made all the discoveries in a particular area of science, only to find that they weren’t even close.
Some of your examples are fairly lucid, but others are downright comical. I think you realize that.
At one point it was herasy to think we would break the sound barrier. There are other things we take for granted today, that were considered impossible.
When you went to the Nigerian example, you shot yourself in the credibility. Looks like it was fatal, but there still may be hope.