Reputation trap

I'm pretty sure I've figured it out.

I'd tell you, but my investors won't let me.

Cheers, James Arthur

Oh, he's a flamer, too?

I meant that if it were real, the solar array gambit wouldn't scale well.

Killjoy

Here's your video:

Pretty impressive. YouTube has several others under "Starlite."

Cheers, James Arthur =======================================================================

Not the video with the kitty that I remember, but the starlite is definitely not clear like I remember. Hmm, wonder if I'm getting old? :-)

----- Regards, Carl Ijames

Hardly a vindication if they had no understanding of what was really going on.

Just the US? There are people doing work to duplicate Rossi's work in other countries. I haven't seen much data on these, so don't know how they got the results they claim.

Bingo! If it can only work under unknown conditions, then no discovery has really been made.

Oh, yes. Look at Europe.

I have an off-grid pal, early solar-adopter. His BP panels are starting to catastrophically fail, from seasonal thermal-cycling, and they're only 10 years old.

Cheers, James Arthur

Think about roof repairs. You'd have to remove all the solar panels, fix the roof, and re-install them.

No thanks.

His case is worse. His array is ground-mounted, so no roofing hassle, but BP closed their solar operation. When he called for warranty service, they told him, AIUI, tough luck, that subsidiary company's closed.

Who's going to honor all the 25-year guarantees when the various Solyndras run out of taxpayer green?

Cheers, James Arthur

Den fredag den 8. januar 2016 kl. 01.21.49 UTC+1 skrev John Larkin:

how often do you have to fix a roof?

-Lasse

I meant the substitution of >unity power for solar power (without publicizing it).

Solar shingles, anyone?

A neighbor with a solar installation got a new "standing seam" metal roof first. The roof's good for 40 years, and the panels clamp to the standing seams. No penetrations, easy to service.

That's the way to go.

Cheers, James Arthur

They have to be replaced every 15 to 25 years.

Den fredag den 8. januar 2016 kl. 02.49.17 UTC+1 skrev krw:

yeh, so not really a big issue

my parents eternit roof is +40 years and is still fine

-Lasse

It is if the payback on the panels is greater. ...and of course that doesn't count damage. The first roof on this house only lasted two years (hail).

What is "eternit"? AFAIK, the only 40+ year roofs are metal and the payback isn't great on them.

If you want to exploit an invention that requires a large scale chemical plant built to make it you have to give up some control!

Obviously it is his choice but he died without ever seeing the thing benefit the human race which was his claimed reason for inventing it!!! His invention brought him only anguish and huge lawyers fees.

Basically if you invent or make something you have to *SELL* it to make money and once it is sold you lose control of what people do with it.

The Nobel Prize is one side effect of a multimillionaires guilt at the collateral damage that stablising nitroglycerine with kieselguhr caused. (and he didn't live long enough to see either WWI or WWII)

In America perhaps where houses are made of wood and tin sheet.

In the UK where houses are bricks and mortar a decent pantiled roof typically lasts a century or so. Mine was ~120 years old when the tiles on the north side started to fail - spalling by freeze thaw action.

Real slate tiles or stone roofs are impervious and last even longer.

Once a tile starts to go it becomes porous lets water into the surface and flakes come off every time there is a frost overnight so it goes downhill quickly over a few of years when its time is up. Aerial installers hobnail boots hasten their demise and the path up to the chimney was visible in the earliest failing tiles.

Roof surveys are done routinely before solar panels are installed.

Slate and copper last centuries; ditto lead, but it isn't used in any new construction that I know of.

If it was indeed something serendipitous and exceedingly rare that they observed then it is possible we may have to wait a couple of thousand years before anyone witnesses it again. Pliny the younger describing the eruption of Vesuvius in 79AD was not really believed by other scholars because his description or pyroclastic flow was so out of line with other common experience of volcanoes. It was only when Tambora and the even more spectacular Krakatoa went off in 1884 that geologists realised his description was both accurate and correct.

Plinian eruptions bear his name in testimony to his observational skills and the written record he made of the Vesuvius eruption which claimed the life of his uncle Pliny the elder.

The discovery might have been made but is at present unreproducible.

I am inclined to believe it was a mistake in their calorimetry but there is still an outside chance that one day the same failed experiment will do something different if conditions are just right.

Alfred Noble invented Dynamite and later Gelignite, neither of which were p ut to use as weapons grade explosives. Instead their widespread adoption in place of the absurdly unstable nitroglycerine has saved countless lives in rail and road construction, demolition and mining.

In the last two years of his life, he acquired the Bofors company - which l ater became famous for their 40mm anti-aircraft weapon used for self defenc e by the Allies in WW2.

German forces put a few captured examples to their own use.

Alfred had nothing to feel "guilty" about.

... Phil

Fair enough - but the principle is the same.

NASA might be willing to play by the rules, but the USA DoD is not. If they had a sample of a material useful for protection against nuclear flashes, that would count as "military technology" of the highest grade. It would not be allowed out of the country - not even back to its inventor. I have seen this happen with simple devices that are classified as "military" - in the case of something as revolutionary as Starlite supposedly is, I have no doubts about the matter.