Rossi vs. Darden developments [CASE CLOSED]

    Quote from IH Fanboy

    That isn't a CV. That is called questioning in a deposition.

    Yeah, okay. Have you noticed though, it presents the same information as a CV only in far greater detail? So it is tantamount to a CV. It's like, you ask for information expecting 1 page, I give you 55 pages, and you say: "that's not information. It has to fit on one page."

    Quote from Shane D.

    IH brought in Murray because Dameron, after earlier *apparent* successes, was not seeing any excess heat.


    Please provide a cite. I've seen this assumption made many times here, but have yet to see any evidence for it.


    Quote

    TD even had a "come to Jesus meeting" with Rossi to tell him it was not

    working.


    But yet, TD went on to solicit tens of millions of dollars from Woodford, in which Woodford considered Rossi's technology as core to their investment. So I think TD's "come to Jesus meeting" story that he told about the e-Cat not working is looking pretty suspect.


    Quote

    Murray was much more suited than Dameron as Vaughn testifies.

    So of course Murray would try and improve on what did not work before.


    It was working before. We have contemporaneous emails stating that the performance was COP 9. If it wasn't working, why did Dameron still have one of the Rossi-built reactors running in the other room when Murray was doing his thing. Does Dameron like to keep non-functioning e-Cats in a running state?


    Quote

    Why would he be so stupid as to go down the same failed path as before?



    So Murray is building his own stuff with differences, testing it without knowing what fuel is in it, whether it was prepared correctly, whether it was loaded correctly, and then when it doesn't work, declaring that the e-Cat doesn't work after a few months of trying. That doesn't strike me as particularly persuasive or conclusive. I mean, we have Parkhomov spending years at this point building and perfecting his replications. You don't just whip this out in a few months and make a final conclusion, and then close up shop and pack everything up into boxes. Well, you can, but don't expect that to go over well with me, or to convince anyone with a skeptical bone in them.

    • Official Post

    IHFB,


    You are one of the few Rossi fans I do not ask for "cites". You are pretty good there. Hopefully you agree that I do my homework too? That said, I would be happy to oblige, but been away for 3 days, and it took me 6, freakin, hours to catch up! So no more digging for Shane on this..tonight.


    As to TD, IH, or whomever "soliciting"...yes they did. That is business. Business has to solicit to thrive. But you probably did not read those transcripts Abd so kindly provided today, but in one, Pace told the Judge, after Rossi's challenge, that IH had an standard "investor presentation" they gave each potential client, in which they laid out their (IH's) opinion, and risk assessment, of Rossi's technology.


    Rossi's lawyer accepted that and no more further was said about the matter.


    The rest of your stuff is a road well traveled.

    Quote from barty

    The question is: Did they also use a "Rossi-built" measurement method?

    If so, then it's obvious they measured the same COP.


    The tiger modules were built (by IH) after the Lugano test. They would be crazy to use the old test method.

    May be somebody can dig out a reference to an IH deposition, where they clearly state that they re-tested an unchanged Rossi built reactor. The test with COP 1 made by Darden & Murray was the kick-of of the Darden/Murray FUD story. We need a better reference!


    Quote from JedRothwell

    People who are not deluded can see that Murray and others plainly said they have proof the flow meter was installed in a half-empty pipe, and there were many other problems with it. There is not the slightest chance it was correct. As Smith pointed out, Rossi did not leave that to chance, in any case. He installed the hidden pump, giving him another way to cheat, in case his flow meter fraud was not sufficient.


    This (wrong flowmeter position) has been refuted by Murray's deposition. This was a key part of Darden FUD plan.


    Quote from ele

    Corrosion in pipes is not a trivial topic.

    How can you say that partial corrosion (???? seen from outside ????) if any is evidence that the return pipe was half empty ?


    Does anybody know for sure that Rossi used a new flow-meter?? -And not his old one, which heavily suffered during old tests?


    Quote from Shane D.

    I disagree. That exchange needs no further exploration. IH brought in Murray because Dameron, after earlier *apparent* successes, was not seeing any excess heat. TD even had a "come to Jesus meeting" with Rossi to tell him it was not working. Murray was much more suited than Dameron as Vaughn testifies. So of course Murray would try and improve on what did not work before. Why would he be so stupid as to go down the same failed path as before?


    Shane D. : It would be very kind of you when this could be undermined by a reference to a deposition. Otherwise it's just FUD.


    As mentioned before, the expected COP was 11 and with 11kW input we should never see more than about 120kW. Thus no cooling is needed. (One old test plan had indeed only an annotated flow of 3600 liters! Read Murray's deposition.)

    But if some magic happened like extensive SSM mode or improved fuel/stimulation method then, may be, AR had to add a heat exchanger.

    I believe that 1MW was just an IH-marketing-hip, AR had to support. It is anyway not a killing argument, as the contract clearly states COP and reliability.

    @Shane,


    Upvote because I believe you are one of the few here that actually do their homework, notwithstanding our differences in interpretation. And yes, this takes a lot of time. And it's unthanked time that I could certainly be devoting to many other things and people in my life. But this is the biggest (unknown to most) story of the century. And I'm bound (by my own desire) to follow it closely until the end.


    Right!


    On page 200 and thereabout, they get all balled up in power and energy units - they confuse watts, kilowatts and kilowatt-hours. Even kilowatt hours per hour! The level of unnecessary detail and tangential garbage in these depositions is stultifying. I could only stand to browse this one and only briefly so I guess I will have to rely on summaries by others to figure out what was said. If this ever gets to a jury, I pity the unfortunate jurors. Meanwhile, the only winners are the lawyers.

    Quote from guest111

    Someone who admires the behavior and characteristics of a convicted and ongoing liar and conman, well, what does that say about their character.


    Hi Guest111,


    Your black and white thinking will hinder you to see certain things. The world is not made-up of heroes and villains. There is something to learn from everybody and there is good and bad in everyone of us. I'd rather let an enigmatic and creative inventor run with a technology, than that i would trust that technology with a bunch of hypocrite "money changers".


    Rossi has his manhood on the chopping block. He has his life invested in this. He is the personification of "skin in the game". The recent leaked photo's where he wears a grey wig point to chemotherapy. Lying or not, the man is working long hours and is super productive. He fights on several fronts and is building a new product at the same time. You should try to write him a mail. Within a day he answers and gives information where he can. Sure, his communication is special, but this guy is involved.


    On the other side we have a bunch of guys that smile a lot. Their combovers are well positioned and when they talk they use a lot of words, but actually do not tell you anything. They are connected and want you to know. They are they supposed saviours of LENR and after some purely executed investments, give small hand-outs, scraps to the vulnerable in the industry to make a name. Moreover, to kill the characters that now stand in their way.


    Sure, Rossi has been convicted. In Italy that was. A country where one hand greases the other and the juridical system has severe problems. Where recently Amanda Knox spent four years in jail. And i understand that "convicted for financial fraud" is a nice soundbite, but let me tell you that IH and affiliates are no saints either.


    Some excerpts from a NY Times article (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04…acres-of-brownfields.html)


    "They (JB: Cherokee) are taking on some fairly challenging projects," said Bradley M. Campbell, commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. "Their willingness to take risks can advance our policy goals."

    Yet not every official is ready to turn over the keys to the city or the state to an obscure out-of-state company whose track record offers little evidence of what to expect."


    "By taking advantage of legislation that favors development over preservation, availing itself of government subsidies, appealing to strapped municipalities, and donating generously to local, county and state political candidates and parties -- either directly or through well-connected consultants -- Cherokee finds itself not only with preferred status, but also in a position to affect many of the state's most important land decisions."


    "Critics of Cherokee -- who insist that company has been given preferential treatment in the granting of contracts in New Jersey -- have speculated that some of those private investors are part of the state's ruling political elite, an accusation that Mr. Darden denied."


    And so on..and so forth..


    The article sums it up nicely. Thomas Darden is good at "smart business". Saving the world my ass. I call that arbitraging legislation. A few visits to the White House, a few donations here and there. Keeping people happy with a tip and now and then a speech where he doesn't say anything. There is no added value whatsoever. Changing money, pushing boxes, that is how these guys roll.


    The funny thing is, that when they actually try to do something useful, they screw-up tremendously.


    And when shit hits the fan, they have accumulated an impressive warchest to, together with scary parties like tobacco and oil company promoting APCO and the like, threaten, sue and delay in court, until at one point nobody can comprehend where stuff derailed.


    If i were an LENR entrepreneur i would not touch Thomas Darden with a twenty foot pole. If i now were one of the guys that Darden invested in, i would look at the agreed upon contracts very carefully and search for outs. The LENR space should be very careful with these kind of guys. Think twice when you drag a rather large horse into your fort.


    LENR might be the beginning of a next phase in science. IH and affiliates do business "twentieth century style". And no sane man should want to combine the two.


    So in short, this inferior character rather drinks a grappa with a convicted inventor, than to sit at the same table as the world saviours.


    Cheers,


    JB

    Thanks for your thoughtful comment. I don't think IH is any "saint" (and one should not expect as such, they are an investment company, above all their hype about wanting to save the world, they are out to make money). I also find it relatively difficult to believe that IH's motives (regarding money) were entirely pure, or perhaps entirely ethical, either, but the behavior that you describe is par for the course for many investment companies, and many businesses, and "business plans" of people seeking investment in general--"buyer beware". I also find it hard to believe they were that naive and incompetent on due-diligence for a rather extended time, The marketing people in one's own company even do similar (I've seen it working in big companies), they promise developments and deliveries that they know are highly unlikely to be forthcoming. However, this is rather apart from the frauds that Rossi perpetuates, the resistance to perform a simple test to PROVE his greatest invention of the century DOES work, and the constant drone here that the world must prove that every outrageous claim that Rossi and his followers put forth are NOT true. Cheers

    A thought occurred to me. Rossi's patent was granted August 25, 2015. I haven't gone back through the chain of letters between Rossi, IH, and their lawyers, but that is around the time when things between IH and Rossi started to turn south. I wonder if the patent approval might have some bearing on IH's (and Rossi's) decision-making.

    Quote from Nigel Appleton

    It does not each its subject matter in such a way as to allow a reasonably skilled person to reproduce it.

    If your goal with a patent is to teach others your secrets, then it fails. But most people apply for patents to secure IP, and if that's your goal then it's great. Even better if it's a bit nebulous or ambiguous, so it can be applied to a wider range of patent infringement suits.

    Quote from Nigel Appleton

    with every chance of the patent holder losing any infringement suit.

    Patent trolls usually like to threaten a lawsuit in order to settle. Anyway I don't know if the patent can be considered nebulous or ambiguous. Either way, the patent was granted, and I find it hard to imagine the patent had no effect on IH's decisionmaking. In what way I'm not sure.

    This is pure speculation but has it ever been suggested that the endothermic process is actually a thermal based splitting of water into hydrogen and oxygen (catalyzed by platinum) or a high temperature hydrolysis? The reaction products could be turned back to water by combustion (if not vented away). This, I believe, would be very endothermic and very useless. To be clear, I firmly believe Rossi's representation of JMP as Johnson Matthey subsidiary was a lie, but if the endothermic process actually existed it would just be a marketing lie.


    Please correct me if the proposed reactions are unpractical, even with state of the art techniques.

    • Official Post
    Quote from Pascal Marchetti

    I doubt vented away cause hydrogen smells a lot


    It has no smell at all. You must be thinking of one of its compounds, like H2S. To make hydrogen you would need to use electricity, or a lot of chemistry and create a lot of dirty chemical waste. Using a 30% efficient turbine or other generator system, Rossi might hope to use his entire MW to produce around 300kW continuous of electricity, which at the accepted 50% efficiency of the best electrolysers would produce approximately 4.5 Kg hydrogen per hour. This has an energy content of close to 150kW/h.


    So this process only loses 150 kWh continuous, leaving 850kW to be dumped as waste heat.


    AND BTW, Welcome to LENR Forum!

    Quote from Alan Smith

    It has no smell at all. You must be thinking of one of its compounds, like H2S. To make hydrogen you would need to use electricity, or a lot of chemistry and create a lot of dirty chemical waste. Using a 30% efficient turbine or other generator system, Rossi might hope to use his entire MW to produce around 300kW continuous of electricity, which at the accepted 50% efficiency of the best electrolysers would produce approximately 4.5 Kg hydrogen per hour. This has an energy content of close to 150kW/h.


    So this process only loses 150 kWh continuous, leaving 850kW to be dumped as waste heat.


    AND BTW, Welcome to LENR Forum!


    Yes, for sure I remember burning hydrogen sulfide during high school chemistry lab experiments, that's why I thought hydrogen was smelly. Thanks for estimating entropy of the process. Thanks for the welcome :)

    Quote from joshg

    If your goal with a patent is to teach others your secrets, then it fails. But most people apply for patents to secure IP, and if that's your goal then it's great. Even better if it's a bit nebulous or ambiguous, so it can be applied to a wider range of patent infringement suits.


    Patents are used rather as scars on a warrior to demonstrate to investors that IP has been protected. As PR. And people with vapour-ware in particular use patents as PR - look at Rossi. The first thing any VC looks at is whether IP has patent protection and they do not always do this from the POV of whether the patent is real - which in some cases may be difficult to judge anyway.


    Most patents never protect anything, because the things they were suppose to protect never becomes commercial, or in some cases just does not work. But any decent patent will have a sequence of claims, some very specific, some more general. You get as many passed as possible, and when there is a challenge you hope that one of them fits the case well enough for you to win. The specific ones are almost certain to have no overlapping patent, but much less likely to match the actual technology being contested. So it is a trade-off.


    IH will behave - towards patents - as though the thing they are protecting is real and might have value even if they are 99% sure it is rubbish, even if the patent looks like rubbish. That 1% is worth a lot of money...


    I've never seen the point of Rossi's patents which manifestly do not allow his devices to be replicated. But then, that is understandable, because his devices do not work. If they did work with some critical step left out, then such a non-functional patent might still have value if it could be shown that it embodied a working inventive step that was part of the solution. Patents are judged in a weird way by lawyers, and in some cases it is a game that has little relationship to the technology. Also, just the possibility of a legal case can allow large companies to intimidate smaller ones even when the patent in fact would never win. The other way round, where there is a real inventive step, patents can be the way that small companies preserve IP which would otherwise be stolen, so they serve a purpose. But IMHO they are at least 50% of the time parasitic serving nothing except lawyers.


    we_cat_global's they are all money-grubbing comparison between IH and Rossi makes a mistake.


    Yes, any VC will look for agreements that make the best deal it can. However, where products are very early stage, the best deal is about what will allow the product most easily and quickly to be commercialised. VCs generally at this stage back people rather than product, because they know it is not possible to tell how technology will actually be valuable - easy to sell a story but what matters is the hard graft to make things work cheaply and reliably and in a way that can be commercialised. You don't get that by screwing the inventor because you want him on board.


    The one thing we know is that Rossi's contract with IH, with the GPT, was highly dysfunctional from this POV. It was a contract to sell a product, not a person. It is not surprising that no other VC would touch it. Rossi was a unique case as far as VC investment goes. Promising untold riches, with a character that no-one in their right minds would back, but uniquely secretive so that without his help whether his stuff can be replicated remains unclear.


    Of course, most people will reckon it likely Rossi's stuff is rubbish - since most of his demos were rigged so transparently that every one could see this. The above are the considerations a VC who nevertheless believes Rossi's stuff might be valuable will have.


    It is obvious that the GPT license was demanded by Rossi because it is totally against the interests of any VC. It provides no incentive for long-term cooperation and every incentive for Rossi to cut loose and run as soon as he gets his $89M. Those suggesting Rossi wants the license are absurd. He has half of the world to license elsewhere, and in any case without working product (anyone seen that?) no license is worth anything.


    Interestingly, IH might be enticed by the contract specifically because they don't think they can work with Rossi long-term due to his dysfunctional approach towards partners which they knew about before they signed the agreement (remember the Hydrofusion letter?). They could argue: he must transfer the IP to us and help us getting stuff to work. After that he wants a large up-front sum of money, and we are happy to give him that if the stuff works. We probably don't want a long-term relationship because he is highly untrustworthy.


    So both sides could be seeing a short-term relationship as preferable.


    IH were unwise. Mostly in not understanding the scientific due diligence needed. They thought 5 Swedish and one Italian professor endorsing Rossi with claimed independent tests meant his stuff had a good chance of working, as did many others in the LENR field, even though they had reservations. They should have paid more attention to the long history of BLP with its endorsements from sundry academics and no product, nor scientific progress, after 25 years of claims that it was imminent.


    I reckon though that this is not so much their fault. If you are investing in LENR you must have a bold disposition willing to take a chance and take multiple respectable results from a single team as validation even when those results are not properly critiqued. LENR research tends to get either rosy-tinted critiques from those in the field, or over-harsh critiques from those outside who have already made up their minds that LENR is certain vapourware. That is exactly what happened in this case. the Pomp critique was not really damning because while it identified many poor areas of methodology it did not directly attack the results, and was clearly coming at the matter from a biased viewpoint. The McKubre (forgive me if it was somone else?) critique was about right, except that McKubre argues unproven but interesting so could easily be real, rather than unproven but interesting however highly unlikely to be real. I'd argue that you need critiques more skeptical than this - especially when the history includes somone who has Rossi's past. IH are not me, and their mission is to look for LENR wherever they can checking all these possibilities instead of dismissing them as the LENR skeptics do. Even though I would not do it, I can admire it.


    I find the second guessing that joshg, IHFB, etc do here to be unfair, unthankful, and muddle-headed. It is very easy in retrospect to look at people's behaviour and condemn it as stupid. People tend to do stupid things when presented with unusual situations. Well, LENR is an unusual situation, Rossi is a very unusual situation. Put the two together and I think you should cut IH a lot of slack.


    Which many people are not doing. I think it is because they are trying to fit facts into a model where Rossi's stuff does nevertheless work - hope springing eternal. And to do that, because the facts don't easily fit your premise, you have to bend them to imagine some MIC-style conspiracy involving IH.


    Those hoping for Rossi's LENR have often argued that working Rossi-style LENR would be worth billions - or more. The conspiracy theories have to suppose that IH is not satisfied with these billions, and prepared to run the risk of this trial (with possibly nothing at the end) to get hold of more.


    My sense of the injustice here is what keeps me posting (and also a love of the technical mysteries decoding Rossi's false scientific statements - those have gone quiet for now but you never know). Darden and Vaughn are the people all those hoping for LENR, like joshg and IHFB, should be celebrating as noble (even though self-interested) heroes. Instead some of them write up Rossi as a noble self-interested but persecuted hero whose dysfunctional behaviour is seen as getting things done. God help us from such judgments outside of the bubble of an internet forum.


    Regards, THH

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