@ sigmoidal,
I see that you wish to continue the confrontation on this subject. So, let's go on.
You seem really confused by insisting that Melich can only be 'a functionary of the DoD'. He is a research professor at a US Navy Graduate School. [...] He is not limited to being only 'a functionary of the DoD', though.
I can't understand your objection. He acted in the Ecat affair as "someone" of the DoD. In fact, he appears in the Board of Advisers of JoNP as "Prof. Michael Melich (DOD - USA)".
You can also rely on his own words. A few weeks after the first and most famous demonstration of the Ecat held in Bologna on January 14, 2011, the ICCF16 started in Chennai, India. In that occasion he said (2): "the reasons that I am involved in this at all derives from my responsibilities as a federal employee who is frequently approached and Rossi and his partners approached us". If you wish to know who "us" were, you can read the "Overview of the ICCF16 in India" written by his wife (3): "Melich described the involvement he has had with Rossi’s efforts: “Rossi and his partners approached us at the Navy …""
So, there is no doubt that he was acting in the Ecat affair as an employee of the DoD.
QuoteHe could have paid the $20 registration fee himself out of pocket.
This doesn't matter. As shown above, he acted in the Ecat affair as DoD employee, and therefore he should have had some authorization or mandate to do that, also because he could have incurred much higher expenses (for instance all the travels with Rossi). Probably he had a budget at his disposition to manage this specific assignment, and the modest registration fee could have been included in some lump sum for minor expenses.
What does matter is that, if Krivit's allusions are true, he registered the JoNP site as a federal employee of the DoD involved in the Ecat affair, therefore, in such a case, Rossi is writing since 7+ years on a site put at his disposition by the DoD.
QuoteSo let's go with your assumption that Melich was the original registrant of journal-of-nuclear-physics.com . Melich is a professor. Maybe (unrelated to any knowledge of Rossi) in the middle of the night he got inspired to start an online Journal of Nuclear Physics, …
Your funny story is interesting, but for sure the incipit is false. The assumption is not mine, it's a clear allusion made by Krivit. I have no means to support it. I can only rely on the fact that Krivit, contrary to me, lives in the USA and knows very well the CF/LENR circle and its protagonists.
QuoteMelich could easily and reasonably have done that without any input, endorsement, or any other connection to the DoD.
No, for his words at ICCF16, he was acting as a federal (ie DoD) employee.
QuoteSo under your assumption that Melich was the registrant, does it not seem likely (or at least plausible) that he simply gave (or maybe even sold for a small fee) the URL to Rossi because he wasn't interested in pursuing it and/or he wanted to help a colleague out?
Again, it's not my assumption, see above. The rest, sorry, are nonsense, especially if he had the minimum doubt that Rossi could really have the Graal.
QuoteBut do you even have any proof that Melich registered that name? Because the current registrant is named as: 'EFA SRL' located in: 'BOLOGNA, ITALY'. So my question to you is: Why do you think that a website clearly controlled by Andrea Rossi and registered in Bologna Italy has any connection to the US DoD (other than possibly that a US citizen who happens to be employed by the Navy as his 'day job' also has helped him get it started)?
As already said I base myself on what Krivit strongly alluded in 2010. I'm confident that he checked the registrant name on the whois site and found that it was "A web site registered in California by a secret entity", as he confirmed in January 2011. So when the JoNP was largely used to disseminate worldwide the fake calorimetric results of the January 14, 2011 demo, it was owned by a secret entity based in California. There are not so many candidates for this role.
Presently, whois indicates that the site is owned by EFA, but it also reports that there have been at least 2 registrants. So the ownership changed after the January 2011 demo. Maybe it changed only recently. I have no idea when and why. But it would be also interesting to know the date and the reasons for this change.
QuoteAnd please consider that one way to interpret the fact that Krivit hasn't responded to you is that he no longer is interested in his speculation regarding the JoNP board of directors that you have become so interested in.
That's the reason I showed you the jpeg ( http://i.imgur.com/yoshHoI.jpg ) with date and hour of all our comments on ecatnews.com. Do you think that he lost interest in just one day?
QuoteOr maybe there's some super secret conspiracy that's so complex that it doesn't make any sense to outside observers. We can never completely rule that out, can we?
Conspiracy is not my hypotheses, but for sure the Ecat affair is so complex that it's not possible to jump to any conclusion about the role and the responsibilities of whoever protagonist of this intricate story.
(1) http://faculty.nps.edu/vitae/c…earch_results&last=melich
(2) http://www.newenergytimes.com/…elich-on-Rossi-ICCF16.pdf
(3) http://www.infinite-energy.com…s/pdfs/MacyICCF16IE96.pdf