noone noone <thesteornpa...@yahoo.com> wrote: I don't agree with the government using tax dollars to pay cold fusion > inventors. > > In my opinion, the government needs to be forced (peacefully) to grant > Rossi's patent. >
As I said, having the government grant a patent is functionally equivalent to using a tax surcharge on cold fusion equipment to pay the discoverers. The only difference is that it is too late to grant patents. The discovery is already in the public domain. Patents cannot be granted retroactively. Rather than try to rewrite the patent laws on the fly, or making an exception to them, I think it would be better to address the problem directly. > When the government tries to fix a problem they helped create, 9 out of 10 > times they make it worse. > I do not think there is any evidence for that in technology. As I have pointed out before, the US and British governments together have played an essential role in developing just about every major technology in the last 200 years, from railroads to telegraphs to electricity, aviation, computers, nuclear energy and the Internet. Government researchers themselves invented a large fraction of technology, or the government paid for the research as with the laser and most integrated circuit technology. Nearly all cold fusion breakthroughs were paid for by governments, such as the government of Utah, and various agencies such as MITI, DARPA, DTR, ENEA and BARC. Industry and capitalism have contributed nothing so far. No doubt they will contribute in the future, but without government we would have no cold fusion. Not only did these agencies fund the research, but most researchers spent their entire careers working for national or state universities, national laboratories and other publicly funded institutions. I mean people such as Fleischmann, Pons, Arata, Storms, Miley, Szpak, Boss, Miles, Celani, Focardi, Piantelli, De Ninno. Frattolillo, Violante, Scaramuzzi, Mizuno and Takahashi. A few are with industry, such as McKubre, but most of his funding comes from DARPA. Just about the only major figure I can think of who has not been paid by a government all his life is Rossi. Needless to say, he owes a lot of credit to others I listed above. - Jed
