On 01/20/2011 09:57 AM, OrionWorks - Steven V Johnson wrote: > Playing devil's advocate in situations like this serve a useful > purpose. Honoring our skeptical bones hopefully help keep our feet > firmly planted on the ground, particularly when our wings would love > to start flapping right now! ...to soar into the stratosphere is > everyone's dream. > > Nevertheless, and for the sake of argument, assuming this is a scam, > it seems to me that there is a crucial item that hasn't been explored > to any great length. What would Rossi and Focardi's exit strategy be? >
Erm -- "Rossi", /not/ "Rossi and Focardi". I haven't read anything indicating Focardi knows what the "secret ingredient" is -- as far as I know, /only/ Rossi knows. And as far as I know, it's /only/ Rossi whose background and integrity have been impugned. As to his exit strategy, I don't know, but IMO it really doesn't matter. Exit strategies are often apparently not planned in advance, and the lack of an obvious, viable exit strategy is not a sufficient argument for concluding it can't be a scam. Consider the fact that every pyramid scheme is *guaranteed* to collapse, yet people start them without a workable exit strategy, and get caught. There must be an immediate financial incentive, or it's not going to happen. But an exit strategy ... nah. All that said, an exit strategy is trivial in this case: All he needs to do is "lose the process", and voila, Rossi's off the hook, and nobody can prove there was ever anything sleazy going on. Processes in this area are so flaky, and so ill-understood, that it's really not a problem. Did anyone try to arrest Patterson when he lost his process? No, of course not -- as far as anyone could see, it was a legitimate case of "Jekel/Hyde syndrome" -- there must have been one more "secret ingredient" in the first batch of beads, unknown to everyone including the experimenter. Did anyone try to claim Intel was lying about it, 30 years or so back, when they suddenly "lost their process"? (I forget which chip it was, and maybe it was actually Motorola.) No, of course not -- people just waited out the major schedule slip until they "found" it again. The difference is that in semiconductor manufacturing, you typically can find the process again if you work at it; in cold fusion, it doesn't always happen. And, of course, the original "lost process" was the process by which Hyde turned back into Jekel -- the original batch of chemicals had an unknown impurity, and later batches didn't work...
