On Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 3:01 PM, Jed Rothwell <[email protected]> wrote:
> ...There is precedent for this. In 1917, the United States wanted to begin > large-scale mass production of aircraft for World War I. The industry was > hamstrung by patent fights especially by the original patent which had been > bought by Wright-Martin. There was a confused tangle of conflicting claims > and different patents. I do not recall exactly how was worked out, but > books about aviation say that Congress cut the Gordian knot and > establishing a single source for royalty payments owned by the government. > It paid everyone who still had a valid patent in aviation, including > Wright-Martin. Something like this a world-wide scale, with many different > governments contributing, will probably be needed to work through the cold > fusion patent mess. > The United States of 1917 is long dead and buried. Sorry if I sound cynical, but the behavior of the establishment and its pet physicists during the cold fusion debacle is really not comparable to the behavior of the early 1900s establishment and its Smithsonian equivalent. Yes, there were establishment denials early on and yes there were some red faces but to compare the lack of flight during that era to the lack of cold fusion as a power source during the late 1900s is to miss orders of magnitude, not to mention a qualitative shift in the kind of corruption in high places that rules today. Seriously, these people would rather fry the biosphere than lose social status.
