Jed: Mostly I agree with you. In the past, Bill Gates (BG) stepped in front of the parade of microcomputers because he was very well qualified to do so, having written BASIC for the 4004 processor on a DEC simulation at Harvard when he was 17 years old. But he did not have a reputation at risk; now he does.
Nowadays he no doubt thinks of the legacy he will leave behind. He would be weighing the possibility of becoming a laughing stock against the head-of-parade-again technologist. My guess is that he plays it safe. If he supports LENR, it will be very quietly until the results are simply undeniable. It would take courage to support LENR, and I think he lacks courage. He approached ENEA because they have gravitas; Rossi doesn't. That's an indicator of BG's lack of courage in terms of how he wants to be perceived -- Rossi presents a risk to that goal while ENEA does not. With your scenario in mind, the most likely outcome is that he drops it. To use Blaze Spinnaker's approach, I would put the likelihood of BG openly supporting LENR at about 1/5, and covert support at about 1/4. How about you? On Thu, Nov 20, 2014 at 11:51 AM, Jed Rothwell <[email protected]> wrote: > I fear Bill Gates will gather up the information from Violante and show it > to leading physicists in the US. They will tell him that cold fusion does > not exist according to their theories, so the results must all be wrong. > That will be the end of that. > > - Jed > >
