Axil Axil <janap...@gmail.com> wrote: The engineering game is a difficult place to set up a successful fraud; > having said that, con-men are most often the smartest men in the room. >
McKubre is brilliant and he has 22 years of experience working with flow calorimetry, but he could not devise a method of faking a result with a flow calorimeter that I would not spot in the first five minutes. I mean that. The whole point of a calorimeter is to lay bare all energy inputs and output. It is to simplify the equation and narrow down the possibilities so that there can be no significant undetected source of heat. This is done to make the results accurate, but it also has the effect of making the machine very easy to check for legerdemain. A person could design a complex machine with many inputs and outputs, and wires and hoses running every which direction. This machine probably could fool me. It would take me a while to trace down inputs and outputs. I doubt such a thing could fool McKubre or E&K, but it could fool me. However, a flow calorimeter DOES NOT HAVE wires and hoses running everywhere. It has ONE input and ONE output and exactly 4 parameters. If there is another input, it stands out like a sore thumb. A calorimeter is as simple as an energy system can be. That is the whole point of it. If they could make it even simpler, and eliminate other possible sources of error (or fraud -- it amounts to the same thing) they would make it simpler. No one is so smart he knows a way to defeat industry standard machines and techniques used worldwide for a century. Do you remember the Enron affair? Lest we forget, Enron Corporation is an > energy trading, natural gas, and electric utilities company based in > Houston, Texas con game that employed around 21,000 people by mid-2001, > before it went bankrupt. > > > > Fraudulent accounting techniques allowed it to be listed as the seventh > largest company in the United States . . . > Accounting techniques and like cannot be compared to a machine such as a calorimeter. Machines must obey the laws of physics. An accounting system can have any value stuffed into memory by the programmer at any stage in the process. For this reason, a computerized voting system is permanently suspect. There is no such thing, even in principle, as a computerized voting system that cannot be corrupted. (Granted, some are a lot easier to corrupt than others. They used to make voting systems with Data General Nova computers, which I used to program. They had zero security. Any programmer who read the manual would know how to sign on via modem, find, and change any number or ASCII value in the 64 KB memory without leaving a trace. They now make them with Microsoft Win-CE, a.k.a. "wince," which is like constructing a maximum security prison with nothing more than three feet of chickenwire fencing around the perimeter.) - Jed
