Skepticus

I'd like to weigh in on this debate. I didn't vote though, because there were possible options that were left out of the list of answers. Also the question "Is Free Energy Or Electricity Possible?" itself is ambiguous. What does the word "free" mean? Also the phrase "Energy Or Electricity" is a bit like 'animals and dogs' it's redundant. There are several concepts which need to be refined here and the question needs division into two separate ones which have very different lines of inquiry. If by 'free' we mean financially free as in 'free beer' yes there are vested interests in this socio-political landscape which will try and make it hard for any competitive technology to steal their markets, but hey, that's free enterprise. If by 'free' we mean over unity or perpetual motion, then you can count on it being a hopeless cause. As an eight year old boy, I heard about perpetual motion and bugged my father and brother mercilessly, to consider every new design I would scratch out on the back of an envelope and when they pointed out that the design would succumb to friction and 'wind down' I would tenaciously set about designing a new model, ignoring their emphatic caveat that 'you can't get something for nothing'. As an eight year old boy I simply didn't understand the fundamental inevitability of natural laws such as law of conservation and the second law of thermodynamics. I just naively guessed that nobody had yet thought up a way to make a perpetual motion machine and went on ignoring that friction would cause energy to be lost and that one of my designs would overcome the problem. I drew such diagrams as a vacuum cleaner (hose connected to the 'blow end') driving a turbine coupled to a generator that made electricity to run the vacuum cleaner. But no end of cobbled together, Heath Robinson contraptions failed to impress my father and brother. The real problem, was that I wasn't trying to solve the problem at all. I was ignoring the problem, because I simply didn't understand the laws of thermodynamics. I didn't see how they were inevitable and how perpetual motion is simply an impossible idea. You can't get more energy out of a system than you put in. That's as final as any law of nature gets. What I was doing was just submitting guesses one after the other to my father and brother and asking them "here will this one do it?" They never even had to look at my diagram to know that it would not "do it", and only did so to humor me. Eventually I think I lost interest and busied my self with more fruitful endeavors. It is no use thinking or hoping that there may be a way to get around the the conservation law, just because it would be convenient either. What motivates a scientist to consider reevaluating a scientific principal, is not wishful thinking, "well it would be nice if we could violate that energy conservation law, then we could manufacture all the energy we want". No a scientist recognizing that the law is watertight and intimately intertwined with the many other laws of nature, will say that such a law must stay put, until evidence gives us pause to reconsider it. If there were an anomaly in the maths or perhaps some experimental evidence coming in to suggest that we may have a discrepancy to explain, then quite rightfully scientists should go back to the drawing board and try to explain the anomaly. If it turns out that the second law or the law of conservation needs revision, believe you me, the up shot would be at least as great as the revolution that followed in the wake of Einsteins relativity. Sir Arthur Eddington, in regard to the second law of thermodynamics stated the same dilemma thus: It is all very well if somebody such as Dennis Lee had revised the laws of energy conservation and thermodynamics or taken his marvelous invention to a physics lab and just said "why don't you guys test this and let's discover how it works". The influence of the oil companies, might sway some R&D dollars to put a particular car off the road, because they wont subsidize the research voluntarily (which is of course their prerogative and we can hardly call this foul play), but I seriously doubt they could influence even a small minority of physicists to give up the glory and wonderment of re-defining the laws of nature as we know them. The Lee story as I recall, involves alleged death threats (attempts) and know I read it somewhere that he was jailed for attempted murder, which he claims he was framed for by big oil. It would make far more sense that he was jailed for fraud and that the claim of being framed for murder, is another whitewash. The attempt to cover up such a discovery, is betrayed by it's import to our fundamental understanding of nature. Such a treasured gem is of much more importance than our parochial energy needs. Even the big oil companies know that new energy sources and technology are essential and far from suppressing them in some insidious conspiracy, many of them seem to be investing in them. Honestly why would a huge fuel company who's current product is in limited supply, try to suppress the alternative and secure their own extinction, when instead, they could invest in R&D of these emerging technologies and ensure their survival. Big oil already has the market for fuel. If I was in their shoes I would want to be in on the marketing of what ever fuels are going to replace fossil fuels. The demise of fossil fuels is inevitable, what is not inevitable is that big oil companies will have to go out of business. They will have to invest in new fuel sources to stay alive or diversify into unrelated areas. But when fossil fuel is exhausted somebody will inevitably be making money from whatever takes it's place. The product has to change, that is just a physical and inevitable fact of nature, but the corporate entities who supply the new product do not have to change. They know that the market for one product will become the market for another and they already hold the market for the former fuel. Why would they cut their nose off to spite their face, by conducting a global conspiracy to shut down any technology that they could invest in to secure their future market? The fraudulent claims emanating from the likes of Dennis Lee, expect us to believe tall stories that are implausible on two fronts. That obviously infallible laws of nature are being violated, and without showing their workings for how this could be so, and the other is that, a global conspiracy involving commercial interests and even scientific community are out to get them. I love my science because I love to understand nature, and no amount of money could keep me from presenting to the world, an equation that explained the law, which permitted an over unity machine to exist. But that is not the end of the story. There is something of a confabulation going on here. As I said free energy machines that we call perpetual motion or over unity, are blatant violations of the law of nature, but harvesting energy from the environment is not the same thing. If you can harvest energy from the environment which has cost you nothing financially, then you don't actually have free energy in the sense of a machine which produces more energy than it consumes. The pseudo-scientific claims of over unity devices are not the same as finding cheap (or even free) efficient sources of fuel and harvesting them. In the latter case, this is exactly what we have been doing all along. All forms of fuel that we uses are in some way or another taken from our environment. Solar Coal and Oil are all environmental sources as are wind geothermal and OTEC. The more interesting ones are cheap and renewable and have a have a lower impact on the carbon cycle as well as other environmental factors. When people talk about 'free energy' it is important to make this distinction. Are we talking about energy in the environment, that we don't have to pay money for, or energy produced by an over unity device and as such materializes from nowhere? It's two separate things. Let's be clear, the chances of discovering a method to create over unity, is right up there with pixies in the bottom of your garden. How about fuel sources that are free to harvest for little or no cost financially? Of course why not, and we do that already. Solar is a great example. OK, the cells may be expensive and inefficient at the moment but they have improved to the degree that they have become a viable alternative, especially now that you can install systems that feed the surplus energy they produce beck into the grid for credit. Now you can back up the solar with grid power and offset the cost of grid power when you have more solar than you need. The cells may be expensive but the do last along time and they are harvesting free energy, that is the solar cells may not be free but the energy they harvest is. I don't know much about the environmental impact of manufacturing the solar cell, but I trust they are getting better with that. The solar cell however is not the only way to harvest solar energy. Even way before the advent of the photo electric cell, there were so called 'sterling cycle' engines, for which a low grade source of heat (such as magnified sunlight) can be used to power them. They do work, but again they put out very low amounts of usable energy. The main problem with these kinds of designs, is that they are impractical for large scale usage such as a power plant for a city or to drive a vehicle. Surely we may suggest, 'these are just matters of design improvement' (I sometimes think that myself). But some designs are just intrinsically limited. The bigger you make them the harder it is to harvest energy to drive them. What we are really making with these devices, are energy converters rather than generators or power stations. An engine uses one kind of energy, to deliver another. In the internal combustion engine it is a volatile fuel (which stores chemical energy), that is converted into angular momentum that drives the wheels of your car. In a hydro electric plant, it is angular momentum (produced at the turbine) that becomes electricity. Actually we could go back another stage and recognize that nature converts solar power (by evaporating water) into kinetic energy and then precipitation releases that kinetic energy as rain some of which falls over mountains and makes it way into rivers that flow down hill to the sea, we borrow some of that kinetic energy and convert it to angular momentum that is used to drive generators. There is nothing wrong with looking towards these alternative, but less conventional methods of converting one form of energy into another. There may certainly be potential design improvements and better designs, I have had a fascination for alternative energy for years. I have an idea for using capillary action in large ocean based hydro farms. Thousands of kilometers of rigid double walls sandwiching some kind of wick, would lift water to a head using capillary action. On top of the wall a perspex capping protudes in the shape (looking at the cross section) of the playing card suit spades. The capping forms a chamber, which acts as a hot house, that uses solar energy to continuously evaporate the water from the wick which is enclosed by the capping. The water precipitates on contact with the perspex and trickles down the angled inside walls. The two walls curve into the bottom 'lobes' that provide a gutter for the watter to run into. on one end of the wall is a box containing a turbine and a generator (or an alternator) to produce electricity from the water flowing through it. A bonus, is that the water coming out can also be harvested as it is naturally desalinated. Instead of costing giga watts to desalinate water (as we are planning to do here in south Australia) we could produce electricity and desalinated water at the same time. The problem is again probably the scale and the viable amount of energy produced. It might not provide energy and fresh water for a city, but perhaps it could be scaled up to to provide for a small live away aquaculture community, who could live on a decommissioned ship mored to a decommissioned oil rig and the 'hydro wall' would also serve to fortress their aqua farm from poachers. I have a couple more alternative energy ideas, but I am probably well over the credits I need to get hosted and that means I have a job to do. So I'll see you all in the soup.

Yeah, thanks pyost. Awww Shucks [blushing and shuffling feet]. Thanks mate. I did accidentally make a largish post over at Trap (because I had been browsing on both boards and they just look so similar). I should have known, as it was a religious woo topic postulating the creation evolution debate and starts nearly identical to one I just spent two months posting on. I do really belong in here, because the moderator expressed some disappointment at what I had said and because it is about ten times longer than my first post here, yet I only earned 10 points for it. I don't think both boards can be using the same credit algorithm. I wanted to make one nice long post and just get my credit well over the 30 point mark so I could apply for the larger hosting package. Then I discovered that I was actually on Trap instead of Asta !!!BUGGER!!! And what's this only ten points nonsense? Ouch that bites. I will close my Trap tabs and stay away, as it really can be a trap if you get caught up in one of those creationist debates, and the visual similarities of Xisto really does make it a trap, if your intention is to post in here.

Oh brother!! where to start with this lot. Well it is patently clear that there is a distinct lack of rigorous thinking around these parts. I could honestly care less whether somebody claims to have 'academic qualifications' on one hand or 'personal revelations' on the other, the problem that concerns me is with the status quo. The evidence at hand and the level of nativity regarding that evidence. Also with respect to the creation vs evolution debate itself, it always seems to get rehashed and the same lame points are revisited in utter, blissful ignorance of the huge volumes of material available to each of us, which provides concise explanation of the supposed mysteries and paradoxes. Too many people are content to wallow in their own ignorance and proclaim that because they don't understand something there is no possible explanation, at least without resorting to some kind of supernatural cause. The interesting thing about this kind of thinking, is that it does at least ultimately require that any plausible explanation, should ultimately be predicated on cause. We are all prone to assuming that every effect must have some kind of cause. At some point however, we must assume that this chain of cause and effect breaks down. Why? because if everything must have a cause then that cause must have another cause and so on ad infinitum. Meet the infinite regress people. Creationists wish to circumvent this dilemma by proposing that a supernatural being exists, that has the power to create the entire universe in all of it's splendid glory. I might just as well propose that the universe itself is just a supernatural event or at least, its spontaneous creation out of nothing, is such a supernatural event. I won't trouble you with that speculation (although I kind of already have ), oops... never mind, I know I will never get an intelligent response to that dilemma from any creationist because it is more logically problematic than the very dilemmas that they set out to explain by invoking their God. Likewise they will never explain why their supernatural benefactor, should just be let off the hook in terms of cause and effect relationships. It is indeed an incredulous complaint that nature itself can not exist without cause and yet super-nature can. if you are trying to explain things without scapegoating, then supernatural beings which have no rational explanation for existing in the first place simply will not do. Contrary to several things that have been stated here. Biological evolution by means of natural selection is not only a viable explanation for the existing empirical evidence we have to hand, but it is a logical necessity of it. Knowing how genes propagate from one generation to the next. carrying traits as they do, it is inevitable that natural selection must act on them, to weed out any unsuccessful genes in the gene pool. Genes themselves know no boundaries between species, so speciation events must also be seen as inevitable. Specious arguments, about macro vs micro evolution, seem to always come from those, who seem to have little comprehension of evolution and almost no knowledge about biology. The assumption (and let's be clear about this: An assumption is exactly what it is) that complexity and order, can not come from simplicity or disorder - or that organization can not come from disorder if necessarily false. If we have order or organization, enough to warrant an explanation, then surely it comes from somewhere. Anybody can invent a fictitious entity called God and propose that it solves the problem of where order and organization comes from. I'm so sorry creationist folk, but it doesn't. I will simply point out that your supernatural creator is orders of magnitude more complex ordered and organized, than any artifact of nature which you employ such a God to explain away. It is obvious to the point of being purely trivial, that there is another clear motive, for arguing the existence of such a supernatural creator and that has nothing what so ever to do with, attempting to explain the apparent organization in nature. a purely psychological motive, is the real explanation for creationist zeal and tenacity, in contriving ever more specious arguments in favor of a supernatural creator, it is simply this. Creationists do not want to believe that they will simply die and cease to exist, body and soul (whatever that is). they have been promised a place in Gods kingdom, eternal life in heavenly bliss, and like children who never quite grow up, they can not throw the shackles of the immortal promised land of heaven. The problem with much creationist rhetoric is the banal assumption that if they can pick a flaw in evolution (or big bang cosmology) however contrived or based on bad logic it may be, that if it were a valid argument, the next best explanation is the puerile bronze age mythology of creationism. Creationist ideas are nearly always based on poor logic and scientific ignorance, but to suppose that even if there were an element of truth to them, that they have brought mainstream empirical science crashing to it's knees, is the essence of absurdity and wishful thinking. To go one step further and propose that the alleged discrepancy in science, therefore vindicates the idea of supernatural creation, is blind arrogance and dogma in all of it's plain stupidity. Should I dare give you an example of such ignorant stupidity? Well why not. This is not my opinion. The facts I will speak of are not speculative or in any way conjectural. The creationist plaint however, it isn't based on clearly thought out rational reasoning, it is just base ignorance and stupidity about how evolution works. I am talking about the idea that if humans evolved from something else then why does that something else still exist. It's hard to find a stupid question that more clearly points out the biological illiteracy of the proponent. Firstly I will digress, as the worst form of this complaint, takes the form of "If humans evolved from monkeys why do monkeys still exist". The point about biological illiteracy is driven home by the first rate ignorance that modern day monkey species have nothing whatsoever to do with the recent appearance of '*person*-sapiens'. Where ever did these ignorant creationists get the idea that humans evolved from monkeys? Their inability to draw distinctions between modern species is bad enough, but to stupidly assert that one modern species evolved from another according to evolutionary science is lamentable indeed.For starters, monkeys are not a species and therefore not the kind of taxonomic group, that any individual species can sensibly be said to have evolved from. Monkeys are hot even a part of the super family Hominoidea but rather primates who's common ancestry predates any of the modern ape species. This biological ignorance is obviously based in a basic lack of any capacity (or simple understanding of nature), to make a distinction between monkeys and apes. So if you hear a creationist rabbiting on about how humans supposedly evolved from monkeys, you should immediately hear alarm bells and realize their ignorance of basic biology is abysmal. What anybody so hopelessly ignorant of basic paleoanthropology, could help to contribute to a more complete understanding of human origins is non-existent.. It mounts to just so much worthless noise. The real foundational problem, I have not touched upon just as yet, That is, putting aside the irrelevance of our biological kinship with monkeys for the moment. The basis of the claim that one thing should not evolve 'into' another in such a way as the original ancestor continues to exist. Now where does this ridiculous and preposterous claim come from? You would think that biologists themselves would be all over each other in the first instance, if nature in anyway suggested that the divergence of new species were some kind of problem. Now I will generalize my argument, because this issue happens to fit many of the baseless creationist plaints that exist. If a scientific idea is faulty, then it is the job of other scientists to debunk the idea and call it to reason. If there were any credibility in creationist complaints, then you would have to ask why scientists in the interests of intellectual honesty, have not torn them down. If I understand anything about science, it is that it is self correcting and it won't stand for irrational nonsense. You can propose a fabulous idea in in science that has no merit based on what is clearly understood and fails to fit with carefully studied, reasoned knowledge, but you can't expect it to survive the onslaught of other scientists who will gladly tare it from limb to limb as the nonsense it may very well be. So if it doesn't stand to reason and if there is no merit in it then it will surely get torn down. It certainly won't rise to prominence as the best explanation of the known evidence. It will rightfully be torn apart and thrown aside as useless conjecture. The point is, considering how carefully studied the science of biological evolution by natural selection is, and supposing that there were some fundamental flaw in it, so simple that an uneducated (nay - ignorant) layperson could understand and bring forward, then why would the thousands of well educated experts, who are on the front lines of biological science, not be the first to come forward and take the flaws in the popular theories to task? To answer this we need to postulate three things: 1) That mainstream biological scientists are (approximately) as stupid / uneducated (naive) as the creationists adversaries who challenge them and that most if not all of them simply did not think of the obvious misconceptions and inconsistencies in their popular models of mainstream biological science. 2) That science is involved in a huge conspiracy to confabulate a mainstream scientific theory called evolution by natural selection. Many thousands of scientists, who are trained to hold each others scientific ideas up to the light of reason and who have a process of pier review, that constantly works in every other area of science to purge mainstream science of bad ideas, are nearly unanimous, in a world wide conspiracy to maintain this cockamamie idea called evolution which disagrees with nature. 3) That evolution by natural selection, is a fully vindicated scientific theory, that completely stands to reason with veritable mountains of conclusive evidence that confirms it beyond a shadow of doubt. That further to this, creationists are just a whiny group of religious zealots, who don't want to believe it for the true fact of nature that it is, because it gets in the way of a literal interpretation of a barbaric bronze age, supernatural creation myth. But not only do creationists not want to believe this irrefutable fact of biology, they don't want others to believe it and they don't want it being taught to children in school. Considering that creationists reject the last proposal out of hand and claim that evolution is a false theory, then we have to go back to the second and first proposal. Either highly educated mainstream biological scientists, don't know what they are doing and just happen to come up with an addle brained crazy theory that doesn't stand to reason, or they know very well that their preferred explanation for biological diversity and the origin of species, is false and are all involved in a massive conspiracy to prop it up. It is as if mainstream professional science were involved in doing pseudo science, replete with confabulation, misrepresentation and willful deception of the wider public. The problem with the second proposal, is that it is fundamentally ignorant of how science is done. The scientific method of biology is the very same principal used in physics, chemistry geology and every other mainstream science. If science in general didn't have some reliable way of getting it's thinking straight, then it couldn't succeed at producing reliable knowledge that is used in space travel, manufacturing pharmaceuticals and that masterpiece of technological wizardry you are using right now, called a computer. In any case for biology to be confabulating a fraudulent theory, many other areas of science would also have to be implicated in the conspiracy. Biological evolution after all is massively supported by geology, with its massive timescale, its geological stratum and plate tectonics. None of evolution by natural selection, would have made any sense, except by virtue of the geological underpinnings of a very very, old world and of the precise methods developed, to scrutinize the age of rocks etc... That in turn, implicates physics into the conspiracy, because geologists rely on physicists having gotten their facts straight about the decay of radioactive isotopes, and that in turn implicates mathematics in the conspiracy because the physics borrows so heavily upon mathematical knowledge. Without biological evolution by natural selection, paleontology would also lay in ruins, for lack of any coherent model of organization to categorize and correlate mountains of fossils that have remained in the earth for millions of years. Turning to the first proposal, that biologists are just muddle-headed wackos, with crazy ideas about the origin of the diversity of life on this planet and that an uneducated layperson is just as qualified to criticize them and call them to task. Well... You won't hear me complaining that a lay person can not understand science or that academic qualifications are a necessary prerequisite to understand or even criticize mainstream scientific knowledge. There is no equivalent of 'divine authority' in science and it is fundamental to the success of science, that its ideas are expected to stand on their own merit, in the face of whatever support evidence and reason procures for them. The problem with the layperson in practice being capable of criticizing science, falls not on their lack of qualifications, but rather that in order to criticize an idea, you must first understand it. Even then, there is no elitist barrier erected to keep scientific ideas away from the layperson. I have read dozens of good popular science books, that are excellent at explaining what is understood about nature and how science has come to the conclusions it has. There are mountains of good non-technical introductions to scientific ideas on the internet. There is no problem in principal with a layperson understanding and criticizing science. The problem is in practice, that when creationists attempt to criticize science, they do so without even a basic understanding of the ideas they are attempting to refute. The idea that humans evolved from monkeys is not false because biological science has gotten its facts wrong, it is false because it is just a stupendously ignorant misconception of what evolution tells us. Why do creationists propose such a question as if it even deserved an answer. What is more annoying than a creationists innocent naivety of science is their arrogance in proposing problems that just don't exist and which would be meaningless in light of even the slightest understanding of biology. It is simply naive to not know something. It is arrogance to assert a contradiction of well established knowledge without understanding how that knowledge is derived and it is utter ignorance to set up an idea as false based on a straw-man caricature of that idea which is complete and utter garbage and for which refutations are abundantly available. If the creationist wishes to know why monkeys still exist, "if humans evolved from monkeys", then they should be informed of these few things: 1) firstly humans didn't evolve from monkeys. 2) If you wanted to know the answer to this ill conceived question, then it would take you about one minute to find an appropriate article on the internet that thoroughly debunks not only the misconception that humans have evolved from monkeys or that biological evolution suggests that they did, but also the fallacy that speciation (the process leading to new species), requires that ancestral species must become extinct for new species to arise. 3) If the creationist has a problem with the current scientific theory, then the onus is on them to explain why they believe there is such a discrepancy and why we can not come to the conclusions we have. For instance if the creationist proposes that the emergence of a new species should logically preclude the ancestral group from continuing, then why? 4) If you want to find fault with an idea, you must first understand that idea. This 'monkeys to humans' misconception is wrong on just so many levels. It beggars belief that anybody could be so woefully ignorant and yet so arrogant in their willingness to challenge scientific ideas. The expectation of creationists that everybody else should answer their ill conceived problems with evolution, is underwritten by a pretense that, they could even understand a flaw in basic evolutionary theory, without even the minutest understanding of the idea itself, that the objections they raise are valid or even meaningful and that those objections represent 'holes' in the scientific idea that still remain unexplained. None of the above pretenses are worthy of the evolutionists effort to dignify with a response. It a completely ignorant fantasy, that species are required to evolve in their entirety from one species to another and nothing in biological science suggests any such thing. The only intelligent response to such a ignorant question, is 'don't be stupid, and go and learn something about evolution before you try to pick holes in it.' Why don't you just Google for an article about how the mechanism of speciation is proposed to occur? Why do you just pretend that this make believe discrepancy, has not been thoroughly debunked? Why do creationists continue to ignore abundant refutations of creationist arguments and simply restate them as if they have never been proposed and refuted before? This is particularly obvious in online communities where by virtue of the fact, that the creationist is present, it is also obvious that they have an abundance of relevant information at their fingertips. Literally in moments, they could be reading the answer to any common creationist objection to evolution and then they could move forward. Either they should accept the refutation and acknowledge this or present a more enlightened criticism based on the understandings so derived by looking into the answers generously provided for them. Creationists don't want to know how evolution works. They don't want to believe there are explanations for their objections to evolutionary science. They don't care that their objections are simply ill conceived nonsense. They are living in a make believe fantasy world, with supernatural creators, angels, demons and miracles a plenty. Evolutionists are not permitted to compete with this fantasy because creationists are immune to reason. They expect science (quite rightfully) be held accountable to reason, as they so obviously present objections which are supposed to give us reason to doubt evolution. But they are not willing to be held accountable to that very same incumbency to reason. Their entire worldview is accountable to pure faith and no 'proof' would ever suffice to undermine that mindset which is predisposed to belief without reason. It is all a big game of make believe to creationists like preschoolers that never grew up, they are immersed in a fantasy world. Inevitably then , their approach to science takes on this form of make believe fantasy. The alleged inconsistencies with scientific ideas, are just make believe ones that are fantasized into existence, for the obvious benefits they entail in protecting their communal delusions. The idea that monkeys should not exist because humans do, is roughly the intellectual equivalent, of proposing that if the earth is really a spheroid, there should be no such thing as Australians because we should have all fallen of the planet. I am so sorry to disappoint the 'spheroid earthers' out there, by my embarrassing continuation to exist. The world really must be flat.

That's the one. I signed up there first, and decided it might be a bit full of woo (now there's a technical term). So I decided I better come in here and check out the technically oriented forum. Damn. That's a shame. It would be nice to contribute to either of or both forums, and credit the user as single entity. I assume they are both run by the same parent company Xisto. Or perhaps they are just individual entities and both Xisto customers. Yep. I got all that. Ah... where do I start. I have a childhood background in hobby electronics. I grew up in a home with a shed in the backyard containing a very large lathe and many pieces of machinery. My father was an industrialist and owned a spray painting / baked enameling shop, than a sandblasting factory. One of my brothers became a TV technician and got me into electronics kits. Latter I progressed to CB radios and modifying them. I studied for my amateur radio license but never sat the test. I also kept bees, from which I curtailed a fair degree of biological knowledge (more than I realized at the time). I began an active interest in reading popular science at about the age of 24. I have also been an avid computer geek for over 15 years. I love GNU/Linux and OSS. I guess it depends on what is meant by technical. I have a fairly wide set of interests and background in technical things in general, but if the kind of technical info being encouraged is more narrowly computers and internet related then I may be better of at Xisto, Snap. Well there is a problem I will never have. I am inclined to write long monologues, that attract plaints of derision for long verbose and detailed manner. What can I say I love to write. Creationists never do appreciate detailed technical writings which may be deemed educational and usually resent a pragmatic tone. Well, you can only lead the horse to water as they say. Perhaps my kind of writing, would be better appreciated here. Why do I get the feeling you are going to regret encouraging me to write long posts? At a forum I recently frequented I had a habit of maxing out the edit box (10,000 words I think), I kept having to write muti-part posts with 'continued...' at the bottom. On one of my last posts I filled up the edit box nearly six times. I keep warning you. You may regret saying such things around old Skepticus. Thanks for the welcome and all of the good advice Jimmy. Yeah? Not bad. The one you responded to got me 7.2, So, I will be flooded with so much credit I may be able to buy the company. Regards Skep.

Hi there everybody.I am new here and this is my first post. I am an active atheist and a skeptic and I have been setting up an online bookshop for atheist literature and other goods. I am trying to do this without shoestrings at all, and I hope if it takes I will migrate to paid hosting services. Recently I found a free host; I don't know if I should really mention them here but their name is in my bookshops URL and I have used this in my signature. I don't know if I should even do that, but I will remove it if it is a problem. Unfortunately my host doesn't support PHP & MySQL (not for the free accounts) which I will need for databasing stock and delivering dynamic web site content.I actualy came here looking for a server to just support my customer and stock data and serve dynamic content which I figured I will reload back into the main website. I don't know if this is technically feasible and I am still learning a lot. I am however impressed to learn that I can get full web hosting service, in exchange for writing on a forum. I am addicted to forums and spend quite a lot of unproductive time (usually debating with creationists) in various forums. I do fancy myself as something of a budding writer and enjoy word play and generally expressing ideas in the written form. I have a couple of inquires regarding these boards and the associated web hosting, which is not clear from my present investigations. 1) I was not sure which forum to choose so I have signed up at both. Will my credits be accounted for separately and if so can they be transferred to the one account? 2) It is not so clear from the FAQ just how much writing earns how many credits. Not that I should have a problem, I am quite a prolific writer and I should earn in excess of my needs. I am more interested in bartering an spare points I accrue to others, who I may wish to pay for other services with my own website etc...Well that's enough from me for now. I look forward to a productive an prosperous relationship with the good folk here and I will speak to you again soon. Regards Skep.