The disk in the middle is clearly opaque. I wonder why that might be?

You realise it's all bullshit, right? Bearden is a moron.

http://www.phact.org/e/z/bearden.htm

Did someone cite Roughlydrafted? That guy is the ultimate fanboy. He writes long completely one-sided "articles" about how Microsoft are the spawn of Satan and Apple are the best thing since sliced bread, just for fun. He's a complete moron- on one of the linked articles from that page he looks at Apple's market share and divides all the PC manufacturer's sales figures in half (allocating the rest to Microsoft) because each PC comes with a copy of Windows! What kind of crazy logic is that!

Finally, someone with a brain!

"J.C. Maxwell originally described his model which included excess EM energy surrounding the circuit which could be transformed into photons and applied to the circuit."

Sorry, but what on earth does that mean? There is "EM energy" around any circuit, anyone who's done high-school physics knows that. How can this be "transformed to photons and then applied to the circuit"? So, what, you want to turn the magnetic field into light, and then shine that back on the circuit? Sorry, I've heard this kind of drivel before in this context, and it's always explained in bullshit Bearden style word salad, so I've never understood what (if anything) is actually meant.

"Subsequent simplifications by Heaviside and Lorentz to make the model symmetrical discard this part of the system..."

It is well known that Heaviside simplified Maxwell's original equations by putting them into vector notation. Heck, even Wikipedia says it. Again, this is something I've often heard spouted on the topic of perpetual motion, but I've never seen it explained in proper terminology which, you know, makes sense. For some reason Maxwell is always taken as the benchmark, despite the fact that apart from the addition of the displacement current term in Ampere's law all had been derived previously.

Anyway. My main problem with this conjecture is that it is simply WRONG. Maxwell's equations are /not/ symmetrical! This is because as far as we know there are no magnetic monopoles, and as such there is no "magnetic charge" or "magnetic current" (analogous to electric charge and current, which of course do exist) in Maxwell's equations, making them asymmetric.

@DorianGray:

"Stumbling upon" a perpetual motion machine is hardly comparable to discovering that certain frequencies of microwaves can heat food, because there was never anything to suggest you couldn't. There's a heck of a lot of science which says you can't build a perpetual motion machine, so to "stumble upon" a way of doing so would be like accidentally building a car which can go at twice the speed of light!

As Vëon said - in the (I think highly unlikely) event that perpetual motion was found to be possible it could only be under extreme conditions, such as on a sub-micron scale or at close to absolute zero. There's simply no way a bunch of magnets and perspex at room temperature is ever going to do it!

@J234, Ultraorange, etc.

There's a bit of a difference in scale between the movement of a watch on a persons arm or a torch in their hand and the vibration of a bridge!

As it says above, this is designed to power remote low-power devices such as sensors attached to buildings or bridges. Buildings and bridges do not typically swing around like a persons arm!

For someone who talks about the past you sure don't know much of it. There were "Mac clones" in the nineties (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_clone). The reason there aren't now is that Apple doesn't allow it!

From wikipedia:

Apple VP Phil Schiller said the company does not plan to let people run Mac OS X on other computer makers' hardware. "We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac"

Um, yeah. According to an article I found on Macworld, Apple's market share SOARED from 4.4% in 2005 to a ENORMOUS 4.8%. Wow, that's nearly 5 percent! PC manufacturers must be pretty scared, now that they're only approximately 95% of the market.

But seriously. Believe it or not, "the masses" don't buy the majority of computers- businesses do. For "You're (sic) typical Joe Idontreadtechblogs" a computer is a toy he can chuck in his backpack along with his iPod, which might be useful but he doesn't really /need/. For a big business, computers are basically a necessity these days, and for business use you really do "give a crap" about boring things like spreadsheets, and certainly don't care about design or "coolness".

Heard that before. Desk applets are nothing like widgets.