Time goes by and my hope for everyone being energy independent is more and more slim. So I decided to share some thoughts first and then ask an open question about free energy SSD that I invite you all to reflect and answer.
My intention is to summarize the PRACTICAL achievements people got and the MISTAKES they did, so that we learn and never repeat them. Here they are in a very blunt way:

- Most people are pure breed experimenters, literally living for their work in a very passionate way. They are the anonymous army of workers that pushes the envelope of knowledge each day with every circuit they build. I really admire their work, but without a solid, fully understood and generally validated theory behind those experiments it is like finding the needle in the hay stack. A viable invention will come out only by accident this way. That is why all free energy forums have long topics (hundreds of posts) that slowly die.

- There are few people that ALMOST hit the jackpot (Gray, Smith, Marks, Reed etc) and tried to patent and/or sell their invention. They chose NOT TO SHARE their knowledge with humankind and had to learn the hard way that you can't fight alone the scientific status quo imposed by a corrupt and greedy hand of evil people with tons of cash in their pockets. Smith thought that investors will line up bidding for his magic briefcase and he'll only have to sit and wait... just to find out he will have to sit and wait 1000 years since everybody said to him "We don't need your invention". Do you know anything of him today? I don't. All I know is he is a dying, trembling in a wheelchair, old man.

- Some people are scavenging the archive of inventors' patents hoping to gather nuggets of secret knowledge. BIG error. Nobody really checks their validity before issuing the patent. There are blatant errors, wrong figures, missing data, etc. that patent offices largely ignored. Not to mention my biggest dilemma: how do you issue a patent for an apparatus WITHOUT seeing and testing a working prototype ?

- There are also a few very 'shady' inventors, some with a big chorus of fans, and the best example is John Bedini. Take any major free energy inventor in the last 30 years, and Bedini has a finger in their life or invention. He checks Floyd Sweet, Howard Johnson, Cejka and many others in person or with Tom Bearden aside, he has A LOT of documents, charts, samples in his Alladin cave lab (see Energy From the Vaccum series), he knows a lot about their personal lives, yet nobody asks: WHERE and HOW did you get them, John ? Inventors are very careful sharing things, yet Bedini had the ability to collect them. To me this smells like he was helped by 3-letters agencies, and at one point Bearden admits Bedini had/has a lot in common with them. In fact I don't know of any free energy commercial product he sells and you might wonder: "this guy has data I couldn't get, for either I haven't means or haven't time, he sits on a pile of information that he scarcely shows or explains, and yet he has not even ONE product on he market, after being banned from audio industry?"
That being said, I ask you all:

WHAT ARE THE ODDS WE ALL HAVE IN 2012 THE PLANS OF A SELF-POWERED SOLID STATE DEVICE, SO THAT WE POWER OUR HOUSES AND RUN OUR CARS FOR FREE ?