Why is it that you are comfortable with a device that travels upwind at 3 times the wind speed, but think that one that travels downwind at 3 times the wind speed is a perpetual motion machine?
Clearly, any wind powered vehicle that travels faster than the wind in ANY direction must be harvesting energy from the velocity difference between the wind and the ground, not the velocity difference between the wind and the vehicle, or it would be a perpetual motion machine.

Unfortunately, you're likely to get sued because BadAnalogyGuy owns the patent on making very bad analogies on Slashdot. :-)

Hey! Your not allowed to just add "on Slashdot" to some widely used technique and then patent it!

There is a paradox at work here. In fields like software development, a person can not become productive (and therefore valuable to an employer) without on the job experience. And so there is a skill level at which people can contribute nothing, but can not advance to the next skill level without doing the job for real, which they will almost certainly screw up, costing the employer money.

Given that such a skill level exists, this is a "tragedy of the commons" scenario. It is advantageous for employers as a group to hire lots of interns, so that it is easy to enter the profession, thus increasing competition and bringing wages down. But for any one employer, there is no benefit to hiring interns, who don't do any useful work.

Perhaps you need a history course. Historically, Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco drew their countries into ruinous wars, which are very hard on corporate profits. Batista so weakened his government that it was taken over by communists who nationalized everything. Corporations hate that.

Saying that the system of government best suited to corporate profits is a fascist-leaning dictatorship is like saying Bernie Madoff will get you the best return on your investment. It is sometimes true in the short term, but in the long term it is very, very false.

The original poster seems to be missing a fundamental aspect of the way organizations hire people.
Organizations do not actively examine all of the resumes that cross their desk, then cherry pick the particularly impressive ones.
At most times, an organization is not hiring, and they do not look at resumes at all. Every once in a while, an organization will decide that it needs more people. Getting approval to hire someone is difficult. (At the organization I work for (which has about 2000 employees), five layers of approval, including the CEO, are needed.) Once the decision to hire someone is made, the team that is hiring has what is known as an "Open Req" (Short for requisition, perhaps?)
Most organizations don't even begin looking at resumes or interviewing until there is an open req. Once there is an open req, the process speeds up signficantly. Most organizations tinker with their budgets every quarter, and what is the easiest item to remove from a budget? An open req. Because of this, most hiring managers are in a great hurry to make an offer before the req gets cancelled. They interview every reasonable candidate they can get their hands on before the end of the quarter, and hire the best of the lot.

The point is, if you aren't getting interviews, it is because either you are applying to companies that aren't hiring, or your resume is simply terrible. (If you are getting interviews but not offers, then you have different issues...)

I recommend the following:
1) Look at job postings on dice.com and craigslist. Companies post there because they are actively hiring. Submit your resume to anything that requires less than 3 years of experience.
2) Post your resume on dice.com. No employers look there, but recruiters do.

A "postage stamp" is a unit of area developed specificly for its unique marketing properties. Although many readers assume it is approximately 5 square centimeters, it can actually be anything up to 2551 square centimeters. http://www.joh-enschede.com/?page=jea.news.overview&cid=143

This law is problematic even beyond the restriction to anonymous speech. By setting specific record keeping requirements to make speech not be considered anonymous, they can label any kind of casual speech as anonymous. Then they can supress it.

Nuclear power is almost the same price as coal, under optimal conditions.
But, the cost of nuclear power all occurs up-front in the form of a multi-billion dollar construction project, and the return is gradual, over 40+ years of low cost operation.
If the construction project is delayed, canceled, or has cost overruns, the investors will lose their multi-billion dollar initial investment. A two year construction delay makes the difference between huge profits and a huge boondoggle.
And there are many things that can cause construction to be delayed, canceled, or overrun: Bad design, changing standards, inability to get approvals, pitchfork wielding mobs, etc.

The modern nuclear power industry claims they have worked out the many snags that troubled 70s-era projects. But the only way to find out is to build one and see.

My employer does a lot of business in China, both development work and sales into the chinese market.
This incident with google has really made me stop and think about whether the whole game is rigged.

Invest in China? Your technology will stolen by chinese competitors.
Outcompete your chinese competitors? The local laws will be changed in their favor.
Complain? Your people will be arrested.
Leave? Your assets will be nationalized.

The chinese haven't done any of that stuff to my employer, as far as I know. But it is the only country we do business in where the question might even come up.
It turns out that doing business in a country without the rule of law entails some serious business risks.
I wonder how many executives are having this same thought, right now?

Don't conflate the issue of whether the price is fair with the issue of whether a free trial is necessary.

I will agree with you that $1 is a ridiculously low price for a software application, and someone unwilling to pay that much should just not use the app.

The problem is that when producers get paid in full every time a consumer evaluates the product and decides it is unusable, they start creating products that look just good enough to try out, but don't actually work. The revenues are the same, and the margins are better.

I simply won't pay for software until I have finished evaluating it, no matter what the price. Many times, that means that I walk away from good products that I can't get for evaluation. Too bad for them.

As a professional software developer, I understand just how much goes into creating an application. I also understand that the difference between an excellent application and a useless one can be as small as one line of code.

In my experience, software development calls for people who are both extremely competent and well rounded:
They need coding skills.
They need organizational skills.
They need communication skills.
They need to be able to take direction.
They need to be able to provide direction.
Most importantly, they need to be able to acquire a deep understanding of the project they are working on, so that they can build the right thing without (or in spite of) close supervision.
Needless to say, real people are not perfect. You have to make do with the people available. But you are almost always better off with a small, extremely skilled workforce than a large, poorly skilled one.
"Coders" are a complete waste of time. "Developers" are almost always preferable.

With that said, degree of educational attainment is only loosely correlated with ability.

The total cost of ownership of a storage device includes the purchase price, the cost of restoring/reinstalling after catastrophic drive failures, and the ongoing cost of electricity.

For a home user, the reinstall cost from a single catastrophic failure is going to outweight both the purchase price and the electricity cost. SSDs have a significantly lower catastrophic failure rate, so they cost less.

For a server, the electricity cost is going to outweigh the purchase price and the reinstall cost. SSDs use less electricity, so they cost less.

If you are confused because you are not a software developer, please don't complain about this article. Just stop reading. The question is by a developer and for developers. It obviously should have had more context so to help non-developers know that.

If you are confused because you ARE a software developer, but don't know what scrum is, or don't understand the scrum jargon, stop complaining and go read up on scrum right now. Agile and scum are part of the culture now. Whether good, bad, or ugly, they're here to stay, just like OO, client-server, and waterfall. You only make yourself sound stupid when you make comments of the variety: 'I've never used it, so it must not be imporant, but I did skim the wikipedia article and it sounds like a stupid idea.'

With that out of the way, let me say the least dysfunctional team I have ever worked on used scrum. The engineers chose to use scrum. It was not forced on us by management. The reason we chose scrum was that we'd all been around the block a few times and understood that process just gets in the way. There is no way to avoid schedules, deadlines, and status meetings altogether. But we wanted to spend as little time as possible on that stuff. We chose scrum as the least intrusive process. The manager pretty much ignored us, we did things in a way that made sense, and we got a lot of work done.

So, to answer the original poster, in your next sprint retrospective you should say '${SCRUMMASTER} has turned into a glorified spreadsheet jockey. That's not good because he used to be our most productive coder. We need to find a way to get him back in the game.' Either the team will adjust the role of scrummaster to make it work within your organization, or you're not doing scum right.

Hint: Hiring a beancounter to jockey the spreadsheets is not the right answer. I've seen that tried, and the results were not pretty. Not only did the beancounter do a bad job with the spreadsheets, but he tried to be the boss.

I know that this idea is targeted at military applications, not commercial ones, but let's just see.
Just spitballing some numbers:
Assume the manufacturer can afford to spend up to about $2.00/gallon on electricity to make the fuel.
Gasoline has an energy capacity of about 40kWh/gallon.
The manufacturer can afford to pay up to $0.05/kWh, if the process is 100% efficient.

One thing that this idea has going for it is that it can operate whenever power is available, and suspend when power is not available. So the manufacturer can probably get an extremely good deal on power.

Seems to me that it enters the range of commercial feasibility at about 25% efficiency.

A competent lawyer would have objected. I'm not saying the judge would or should sustain the objection. But the judge MIGHT have sustained the objection. Now, we'll never know. Even if the lawyer was certain that the objection would be overrruled, he should have objected just to break up the flow of this hopelessly damning testimony.