No.
Hard work and ability gets you lots of money.
Being a dick then makes you lost an equivalent amount of money.
Hard work and ability does NOT earn you the right to be more of a dick than other people.

Like bankrupt musicians, athletes and artists; people who earn a lot of money for one particular skill may not have any skills in other areas (such as being smart with money).
And ofcourse there are plenty of people who just inherit their wealth, who are likely (as average humans) to poses no exceptional skills at all.

How do you know FLOSS projects don't suffer a 70% failure rate too. Or perhaps even worse.

FLOSS projects typically don't have deadlines unless they get really popular, way after they passed the "success" treshold.
If a FLOSS project that hasn't had updates for years a failure or a success, even though it's fully functional?

Projects that don't meet budgets, deadlines or functional criteria are considered failed. Most FLOSS projects don't have any of these unless they already had some level of success. Most FLOSS projects die well before reaching that level, though.

Judging by my own subjective standards of failure; most projects on Github and Sourceforge are failures. They have no code, cannot compile or have showstopper bugs and no recently activity that could remedy these problems.

Wouldn't this ideally be presented as a choice to users?

1. I don't care who reads my email; use either password or SMS only.
2. I care only slightly who reads my email; use two factor authentication.
3. My email is actually of some importance; choose a different email provider.
4. My email contains sensitive information; cancel all my email accounts.

By that logic, we should execute everybody.
Crime rates will drop to zero.

FTFY.

If there is any reason to never execute somebody, this is it.
And yes, it happens: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...

If you are the judge of somebody wrongfully executed, you should be tried for negligent homicide.
So if a judge is abolutely 100% certain of guilt, go ahead and give the order. My guess is nobody would ever be executed again.

I was thinking just about the same thing.
Why don't hackers call their projects "8d 7d 6c 05" or "33 02 ba 9c" in source code constants?
Why would they even include any non-essential things in the code at all?

How much will you be dead and unable-to-ever-be-burried if the NSA finds out?

I think the main reason Minecraft is so popular with kids is exactly because it's a game that most parents are okay with.

Before today, I have never heard of Gigaom.
Looking at the content on their frontpage, I doubt I will ever hear of them again.

That's not how light works.

The flash light is not just visible to you and your camera, it's visible to everybody, even if you don't look directly at the flash.

On the other hand, people who keep buying their machines make them stop installing spyware HOW exactly?

And admit it was malware whilst Superfish was obviously just a case of misunderstoodware? /sarcasm

1. Drop the Applesoft BASIC clone.
2. Create a programming language that natively interfaces with Facebook API, Minecraft API or whatever other software project they actually care about.
3. Show them a "Hello world" example.
4. Wait five minutes.
5. Classroom full of programmers.

How do create an "elite" college from nothing?
Isn't that officious title something a college has to earn?