I would suggest starting at the U.S. Small Business Administration. There is a lot of useful online information.

Next locate a local office and see what free seminars you can attend to get instruction and answers from those who have already started businesses. They usually have classes on accounting, licensing, laws, etc.

I don't know anything about Kickstart but I personally would avoid any start up service companies and VCs until you at least have a better understanding of what your business needs entail.

I believe there are many opportunities to bring products to the market that leverage open source software. As far as the hardware I am unsure because my hardware experience is limited to off the shelf commodity equipment.

I'm also too accustomed to just running down to the local surplus stores (bay area has quite a few) and being able to build and hack on my hardware stuff (places like HSC electronics kind of keep me locked to the bay area; and if you're into hardware, you understand what I'm saying).

With an interest, education, and work experience in electronics I can tell you that Silicon Valley is a place to envy. I don't live in Silicon Valley but over the years I have spent a lot of time there on business trips and the quantity and ease of availability for equipment and components is amazing.

And Silicon Valley is still a hot bed of start ups and new technology. While the unemployment rate for unskilled or common skilled workers is bad the rate for technically skilled is well below both the California and the national average. Unless someone had a solid job offer for you outside of Silicon Valley I would not even consider moving.

I have been doing some freelance web development and system administration world wide and the areas that are continually hot are the Bay Area, New York City, and to some extent the Denver area. You are correct that there are a lot of low ball contracts and gigs but I suspect a good number of these are actually sub-contracting to real developers to take advantage of the current employment market by bidding on work and then expecting you to do the work for peanuts while they collect the profits for doing little more than re-posting a clients request. Just ignore them and keep looking.

Honestly I think a person with lots of experience should be looking at starting their own business or partnering with others to take advantage of the technology benefits in the Bay Area.

Instead, the companies will all cross-licence to reach a stalemate, but with their combined patent portfolios, they will be able to prevent any new competitors arising.

Sadly, you are correct.

The Sewing Machine Combination was probably the first example of the patent system going insane, resulting in the failure of anyone to innovate or produce the products the market was demanding, and eventually resulted in a small group of patent holders banding together in a licensing truce until the problematic patents expired.

Another example was the impact of patent battles in the fresh aeronautics industry in the United States that resulted in virtually no U.S. made airplanes being available for the United States military. The government had to step in and thump some heads to stop the stupidity and bring manufacturers together in a patent pool.

The first Blackberry phone came out in 1999. The patent was filed in 1996 and issued in 1999.

Did RIM license this patent? If not then this is a clear case of Laches (equity) and the judge should tell Apple to STFU and stop acting like a scumbag.

I was looking at the Canadian Home Depot web site and holy crap, you guys are getting screwed. The CFLs are way over priced.

Anyhow, that said, even a $5 CFL is going to pay for itself in a year even on cheap electricity (power is $0.08 / kwh where I am located and from what I know this is cheap). If your power is as expensive as your CFLs then the pay back will be much faster.

even one or two failures basically means you've wiped out any savings for the next decade or so

One or two failures in a single bulb installation will set you back for 1 or 2 years at the most. A decade is an extreme exaggeration.

a good incandescent will last just as long or longer with the same light output than CFLs will.

I started using CFLs almost 20 years ago, both my experience and all the published data comparing incandescent bulbs to CFLs contradict your statement.

I have had several CFL's fail within months

Several? As others have noted, you need to take them back to the store because that sounds like a bad batch run from the factory.

Statistically CFLs are in fact a huge cost saver in the long run and they do in fact last many times longer than incandescent bulbs. The bad thing is that when one person like yourself ends up being one of the data points that falls well outside the mean you will be turned off from the product for a long time even though statistically you will have significant savings if you stick with it.

Case in point, an 18 pack of GE 60W equivalent CFL bulbs are $20.14 at Lowes. If you use the bulb 4 hours a day then your energy usage is reduced by 45 * 4 * 365 / 1000 = 65.7 kwh per year. Where I am at power is about $0.08 / kwh which is a savings of $5.256 per year for each bulb in use and the bulb pays for itself in a little under 5 months. I have three 60W equivalent CFLs on the front of my house that have been operational for over 12 years now which has saved me about $189. With those savings I could buy enough CFLs to cover over 50 more houses in my neighborhood.

And do they really think anyone is properly disposing of these bulbs?

This is an issue but addressing mercury contamination in a landfill is much different from dealing with mercury spread across miles of landscape, rivers and lakes. The mercury level in the fresh water lakes where I live have reached the point where there are now warnings about eating the trout caught from these lakes.

A good manager needs to be a translator in the first place, he needs to translate between his engineers, his designers, his sales people, his financial people and the customers, all of which are using different languages.

And I would say that falls under breaking down barriers. Complex problems that rely on multiple disciplines across corporate departments and/or rely on support for contractors and suppliers requires a broad perspective of the environment and the ability to identify and quickly alleviate road blocks that impede routine or special operations. This is a big part of what MBAs should be learning to do but at the same time I know from experience that you don't have to be an MBA to pick up the necessary skills.

Historically, we'd still be coaxing marmots to eat from trees with rotten fruit if we hadn't developed more efficient, evil ways of harvesting meat.

So now we also need to worry about the MBAs killing and eating all the technical people?!?

I guess the main advantage of good people being in charge is that now, or a thousand years from now, we'd see little difference.

Huh? It is the evil people who develop the technology and science that has advanced human civilization?

Good example of this is the linux usability and GUI.

One word, Android.

You are wrongly accusing weaknesses in linux desktop GUI functionality with the difficulty of penetrating an entrenched market. I have used Windows, OSX, OS/2, Irix, linux (gnome, KDE, XFCE) extensively and the Windows and OSX GUIs have their failings the biggest failing being the retarded "it wasn't developed here" brick wall. A good example, multiple desktops, they have been available in the linux GUI for ages but blind stubbornness kept them from being a standard part of other GUIs.

People work best together. You mix the best attributes from several different kinds of people.

And some people just don't play well with others.

True story: While working full time as an engineer I went back to school and was taking some courses that were a mix of information technology and business management so many of the fellow students were business types coming from the other end of the spectrum. This was during the late 90s when the economy was booming and technical skills were in demand and good wages were required to retain talent. During a break a CIO employed at one company was conversing with a middle manager of software development from another company. They knew in common various talented people who had worked for both of them at one time or another but had moved around to gain better wages and benefits. The CIO made a telling comment, "when this boom economy ends we are going to get back at them", them being the technical people who did not stick around for the lower wages and benefits.

True story: Working with a group of engineers an equipment upgrade plan was developed that would reduce chemical usage costs and reduce hazardous waste disposal costs. Our calculations showed a 1 year payback due to reduced costs alone with the currently intangible benefit of advancing process performance for future product needs that the product designers and process engineers predicted. In presenting the project to the division VP in front of factory management I was laughed at and told "if engineers were putting your own money into these projects you would put more realistic cost savings numbers" which was followed by a round of laughter from management. My response was that I would put up my own cash to fund the project but I expected to collect any measured profitable gains as my return on investment. The laughing stopped and everyone had a poker face. The project was not approved and two years later when the latest product design was released for full production the equipment that was the target of the engineering upgrade was causing huge yield losses due to ineffective performance on the new product design.

We need the talent of MBAs, they learn valuable business skills and techniques in school, but they are currently overrated and overreaching in their decisions and control. When you extend this to the MBAs who climb the corporate ladder to the board level they are corrosive not only to their own work force but to the entire economy and future of the nation.

First, participating in general education classes is in no way a waste of time. Practicing and learning skills and knowledge in an array of topics is always beneficial and has a greater impact on an individuals effectiveness and ability to interact and collaborate within a society, within groups, and with other individuals. And whether or not your high school education covered the same topics it is unlikely the teachers and material will be identical and unlike many technical courses the general education classes can often provide new perspective and insight simply because you are learning from a different teacher and different book.

Second, if you truly do want a CS degree then stop wasting time trying to figure out how to work your way around the general education requirements and just take the damn classes. The time you spend taking these classes is a drop in the bucket compared to the probable amount of time you have to live and work in a career and hopefully even go back later and take more classes to expand your knowledge, experience, and perspective. It always astounds me when I see intelligent people who have the opportunity but waste precious years not getting an advanced education and usually it is due to the most minuscule barriers such as "I don't want to take the general ed classes, they are a waste of my time".

Just do it.

I would concur on Javascript. No need to buy or learn a complex IDE, easy to learn and use like BASIC with the ability to print lines without complex GUI concepts, and just about any laptop or PC with a web browser and a basic text editor is ready to go.

What a crock of shit. Occam's razor suggests your just a brain dead ideological twit.

Labor unions in the United States have been decimated over the past 30 to 40 years and on top of record low participation in unions the unionization of the information technology field is virtually non-existent.*

With almost non-existent union participation in the IT field the problems with incompetence obviously has no relation to unionization. On top of the reality that I suspect points out a completely fictitious anecdote in your post is the irony that the competent workers in the field are screwed over by the companies they work for and unionization would provide them with the bargaining power to end some of the exploitation.

I have seen how capable system administrators are burned out with over burdening and are lured into carrying a fancy geek gadget cell phone as some type of a bonus when in fact it is a trick to get more work out of the capable admins for no increase in pay when in fact these corporations just need to break down and hire more people to cover the work load AND pay the capable employees what they are worth.

* Computer and mathematical occupations 2010 union membership = 4%
    Professional and technical services 2010 union membership = 1.4%

We're already paying roughly $10 a phone for all the media codec licenses; MP3, h.264, etc (none of which I actually use on my current phone), but paying Microsoft an extra $5 feels dirty.

It should feel dirty, even though you are not using them at least you did receive a usable codec for your media licensing fee, you wont get jack from Microsoft for the $5 fee.