A branch of the Scala IDE for eclipse shows when there's an implicit conversion by underlining the converted expression. I guess this feature will come to other editors soon enough. Also, to have this conversion, you must have imported it (or its package object). The predefined conversions in scala.Predef are doing what you'd expect them to do and aren't very dangerous (much less, than say, built-in automatic conversion in some dynamic languages).
Implicit parameters are just like dynamic default values. Not a big deal really, especially since Scaladoc hides them by default, you don't even have to know they're here. But they open for a world of possibilities to change the behavior of an API.
In general, implicits in Scala are really a powerful tool and they're useful for API designers more than 'common' users. You said it's not about FP, but Scalaz which is the FP lib for Scala uses them to their fullest extent to replace class inheritance (considered harmful) altogether.
Your pejorative, and erroneous use of the word "socialism" betrays your bias.
Although Java-the-language has stagnated a bit (I don't know if JDK 7 will ever be complete, due to all the feature cramming), but there's been a lot of activity during the past few years on other languages that run on Java-the-platform. Groovy and Rhino (Javascript) have been available for the JVM for quite a while. JRuby is actually faster than "native" Ruby for a lot of real-world applications. The Lisp-like Clojure language has a lot of fans. IMO, Scala is the most interesting out of all of these, with a very sophisticated type system, as well as functional features that the cool OCaml and Haskell kids seem to love.
All of these alternate languages can use the wealth of libraries available for Java, generally on all platforms on which the JVM runs. For example, I know of Scala apps that can run on Andriod, which is close enough to Sun's VM.
Haven't video game programmers been doing it forever, doing some things on the CPU, some on the graphics card?
The problem is shared-memory, not multi-processor or core itself. Graphics card have dedicated memory or reserve a chunk of the main memory.
And I heard functional languages like Lisp/Haskell are good at these multi-core tasks, is that true?
It is true, because they privilege immutable data structures which are safe to access concurrently.
8 Catfish = 1 Octo-puss