Newsflash! Software products require good marketing, film at 11:00.

Seriously. If you have a great product, you need a business plan to sell it, even if it's a smartphone app. "Stick it on the app store and hope for the best, because some guy made a million bucks with a fart simulator" isn't a business plan.

Philosophical objections are valid. It's why people decided to go with Open Source solutions in the first place... chose the right philosophy, and you're buying into a system that will have developer and user support for a long time, and pay off in more features implemented in satisfactory ways.

If a tech has the right vision, it will go a long, long way, where pure technical excellence on its own is no guarantee the tech will grow with the user.

You're describing a classic "salt" con - You buy an abandoned mine, salt it with uncut gemstones or precious metal ores, and let the investor "discover" that the old mine isn't played out after all. You can then sell him a worthless hole in the ground for millions.

A variation of the scheme is the "counterfeiter machine" - You sell the mark a machine that takes ordinary newspaper, and prints perfect counterfeit 100 bills! It even "distresses" them to make them look like real circulated money! It pops out a new bill once every half hour. Yours for only thirty grand! Of course, you don't tell them there's only a timer-controlled release mechanism and a thousand dollars worth of real money inside and not a magic printing press...

This scheme has that sort of smell to it.

In this case, I think it's black market Russian radioisotope batteries rather than AA's... they can keep producing a surprising amount of energy for decades.

Careful measurement to detect the presence of nuclear material is probably warranted for anyone wanting to invest.

There's a tried and true con game, called "salting." Criminals would "salt" an exhausted mine with uncut gemstones or the ore of precious metals, and let the investor "find" them, and thus trick the investor into giving them millions for a worthless hole in the ground.

If this power plant does work, I'd bring a geiger counter with me to check that these "fusion" devices weren't simply black market radioisotope batteries from Russia.

"Working with someone who's productive but not trustworthy" is not an issue of working with bozos, either. These days, trustworthy means separation of duties - you're armoring the system in case of future bozos, and by extension, social engineering hacks.

Example: your network design team needs a unix host running syslog NG, VSFTP, and a custom app from a vendor that needs a couple of daemons for network analysis. They're good and smart people, but they're not Unix people, they're Cisco-and-Juniper people. So they come to you to run their Unix host, because you know how to rig up a virtual host, but they don't necessarily want or need you every time they reconfig their syslog config or the app needs to be kicked over because it froze.

On the other hand, they sure as hell don't want to be responsible for opening up a security hole or taking down the system. They don't have time to be Unix admins, and you don't have time to be an application support engineer.

This is where sudo and now Vsys comes in. It lets them screw with their mission-specific configs and processes without the risk of knocking over the box. This makes everyone happy.

Yes, it's a really recent development. All of the major Unix vendors would supply their own compiler and build tools, tuned for the platform. Graphical IDE's were pretty much a Macintosh thing, and stone-axe primitive compared to the laser scalpels out there today - but lightyears better than the hex code editors and assemblers used on other personal computer platforms.

The explosion of high quality dev tools in the past 10 years is unreal... from Eclipse to X-Code, from GIT to Firebug, it's a developer's world out there right now... except most of the languages suck. Syntactic morasses overly reliant on ASCII line noise to achieve basic goals. New rule - experimental languages are forbidden from requiring any symbol that needs the shift key to type. Rely on the UI rather than the charset.

It's just Smalltalk on JVM. Smalltalk evangelists are as deranged as Lisp evangelists - only the Smalltalkers are also laboring under the delusion that their language is the most intuitive and easy; so easy, children should learn it! To see this philosophy in action, check out the Squeak environment. It's smalltalk in microcosm: Massively powerful, but a syntactic, disorganized mess.

This has about as much chance of dethroning Java as Clojure. But it's going to be nice for the smalltalkers, who despite their derangement, tend to be immensely talented programmers. (I think it's a matter of a certain mindset meeting its ideal tool, rather than the tool creating the mindset.)

Opinion polls are scientific data, or "facts" if you would. They are based in solid theory collected and refined by sociologists and psychologists and produced using very powerful mathematical analysis, and this sort of scientific data has made the fortunes of many billionaires and put people into positions of nearly unimaginable political power.

Just because the data is gathered and analyzed in ways you don't like, producing results you wish weren't true, doesn't mean it's ineffective or useless or not worthy of consideration. Which is kind of the point of the article.

While it's true that a profession can be oversaturated due to swings in the market - Law and finance are suffering a glut right now, just as comp-sci grads started working at coffee shops to get by in 2001 - these ebbs and flows even out over the course of time.

Auditoriums full of attorneys are massively inefficient and error-prone. It's not a good use of a law degree - come to think of it, billable hours and the organization of the law firm are both obsolete. Prix-fixe legal billing is the new school, and lawyers using technology to make it possible are making a ton of money, and there's going to be more demand as the cost barrier is lowered: Lawyers get to make more money working less hours for more clients. I don't mean there will be more lawsuits, I mean there will be more wills, living trusts, estate planning, contracts entrepreneurs and investors, setting up LLCs and corporations, etc... stuff that increases wealth for the middle class, and was once reserved only for the wealthy. So it's a net positive.

Technology does close some doors and obsolete some careers. It creates far more than it destroys, tho... and there are still craftsmen who cobble shoes by hand, just like old Ned Ludd, and they make enough to support a middle class lifestyle.

The larger problem is that colleges funnel their best and brightest into law instead of other fields of study, and business looks at college as a 6-year trade school. An employee with an advanced history or english degree will be very damn valuable - they can organize research into any number of issues, think critically and analytically about what they've found and communicate what they've decided about it clearly. That's worth more than knowing how to get "hello world" to run in LISP. Yet it's a "useless degree" to many hiring managers...

Both business and higher education are not acting in their own long term best interests in search of short-term profit.

There's more than one free app called Chess. If you've got the one by Aart Bik, I think you're OK - his site and his blog all indicate he's an on-the-square android dev working for Google.