Really? We're talking about those who can see a way to achieve basically the same thing, but whose methods are dozens of orders of magnitude more efficient. That strikes me as clever. To me, the ones who propose such a ridiculous goal are those "lacking in vision."

The number of times 'vision' has been correlated with 'efficiency' or frankly even 'cleverness' is very small. Vision isn't about building a better cow, but how you apply that cow.

RISC? Super-Scalar? Out of Order execution? JIT? Sorry, but vision often does result in orders of magnitude improvement.

You're offering up RISC as an example of vision in a discussion of destroying planets?

Moving Jupiter via fusion candle is vision, RISC is optimization.

The fusion candle idea is neat. It's entertaining because it resembles the thinking behind real engineering. Most of the items from the article are like, "Gee whiz, let's spend about 2 seconds applying knowledge from a 2 second skim of a bunch of Wikipedia entries. Golly, look at the big numbers!"