... for declassifying the shark repellant recipe. We all forgive you and Jula Childs and love you as you are. Please now also declassify the cure for cancer.

I'm pretty sure Powerman 5000 already covered this.

That's actually not a totally unsound point. My advice is next time you present this to an audience don't use the word "Gaia" as the name for our planet. Its okay, I really like anime too, but the people who most need to hear your message will see that one word and just ignore the rest, assuming you're some sort of Hippie freak.

No, they're investing a ton of money in renewable energy too; mostly to stifle it from killing the fossil fuels market before they can figure out how to meter and charge you for access to sunlight.

Right, except that you're forgetting that the MicroBit can be plugged into and programmed from a Raspberry Pi. You can't do that in the other direction, so the devices don't actually even fit the same use cases.

I think someone probably was stealing your mail just to fuck with you.

There is absolutely no reason to expect its not both.

In fact, I'd recommend that you don't even use your phone to check your email unless its an email account with completely separate authentication and hosting that you use only for that phone, and never use as a contact address for any accounts anywhere else.

I know you're saying this sarcastically, but he's not wrong. Don't use your phone to pay your bills. Really. Especially if its an Android or any other type of "smartphone" that runs "apps."

The parent post deserves to be modded +5 insightful. What is fundamentally killing our economy right now is simply that malicious incompetence is given a free pass. It seems like most the world doesn't realize its possible for incompetent people to pretend, purposefully, to be either more or less incompetent than they actually are, to suit their own ends. In both cases, this type of behavior at the very least should disqualify them from claiming they can do said tasks effectively, even if they actually could do so by trying harder. Almost universally though I see cases where obviously malicious laziness and incompetence is given a free pass because apparently the one thing we, as Americans are too polite to do is fire someone for lying about their own qualifications.

TFS says: "It's not intended as a competitor to devices like the Raspberry Pi or the Arduino — it is intended to complement them while remaining simple for educational purposes" so it appears that is NOT in fact what they say they have done.

What are you worried about? They waste their own money doing something stupid? They find out that you need an apartment with a good skylight or balcony to really pull this off well? They find out corn isn't actually a super-efficient all-purpose source of food and ethanol its advertised as by big agricultire? Or maybe deep down inside, the part about this that really bugs you that you can't admit to yourself is the nagging fear that "city folk" might learn to grow their own food and then the one last thing justifying generations of isolation and bigotry promoted by "country folk" will simply evaporate along with all of Monsanto's revenue?

Also, I'm pretty sure Home Depot sells at least half a dozen variations on this product already.

Its a big park and facial recognition tech has come a very long way. Also, in California, FastPass as well as various police agencies have been (possibly illegally) logging license plate numbers and processing them with licence plate recognition tech for some time now. Chances are even if you DID pay for everything in cash they still know who you are within a few minutes of entering their property, unless you drove your own car and parked it in their lot, in which case they know as soon as you approach the gate.