did not contain or need extreme violence

Are we talking about the same game? The one with the uzis and flamethrowers?

First of all the totality of energy available on the earth is not limited to the amount of sunshine falling upon it divided by an arbitrary efficiency of photovoltaic cells. Tide and geothermal are of value as well.

TFA explores the idea of capturing the entire energy output of the sun, and you are bickering over crumbs like geothermal?

Furthermore no one is of the opinion that unchecked exponential growth is sustainable in the long term

What? Our entire society is currently structured around the assumption that economic growth will continue indefinitely. If you hadn't noticed, zero growth in an economy is widely considered to be a disaster. But even modest growth of 1%/year is actually unchecked exponential growth.

Time to stop breeding, folks, or to get our butts into space.

Apparently the submitter didn't RTFA or didn't get the main point. We would be consuming the energy output of our entire galaxy within 2500 years if we try to sustain the current growth rate. And it would be 2 galaxies only 10 years after that, then 4, 8, 16, ... The point is that exponential growth can consume seemingly limitless amounts of resources in much shorter spans of time than you would intuitively expect.

Android is licensed under the Apache Software License 2.0.. Only the kernel (i.e. linux) is GPL.

Not that it matters, because the copyright holder can do whatever he wants with the code, even after he has given it to others under an open source license (like the Apache license or GPL). Accepting contributions dilutes the copyright ownership, but to deal with that contributions to Android are only accepted after a Contributor License Agreement is signed.

You might be thinking of Ripple. It is not centralized though.

It took us decades to fully realize the danger of radioactive materials, it might take decades to fully understand the implications of GM. Until we have a reasonable comprehension of the dangers and risks, we should use other methods for improving crop yields

1) Decades? German physicist Wilhelm Konrad Roentgen announced his discovery of X-rays in 1896. Less then a year later Elihu Thomson found that X-rays harm living tissue. 4 years after the discovery of X-rays, it was widely accepted that exposure needed to be limited.

2) I'm not convinced that it ever makes sense to be afraid of "unknown unknowns" without having a threat model. Don't we have to be afraid of everything in that case?

For example, it wouldn't make sense to say this: "It might take decades to fully understand the implications of reading slashdot every day. Until we have a reasonable comprehension of the dangers and risks, we should use other methods for getting our tech news."

It would work better to say something like "Reading slashdot every day is detrimental to productivity, because the time spent reading and posting would otherwise go to useful work." At least then we'd have a minimal model that we can analyze, discuss, test and refine. That way we can also avoid the same problems when we do switch to an alternative. You can't do that if you just cite "unknown risks".