The son of a colleague of mine chewed up a few at a party and promptly over dosed. Happy 19th birthday kid, you dead.

We wrote ALL THE SOFTWARE for the headless media center on the RPi. No keyboard issues. The thing has given us zero problems. It's an incredible learning tool.

Before I gave it to a child, I'd dump the X server anyway (why retard their skill growth and their productivity at the same time?). My nephew has been working with me all summer and his primary PC is a Pi. He has been very productive with it. We've been working on a headless media center build for it. Granted all the development has been done on it but the goal in the end if for it to be headless. My nephew though love the thing. He does run game emulators on it though. I have no idea why you can't make that work. You have me there...

http://blog.freesideatlanta.org/2012/08/raspberry-pi-headless-media-center.html
Our RPi headless media player, mostly a creation of my nephew on his RPi. We are just about to release a version with a Pandora player as well.

Or you can buy one, use it, and see that it works a treat.

Get him a Raspberry Pi and don't even show him how to turn it on. Just tell him that awesome secrets lie within and even you don't know how to pull them out. Let his imagination run and he will figure it all out, hopefully. I gave one to my nephew and he hasn't left it for a month.

Will is make my ass look big?

How sad is it that his main concern isn't a college fund, food, or shelter, but medical care? He must keep working until he is 65 because he risks ruin if someone in his family gets sick. Even stranger is that not being able to afford medical care is no excuse to not get it, so if he failed to provide it to his kids he would be imprisoned. The mind boggles... Maybe he should move a few miles north to Canada where he can retire whenever he is willing to be done with a fancy lifestyle.

It seemed obvious to me that this wasn't going to work out for them. I suppose this is an example of confirmation bias on my part as I'm sure I wouldn't be posting this if it had gone the other way, but seriously I gave this a 0% chance of success in my minds eye. One wonders why the investors thought that GPS users, the military among them, would roll over and have their devices cease functioning or even risk the interference...

Well said sir.

I very well may be wrong about this, but I don't think we can have everyone on Earth living my standard of living. I think the cost of basic commodities will always keep a few people in the "rich" category and the rest int he "poor" category.

As I once heard, "If you want to be King there has to be serfs." I'd love to be proven wrong, but I'm not hopeful.

You will probably die a happy old man who never saw the reckoning your brand of apathy caused. It will come though not likely in our life time.

I'm guessing we can agree that the world cannot sustain a trillion people, right? We are already doing all manner of terrible things to sustain our current population (inoculating livestock with antibiotics so they grow faster comes to mind). We will have to get more and more grotesque in our "advances" to keep with the billions of new mouths to feed. At some point, be it 12 billion or 24 billion, our "advances" will fail to keep up and it will be catastrophic. More is not better. More is just more. We can see the end of the road ahead (even if it is a at trillion people), it seems silly to just ignore it and hope for the best.

Malthus proved wrong? LOL, thats a good one! We should talk that one over at your next bible study meeting.

I know a scientist that is working on a microbe that you can pump into an oil well and after a sufficient period of time you pump out diesel. It's really cool and creates major efficiencies in refining but doesn't deal with the release of fossil carbon at all. I'd like to see a biodiesel solution as well.

That is the choice I don't want to have to make. I'd prefer we stop creating so many new people. That requires that we raise the likelihood that each child born has a high probably of surviving and thriving though. That means the wealthy we will need to be more generous with the less fortunate. The other option though is that we are stingy, so the less fortunate perceive that the only way to be sure that someone will be there to support them when they are old is to have a ton a children, and that will make the lives of each of those offspring more miserable than necessary, but may also hasten the death of all of us (through destruction of the environment and creation of epidemics).

Malthus explained all of this almost 2 centuries ago. We will reproduce until the environment cannot sustain us, and then we will have mass culling of some type. Darwin expanded on Malthus' work to show that this culling was one of the mechanisms of natural selection. I may have an overly high opinion of what it is possible for people to do, but I'd like to think that we could avoid all that unnecessary suffering through generosity and family planning. It's probably impossible, but since the outcome cannot be worse than doing nothing I think its worth a try. Finding new resources to exploit so that the mass culling begins when there are 12 billion people instead of 7 billion people only mean 5 billion more people need to suffer when the inevitable happens. It will happen if we don't take action.

This is true, but what about the "nutrients" that the kelp captures while it grows and then is removed en masse during the harvest? I find this worrisome. More worrisome though is the constant search for more resources to exploit while the ignoring of the fact that we cannot sustain population growth forever. Why not stop increasing the resource requirements before the inevitable war for resources happens and kills off a few billion people?

For the sake of argument, lets say it works and pretty soon the ocean is all fenced off like Nebraska and each family farmer (multinational corp) has their own little farm (ocean). All this does is push off the problems of over populating a little bit further all the while putting pressure new pressures on the environment. While kelp would capture CO from the atmosphere in equal parts to those exhausted when burnt, I'm sure we are not taking into account the other things it will be removing from the seas. What affect might that have? No one knows. While the Capitalist ethic of "Drive it hard and fix what breaks." is romantic, it is also dangerous and doesn't take into account the people they kill along the way. I think I'd prefer to have a substantive conversation on the population control instead of only looking for more resources to exploit. Eventually Malthus will catch up to us, why not stop running from him and face his challenge. Better now while only 7 billion people will have to suffer rather than 12 billion in 20 or 30 years.