It isn't just our fuel, it's our food. The UN FAO reported that animal agriculture contributes more to global warming than the entire transport sector combined. Plant based diets are an easy short term solution as we develop long term solutions to energy production.
http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/a0701e/a0701e00.HTM

Plant based diets have the added effect of being healthier, reducing local air and water pollution, and reducing ethical concerns over animal welfare.

We're heading boldly into a post-capitalist world, where everything is available to everyone at virtually no cost. Working for a living will no longer be necessary, as the welfare state becomes the majority, but the children of this generation will be artists who will freely create the digital arts and new media through educational institutions or on their own. Innovation has always come through a combination of serendipity and passion. Passion will still drive people to work hard, but for those who would rather just consume media all day, that will be an option.

There remains unsolved problems of overpopulation and resource allocation, left unchecked, we would have to move to a Matrix kind of setup, or something more like Vanilla Sky, where people live forever in pods. Society will continue to advance and we should eventually find cheaper ways into space, then we'll have a world like that in Eve online.

The other option is war, revolt, reducing our great civilization and setting back the progress of science until we find a way to solve these problems.

It isn't simply a matter of population, but also of how much the individuals are using. The amount of resources that each individual uses is their footprint. The carry capacity of a region is how many individuals it can support. The carrying capacity can and has been increased through increasing production and decreasing use (increased efficiency). Earth can support the entire human population and more, simply by using our resources more efficiently. For example, the mainstream US diet includes lots of animal flesh, which is primarily produced by giving animals lots of cereals that could feed an additional magnitude of humans (as we move down the trophic chain)

If we do not address our imbalance between population growth and resource consumption, there will be severe problems for society when we hit our carrying capacity. Science is a luxury that will be among the first on the chopping block as we begin the fight for survival.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc._v._Schmeiser
http://decisions.fca-caf.gc.ca/en/2002/2002fca309/2002fca309.html

Milk is not just some useless by-product which cows produce. Cows make milk for the same reason that human mothers do: to feed their young. Dairy cows are impregnated as often as possible, and their young are taken away to make veal as soon as possible. Mother and child will call out to each other for days.

All this for a product which is not particularly healthy. There are better sources of calcium and protein.

It's just gonna be a little windows box, the software is more important than the hardware. I would expect next gen development to start with minimum specs for the os development, but put the latest chips in closer to when it ships to get the best performance and longest life out of the console. God help us all if we should end up using an xbox 4 for writing emails.

Fry's electronics stores use a single line, usually with an extra staffer to direct people to the current open cashier (a role which isn't totally necessary since the cashiers have green lights when they're ready, but i'm sure people would still get confused) this works well for them as they have 10-30 cashiers running. In stores with just 5-10 registers it might take extra space to run a line like that.

More importantly, for grocery stores at least, is the ubiquitous candy/magazine rack at the checkout line. People have to wait and so they start looking around and what they see is high margin luxury products. It makes good sense. Stores aren't trying to get people out of the store efficiently, they're trying to make money.

Bills in the US congress tend to get pretty lengthy in order to deal with side effects, liabilities, funding, etc. It would probably be political suicide to suggest an internet kill switch as an amendment to a farm bill or something so obviously unrelated, but usually these things are more vague.

In this case the internet kill switch is being put into a defense authorization bill, and it is easy to make the case how an internet kill switch would be related to defense. This is a big bill with lots of parts, it would be a bureaucratic nightmare to try and pass every part separately.

Of course the internet kill switch is a dumb idea that does more to undermine the ideals of this country and turn public sentiment against the government for dubious benefits. I don't see how politicians like Lieberman can say 'China is doing it so we should too' and still get voted into office.

solar charger is an option, so are spare lithium batteries.

most cell phones (all android phones) can be put into 'airplane mode' to disable the cell radio, the gps can remain on in this mode, because gps is receive only. wifi and gps can also be turned off to save battery.

buying a used device would make a spare battery even more attractive, as the original battery might not hold a good charge.

A rock like this heading to our planet and we've got plenty of time to not just deflect the thing, but to move it into Earth orbit where it can be mined, turned into an outpost, and be used as a tether for a space elevator.