I agree with your comment, though not sure I'd sink to the namecalling.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena...
It's easy to be the critic and say that the kid invented nothing and didn't actually implement anything. But he made a proposal, thought of an idea, documented it to
1) possibly win a scholarship
2) contribute an idea that he felt could help the planet
And so I will applaud his efforts.

Uh-oh, I'm a newbie. So the forums on slashdot don't work like the forums on most websites?

That is the most user-unfriendly interface mistake.. to not match what the user expects based on their other experiences.

Is there no preview message to clue people in?

Ah.... so I just did a preview message and I see what you mean. Okay, so I'll toss in a few HTML breaks to make paragraphs and...

much better. Guess I got lucky reading this early