Young children are getting addicted to video to the point that they don't experience much real social interaction.

A web site that generated images in the style of handwritten signs used in the London subway ("Underground") was taken down at the request of the subway. The subway said the site was being used to generate racist signs and presented this as legal grounds for censorship. Racist messages are nasty, but it's wrong to shut down a medium of communication just because some people used it communicate nasty messages. The UK does not respect freedom of speech enough, but I hope that this demand was not legally enforceable there.

I would have refused all along to use a web site to generate parody signs, because doing such a job using someone else's service is SaaSS (Service as a Software Substitute).

Any digital service automatically gives the service operator power over its users. This service's operator demonstrated that power when he shut it down, thus stopping people from making any more signs no matter what the messages. In addition, users could not freely alter any aspects of how the service worked, except those for which it offered explicit settings. The service controlled that too.

The right way to make these sign images, or do any computing job that involves you alone, is with a free program you run in your own computer. That way, the program's author does not subsequently have power over the users once they get copies.

If the developer had released a free program to do this, he would not have been able to "shut it down" on demand.

Artificial gene drives make it possible to modify entire wild populations of organisms that reproduce sexually and don't take long to mature. For instance, we could modify wild mosquitoes so that they can't carry malaria. We could wipe out populations of invasive species, such as zebra mussels or asian carp in the US.

Because it is possible to remove the drive later, if any of the drive-harboring asian carp got back to Asia where these fish normally live, we could easily eliminate the drive to protect the species in the range where it belongs.

The carbon emissions commitments of some countries are so weak that their emissions will keep increasing. What should we do about this?

Since this is about avoiding global disaster, the response implicitly proposed in the article (Just give up) is stupid. What we really need to do is make those countries reduce emissions.

Given the hundreds of millions of deaths this disaster is likely to cause globally, emitting too much carbon is an act of war. It would be justified to bomb coal-burning power plants to stop their emissions, if nothing less can do the job.

Now that reliable gene editing has been developed, it will certainly be used to eliminate hereditary diseases. To deny people this remedy would be too cruel.

I don't think it is bad in principle to make enhancements using this technology. However, designing an enhanced human that doesn't already exist is not as straightforward as replacing a defective gene with its normal counterpart. Until a number of people with a certain supposed enhancement grow up, we won't know whether the change is an enhancement or an impediment.