You could tell the children that copyright is not absolute, and that its primary purpose is to allow creators to make money off their copyrights. Sometimes, you can use pieces of their material for certain uses. You could follow it up with a few simple examples, like a short piece of a song, a screenshot of a game, etc.

Addendum: This is particularly obvious when you consider modern high-level languages. If you're going to fully-specify something in pseudo-code, you could probably just give it consistent syntax and call it Python.

I think you overestimate the number of people that would be subject to that kind of reasoning. How many programmers are given the task of simply implementing absolutely complete and logically consistent specifications?

Uh... exactly? It seems to me that those articles argue directly against food supply as being of prime importance to population growth.

Humans cannot contain nature indefinitely - so whatever we create will eventually enter the environment and compete with the existing species.

We call that evolution.

Now, that's a glib answer, and it's true that we can't simply excuse away any kind of meddling that way. But you seem to be under the impression that, outside of man's interference, nature is out there standing still. It's not. The world around is is constantly evolving, and genetic patterns are being introduced, flourishing, and failing all the time. While introducing new variations may well be dangerous, it is not (in the general case) more so than what happens without human intervention.

Genomes, the resulting organism, and the myriad interaction with other species, viruses, and environmental conditions are far too complex for humans predict any outcome reliably. We are blindly stabbing at potentially world-changing effects.

Welcome to life in a complex system. Anything we do, at any time, could randomly trigger a lethal series of events beyond our comprehension.

"Monocultures" increase risk. Even if this program is wildly successful, and they create a huge supply of "perfect" Tuna - they will be a single species, and their success will be a risk - a single other species or virus could wipe them out.

While you're right in the general case, you're mistaken about the circumstances about this specific instance. They're talking about replacing hunts for wild fish with aquaculture. If anything, this will save the genetic diversity of wild fish, as they're no longer at risk of being hunted to extinction.

Food availability is the single most important factor that drives population growth.

This is flagrantly incorrect. The population of the U.S. is an immediate and obvious counterexample. Humans don't actually (organically) breed like viruses; we only consume like them.

It's far worse than images. At least with an image, you can tell immediately that something's wrong. One wonders how long a video modified in the style of Tyler Durden might persist.

(not meant to necessarily have any correlation with reality)

People seem to assume that what is happening is that previously, cultural norms dictated gender inequality when there was no biological basis, and now that those norms have changed, biological equality is restored. Couldn't it be the other way around? I.e. that there is a biological inequality, that is being altered by cultural factors to produce equality?

An MIT student is using Slashdot's affinity for the Institute to get free advertising (as he did in the previous story). That's all that's going on here.

Then why are there differences in murder rates across various countries? I doubt it's related to the means to kill; controlling for abundance of weaponry still leaves substantial variation. That leaves motive. While you could construct an explanation regarding ancillary causes generating more reasons for murder, I feel a cultural (or perhaps genetic, though heritable mental traits are generally verboten for discussion) explanation is much more plausible.

I'd might need to revise this thesis if violence were compared across countries when controlled against poverty.

I don't think you understand what I said. Just because something (A) is caused by something else (B) does not mean that A cannot also be caused by C.

I agree that these games should not be banned, but you're still committing what I like to call the fallacy of simple causes. Just because there is a known cause for a problem, that doesn't mean that other things can't also contribute to it. Humans may be inherently violent, but excessive cultural glorification of it (which is locked in a vicious demand-produce cycle) can certainly add to those natural tendencies.

But if we can't be pedantic about our specializations, how can we feel superior to the laity?

You seem to be thinking solely in terms of classified information. That part is easy. The problem is that civilian telecommunications links have become the backbone of our economy. And I don't just mean that in a capital growth sense, I mean that they form the core of the financial transactions that keep day-to-day operations running. Losing those links has the capability of causing as much harm to the U.S. as losing a power plant or piece of military hardware.

As with any infrastructure that has national security implications, the answer is yes. Where is the profit incentive to make you triple your costs (at least) to safeguard against an incredibly rare occurrence?