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Look at Bruce McCall's "Fully Loaded".cartoon. That was supposed to be a joke, not a design document.

Are you aware that "going forward" has been a part of the English language for over two hundred years?

is "Fully Loaded", by Bruce McCall.

(This is one of Bruce McCall's many drawings of dream cars of the 1959s that should have been.)

A touch-screen in a car, at least for the driver, is a terrible idea. It can't be operated by feel; the driver has to look away from the road, and probably for more than a second. Not good. Twittering while driving? Please. "Fully Loaded", a Bruce McCall drawing, isn't a design goal.

Auto designers, desperately trying to get margins up with "more car per car" (an old GM slogan) are hanging on unneeded features that are cheap to install. Overpriced car stereos aren't enough any more. Giant hood ornaments are out (there's a "pedestrian impalement" test cars have to pass, in response to a period in the 1950s when auto hoods were weaponized). So now we have dashboard gimmicks.

In aviation, this is called the "head-down time" problem, and efforts are made to minimize head-down time. The military takes this to an extreme in fighters, with the HOTAS ("Hands On Throttle and Stick") concept. This leads to a proliferation of buttons on the throttle and stick, though. Aviation people think hard about how many seconds of head-down time it takes to do something.

If you want to cause accidents, put in a touch screen that's stateful, so the driver has to look. Then give it a timeout, so it goes back to the ground state if the driver doesn't give it undivided attention. This forces the driver to look away from the road. One of the examples in the original article looks very like that.

"I suppose that DNA samples from those frozen Mayan children (whose genes were not selected in any way by epidemiology) could be illuminating on this issue."

Looks like I was wrong about that part. Those Incan (not Mayan) children were sacrificed in the early 1500s, and do not appear to predate 1492. In fact, they may well have been sacrificed BECAUSE they were healthy at a time when the smallpox virus was otherwise ravaging their people. See link here: http://www.bookofjoe.com/2007/09/la-doncella-fro.html

Unless their DNA can be verified to pre-date Columbian contact, I don't think their DNA would reliably serve to shed any light upon this potential problem.

from here

1) Chinese police focus on the backbone networks that undergird the internet. They simply block I.P. addresses of objectionable web sites at the routers.

2) New filtering technology combs the web for objectionable words and phrases (a list of some of the more than 1,000 filtered ones appears at the end of this post)

Of interest: 15% of the banned terms are sexual, while the rest are political

Emails containing them get lost in cyberspace; search engine requests for these words and phrases go unanswered, without an error message being sent back

3) ISP companies themselves, afraid of running afoul of Chinese authorities and being shut down, do their own censoring

Google's cache feature has been disabled in China; Google says its been done by the Chinese, not them, and research by Jonathan Zittrain and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard confirms this.

Of course, Google was shut down by China two years ago, only to come back with its cache feature disabled.