> So your politics invalidates someone else's genuine want? Some people will want the factory lockdown to enhance security.

No. NO ONE wants this. NO CUSTOMER wants this. This is just something that the Ayn Rand brigade like because it allows corporations greater freedom to abuse the rest of us. That includes the paying customer that indifferent at best.

Microsoft likes this. No one else does.

I think that's a very personal sort of judgement and one that should be reserved strictly for the mother. This part of motherhood is not delegable. It's a big responsibility. How it's handled will impact the resulting person for the rest of their life. The resources available to the mother (and no one else) will have a great impact.

If the mother doesn't cooperate and take her responsibility seriously, there is nothing that an busybody can do to change the situation. So the mother has to agree of her own free will or it doesn't really work.

This is why the government should not get in the middle of the decision.

It's also good public policy to support the mother in any way we can once she decides to treat "the blob" as a person. It benefits us all if she gets the best result possible.

Vitamins. Food. Medical care. Schools. Perhaps even training.

Moral Majority busybodies usually want to take all of those things away.

> Should we really eradicate all heritable disease, or post-edit the afflicted to mitigate effects?

We aren't even to the point of that yet. We're still barely scratching the surface of the obviously harmful stuff that will KILL YOU pretty quickly once it manifests.

Sickle-Cell is an entirely different iceberg here.

There's plenty of time for these people to cure cancer and other more exotic things that you've never heard of while the rest of us argue what other things this tech should be used for.

Current regulations will already likely keep Pandoras box closed for the time being.

Nobody is talking about "blindly hacking the genome" at this point. There are some very well understood negative mutations. We know what these genes should look like and we know what these genes do look like when they are broken.

Remember the Human Genome project? That wasn't all for naught. What we're doing now builds on that.

Nobody is even talking about the Frankenstein stuff yet.

GMOs are much more Frankenstein than this stuff.

Once you do something, you have to be prepared for the fact that YOU WILL SCREW UP because you probably will. How can a population of people so heavily biased towards IT not be aware of this? It's like any other system or set of processes. You have to prepare for the worst because you know that sooner or later the worst is going to happen.

It's not IF we will screw this up but WHEN and what do we do about that.

With tech we far too often ignore that discussion because it's not easy and it's not pleasant.

They certainly don't have any more rights than an infant does.

So that means that the "consent issues" are all up to the parents.

There are a number of situations where gene correction could be warranted. Some of these "nasty diseases we could cure with gene editing" are hereditary. So fixing them in the womb might not be such a bad idea.

That would actually PREVENT some abortions and prevent some parents being in the position to contemplate one.

What nerve? I think you just nuked yourself actually.

I'm not convinced that GMOs aren't responsible for my own rare acquired genetic disorder. Looking at the underlying biochemistry and noting how pesticides and herbicides relate to that is really quite scary.

Again. It's not "the science", it's who is using the technology.

Is it some monk or college professor or is it some herbicide company that wants to be the Microsoft of corn.

Scope and scale also matters. Stuff that's being thrown into the environment like DDT is potentially much more problematic than anything consumed in small doses by humans.

There are plenty of far less benign conditions to worry about before we get to Cickle-Cell anemia and bespoke babies. There's an ample supply of quite willing guinea pigs that have few other options (and those options are pretty grim).

...except no genetic tinkering is required for that option. It's already readily acheivable now. It's already been implemented by industrial food makers with help from the US government (food pyramid).

Like any tech, it's not "the science" but how you use it. Who is using it and what are they using it for?

This tech can be used to cure people that have a death sentence, or whose current treatment options have odds like Russian Roullette or involve drugs too expensive for the British NIH to sanction.

A total ban sounds like Bush-like nonsense.

Really? This is your show stopper. Any coder on here should be able to knock something like this out in their free time.

There's probably already something along these lines on Sourceforge. Might even be platform neutral. That's fairly easy with something like Perl or Java.

Does anyone seriously think that mere millions is remotely impressive anymore?

Billions isn't even all that impressive. Some of us were dealing with databases like that 15 years ago.

That tragic "stuff that slows you down" is also the stuff that saves your ass when things inevitably go wrong. Ditch that stuff and you are just gambling with your future.

It gets better than that. There are behaviors for which there are no ANSI standards. So it doesn't matter how much you want to whine that your pet brand is 'more standard". There are enough low level holes in ANSI to ensure that even with the simplest use cases you are still working around vendor specific syntax.

That's just the way it is.

So whining that one engine is "less standard" than any of the other ones is ignorant blather.

Oracle doesn't "merely work" on Linux, it's been Oracle's flagship platform for a number of years now. It took that title away from the darling of the commercial Unix world (Solaris Sparc).

Oracle may have it's warts but at least it isn't pre-configured to eat itself. No wonder Windows admins are so used to rebooting machines so often.

You would think that Microsoft would at least use a sane, sensible, and industry standard default.

So? There's a free version of Oracle too, if you are willing to expose yourself like that.

"Getting something for nothing" usually isn't the point of using "serious commercial enterprise software".

Non-free Oracle can even be licensed in ways that make it as cheap as a more expensive consumer application.