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.

> 3: Finding MS SQL expertise is easy.

No. Not really. Microsoft pushes the idea that you don't need to have any clue to use it's products. It helps enable this idea with better novice interfaces. This leads to the problem that you end up with barely trained monkeys having the appearance that they can us Microsoft products.

> 4: MS SQL does work and is decently secure. For 99.99% of tasks, it is just as good as Oracle.

I think Microsoft has the only RDBMS that ever had a genuine viral exploit in the wild. That's quite an accomplishment. SQL Server also has some "subtleties" that make it oddly more user hostile than even Oracle.

...or Iranian democracy could have turned out like Egyptian democracy and all without our help.

I think this service is entirely pointless. If you are worried about interception using a common carrier, then you need to stop using common carriers. Full stop.

You need to use a proper courier. You also need to work on making your gear more tamper resistant.

> Your pirate, sorry "media backup" collection

Someone needs to downmod this jackass into oblivion.

This sort of Apple-centric "if you strayed off the reservation, then you are a criminal" sort of nonsense really has no place here.

If you are really really really dead set on essentially leaving your media server OUTSIDE then the thing has to be beefed up to industrial or military grade specs.