Aren't most exploits removed by loading the image and then recompressing it? Why would you ever serve the raw binary for an image at least that was directly given to you by an advertiser? Isn't that just asking for an exploit?

I understand flash is much harder to deal with. Maybe the ad networks need some kind of template for allowed flash so they can take the flash file, take it apart, recompress all the images in and and then load it into their own template so that any exploits in it are probably removed.

If a DNA sequence is bad then find the people that have it and correct it. You know you can correct these sequences in adults right?

The treatment would be fairly easy to replace the bad gene sequence with the good one. Look at all the children that occurred along the bad line, patch them, move on with your life.

1 People already make kids like that and the taxpayers deal with it. It is the burden of a society.

2 If someone turns out badly then FIX IT. If the genetic engineering screwed something up then REPAIR IT. That has got to be cheaper than just taking care of the person. Even if expensive once you fix the problem they become a useful and TAX paying member of society.

Just so you know we can already do all 3 of those things. Even creating custom DNA sequences is something that has been done and continues to get better.

We have not put DNA from another creature into humans but that is just because we have not done it not because it is hard to do.

We have done that for LOTS of other organisms though.

With the way our technology is progressing we could hack away on you when your are 80 and if all goes well you would physically end up at around 25 again and life until something catastrophic got you. Editing an adult organism works fine and we are getting better at it very quickly.

This is not something that has to be done on the unborn. We CAN and DO use it on adults! This is not like Gattaca. That is a movie and this is real life. In nearly every scifi movie, book, tv series etc genetic engineering is always about the unborn and making design babies. In reality that is complete and utter BS. It is a little easier to edit the unborn but you can certainly modify adults just fine. Adults also have more money and willingness to pay for treatments.

Also this technology is not a generation or two away. It is at most a decade away.

We screw up with EVERY medicine we make. We KILL people during the development. NOTHING we do can change that. Many of the people I know working on drug development do everything they can imagine to make sure it does not happen but it still does and with each drug we learn something new. In almost all cases the deaths are from things we could not predict ahead of time. We learn, add it to how we do things and don't make the same mistake again.

Absolutely!

That is what we are ACTUALLY doing! This technology is being practiced on consenting adults and some minors that have diseases that will kill them in pretty horrible ways. Diseases for which there is NO HOPE of ANY KIND. Stuff that just slowly kills you and that we can't mitigate it with medication. If you have the disease you die slowly and painfully. For those people there is there ONLY chance and I have no problems with trying to help them.

I know that we will kill some of them accidentally. We will even make things worse sometimes. There is no way around that. Even if we studied this for the next ten thousand years that would still happen. The history of medicine is red with blood. Most things even seem trivial when we look back on them but nobody foresaw them looking forward. As part of this industry it is very likely that I will be responsible for many deaths and countless more are saved. All I can do is do everything within my power to use all the resources at my disposal to make as few mistakes as possible and learn from the ones that are made as quickly as possible and as much as possible.

Why is this always about children?

What if you want to make yourself smarter? What if you want to make yourself immune to cancer? What if you want to make yourself live longer? What if you want to make yourself heal better and faster?

Screw evolution. At the rate it is going everyone in the human race will be able to process bread in another few hundred thousand years. Evolution is slow and I see no reason to wait for it. Especially given all the things that we want as humans that has NO selective pressure and hence will NEVER be selected for.

So you support regulations that say that I can't work with others and develop a gene upgrade therapy that can be used on adults to make you immune to cancer and cure you if you already have it? You would support bans that I can't upgrade the human immune system? That I can't make it so that you heal faster and more completely?

Why do you want to ban any of that?

What right do you have to ban any of it?

Why do you think banning will do any good at all?

Why do you think that I and others would follow the ban to any degree at all and not just move to another country that is willing to allow us to do this? You can't just fear the future and stick your head in the sand. If this stuff is all done publicly you can make sure that rules are followed, that standards are met before human trials etc. If you try to ban it that won't stop it at all but it will stop all the safety protocols you would want someone to follow.

This technology is cheap to do. You could setup a home lab and work with this stuff.

In the end you can support all the bans you want but I will continue to do work in this area and continue to work to improve humanity, to bring an end to the disease and suffering of so many.

CRISPR-CAS9 is CHEAP to duplicate. That is what makes it so easy to work with and why it is advancing the technology so quickly. These treatments will not just be for the wealthy, they will be for everyone. The companies working on this RIGHT NOW are not targeted at a tiny percent of people they are targeted at the bulk of the population.

Stop getting ideas from science fiction. I have not seen a single piece of science fiction yet that was even a tiny bit correct on genetic engineering. It is not expensive technology, it is not really even very hard to do once you understand how. Doing it on an adult organism is fine. The idea that this is only an enhancement that can be given before birth is ridiculous.

Using CRISPR-CAS9 you can modify an adult organism just fine. It is only in science fiction where this stuff can't only be done before birth.

Also this technology has only existed for a few years. Originally CRISPR-CAS9 was ABANDONED by the creators as not workable. It took others to prove it worked at a genetic engineering competition. Now it has becoming the standard by which we judge other techniques in about a year.

This stuff is moving faster than any of these prediction makers can imagine. I also have not ethical problems with genetic engineering on humans. It should follow the same rules as any other medication. We know some of the genes in your body that allow you to develop cancer in the first place and we know sequences that make better versions of the gene that essentially make you immune to cancer. The idea of getting an upgrade so that if you have cancer it will be cured and you could not get it again or get the treatment and never have to worry about it is GREAT.

We can do this for many other diseases beyond just cancer. Why shouldn't I work to make humans healthier, stronger, smarter, faster, longer lived? Why are these pathetic meat bags we are stuck in right now the pinnacle that can't be improved on? Screw that and screw the people that want to make it so these changes can't be made because no matter what people will continue to do this work and continue to make these enhancements. If you try to make it illegal it will only end up restricting access.

I had someone recommend Julia to me over MATLAB and they did it for performance reasons. When I looked about a year ago the stiff ODE solver in Julia gave the wrong answer for the kinds of problems I do. I stopped looking at that point.

Julia will mature in time but right now having something run faster but wrong is not useful.

Octave on the other hand is pretty nice I just like MATLAB more due to the whole IDE that is part of it but I agree with the drolli that in some circumstances octave is a better choice.

I agree that MATLAB can be expensive and that in many ways it would be better if everyone used FOSS. However the reality is that right now my choices are between MATLAB and python and for many tasks MATLAB allows me to get the job done faster and since the job involves human lives it makes the choice fairly simple.

I would like better FOSS tools to replace MATLAB and especially better documentation and defaults and the sad thing is I have the skill to do a lot of that work but not the time. Choosing between making a drug available and making numpy better is a fairly simple choice for me.

This is the kind of reply I like.

There are so many different kinds of tasks in the world that sometimes you find a language or library just seems to fit one of them very well and other times while you could do it the fit is not as good. In the end what matters is getting the job done.

There are just a few things in the MATLAB global optimization toolbox and some of the pde/ode solving built into it that make my life much easier and faster to develop with. However for many other tasks I use python. Right now the toolchain is mixture of python, c++, matlab and excel and strangely enough it works very well and it allows scientists to setup simulations that can then run on clusters and bring data back in a way that they can analyze it and massively speed up development.