My browser tells me that the SSL certificate for the site hosting TFA is owned by Kaspersky Labs. Now, whilst that doesn't necessarily mean that what the author says is wrong, I do get suspicious when anti-virus software vendors publish articles about new ways in which my computer is not secure.

Well you should be fine with the California bill then because it is telling you that you are NOT ALLOWED to send unvaccinated children to their schools.

And it's not your job to behave like an arsehole and yet refusing to get your children vaccinated is behaving like an arsehole.

Damn, and I took the bait. Oh well, you live and learn I guess.

Not quite sure what you mean there. Do you mean removing the Wikipedia links from the maps, or something else?

Now can someone please publish the counter-argument, that Copyright is not in the Public Interest.

Shall we compare them side by side?

Would you buy a computer with the hood welded shut?

If America keeps bombing Pakistan ... is it OK for Pakistan to bomb America? Because the level of "because we're special" which happens here is mind boggling.

Maybe it will be, when militant groups trying to force their religion on the world start kidnapping Pakistanis and holding them in America.

Forgive me for going all pedant on you, but that is not a war, it is a conflict.

The United States of America has not been at war since 1945.

Tomato juice sells well here. Possibly in its usefulness in making bloody marys...

Show me a common laptop that lets me RAID1 two primary storage devices.

Until that happens, they cannot be regarded as more than throwaway novelties since anything on them is either dependent on a single point of failure or in a cloud.

You're an idiot.

Re-read my first post that you responded to. Is there anything there to suggest that I or anyone I am responsible for has not been vaccinated?

Again, this post is not for you, since you are clearly unwell and incapable of reason, but anyone else following this thread.

The homebrew PC market is still booming.

PS. US scientists are also pursuing embryonic gene therapy (albeit using different technology). Of course, because they're not simply trying to win massive publicity, and want to actually understand the system first, they're using mouse embryos for now.

We've been hindered by what is basically a cult ideology about unborn life that we cannot do experiments like this (legally) in the west.

The fact that this experiment was done in China rather than "the West" has nothing to do with religion. The application of the CRISPR-Cas system for genetic modification was only discovered in 2012, and molecular analyses and proof-of-concept experiments - performed in the US and Europe, mostly - are being published in high-profile journals almost every month. There are, at last count, at least three companies (two in the US, one in Europe) founded by the scientists who elucidated the mechanism that have the explicit goal of human gene therapy. In fact, one group (in the US) just demonstrated in vivo genome editing (in an animal model, because only a lunatic would try this experiment in humans first).

There is no legal barrier to performing these experiments on human embryos in the US or Europe. In the US, I believe researchers are still prohibited from using NIH funding for such experiments, but that would not stop them from using private funding (and at this point, VCs and private donors are practically flinging sacks of money at this system). Their hesitation is based on concerns about the ethics of potentially lethal experimentation on unwilling test subjects. No, not the embryos, but the hypothetical live births that would result from implantation. If they're really, really lucky, the off-target effects will be silent or embryonic lethal. If they're unlucky - and given how new the system is, it's very difficult to guess what would happen - they'll wind up creating new genetic afflictions. Everyone working on the system is very excited about the potential applications to human health; no one wants to bring the field to a premature halt by rushing into human experimentation and accidentally causing severe birth defects because they didn't understand how it worked well enough.

There is a secondary issue, which is that China is almost pathetically desperate to prove it can do the same caliber of science as the West, to the extent that it's starting to throw money at non-Chinese researchers to set up labs in China, and offers large bounties for high-profile publications. (They're also known to be desperate for a Nobel prize in the sciences.) So far they've tended to just cherry-pick relatively easy, unimaginative projects following up on research done in the West (to be fair, Western scientists have done this among themselves for decades), rather than making entirely novel discoveries. Thus there is an enormous financial (and social) incentive to jump into a fast-moving field and try the obvious - but ethically dubious - application to human health.