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The US House of Representatives is wading into the debate over whether human embryos should be modified to introduce heritable changes. Its fiscal year 2016 spending bill for the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) would prohibit the agency from spending money to evaluate research or clinical applications for such products.
In an unusual twist, the bill—introduced on June 17—would also direct the FDA to create a committee that includes religious experts to review a forthcoming report from the US Institute of Medicine (IOM). The IOM's analysis, which considers the ethics of creating embryos that have three genetic parents, was commissioned by the FDA.
The House legislation comes during a time of intense debate on such matters, sparked by the announcement in April that researchers in China had edited the genomes of human embryos. The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) moved quickly to remind the public that a 1996 law prevents the federal government from funding work that destroys human embryos or creates them for research purposes.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/u-s-congress-moves-to-block-human-embryo-editing/
[Source]: http://www.nature.com/news/us-congress-moves-to-block-human-embryo-editing-1.17858
We covered a related story, Three-Person Babies Could Be Possible in Two Years just over a year ago.
Original Submission
(Score: 2) by kurenai.tsubasa on Tuesday June 30 2015, @10:57PM
My apologies. I should have expanded on that statement.
My concern wrt nuclear technology is NIMBYs. I'm not an expert, but it sounds like we've got a lot of old power plants, and while, sure, they don't explode like in SimCity after 50 years, we've pretty much put the brakes on research into designs that would be inherently safe (nothing's 100%). Then there's cost-cutting and other things that make existing designs less safe than they should be. Maybe China will lead the way.
Personally, I'm all for nuclear power. It's a proven technology, and it sounds like there are proposed reactor designs that can even deal with nuclear waste from existing designs. That sounds to me like a win-win. However, superstition seems to be winning.
As for the internet, sure, it works just fine from here in full IPv6 glory. Most of us on this site understand that when we load a webpage, the device in front of us has to communicate with another device somewhere else.
I work with people who literally cannot understand that sometimes that other device is down or misconfigured, and there's little we can do about it. Likewise maybe it's just down for us, but for reasons beyond our control (had some truly bizarre DNS issues just last week that made it look like the problem was on our end but only for that website, but then other companies that accessed that website were reporting problems with it as well) is inaccessible. Then sometimes the whole internet is inaccessible. It's simply impossible to get some people to understand that there are simple ways to determine whether being unable to reach a website means OMG INTERNET DOWN or hmm, that's odd, let's send a ticket over to the help desk. Even if you give them a checklist that says what to do.
So ok, maybe that's just arrogance on my part. End users will be end users. I'm one of the lucky ones, and they pay me by the hour (wouldn't have it any other way unless I were buying high-end sports cars with cash).
What really kills me is when that manifests itself in the form of customers angrily demanding to know why we're not able to query their websites for certain information or especially why we can't get data out of or into $amazing_bling_web_20_service they're spending thousands of dollars a month on but forgot to ask about web interfaces for 3rd parties.
There was one customer I went back and forth with, including talking to the CEO of their $amazing_bling_web_20_service, for years. The service vendor wanted us to partner with them, but my boss' boss said no to that (might have been a good opportunity, but who knows). So we kept going for years. They'd ask, “What do you need to get the information yet and why aren't you already?” I'd say, “Ask $amazing_bling_web_20_service for a web service interface, and I'll get you a quote the next day.” Eventually I did get the API I needed, which had apparently been available since day 1, just not available to me. Three hours later we were getting the information. Go figure.
Many more war stories where that came from about integration projects needlessly delayed by business-types who would not understand that just because it's in the cloud doesn't mean I can magically wave a wand and get access to it.
Another important point is all of the unintended consequences of the terabytes of personal information being hoovered up by sites like Facebook. Doxxing, revenge porn, SWATing, etc, etc. Then there's ransomware and other crapware. Then there's social engineering and the PHB that needs way too much access over an under-secured channel. That's not even to mention the petabytes collected by TLAs leading to parallel construction and other nasty things.