Just be easier if the train had defensive weaponry and could shoot back. In fact, I'd join a train for just that option alone..... Hmmm....

Oh it's evolution all right. "Natural" or not, it's the same thing. We're selecting for traits that are advantageous at the point in time the selection occurs. In the case of the 'weak' or 'frail' we are making a conscious selection to keep these folks around for whatever reason. In the long run, it may help or hurt if the selection pressure on humans changes. Perhaps allowing kids who were born premature, who would not have survived except for the intervention of modern medicine, to survive and breed will pass along some genes that allow for their kids to survive in a high CO2 environment (or what ever). You don't know. Any time you select genes you're evolving.

Remember, evolution doesn't move in any particular 'direction'. Newer isn't better, just more adapt to the local environment. Change the environment, change the needed adaption and life goes on.

Nature cares not.

Decoding the genome =! reintroducing changes. So no, you don't get human walks in - Gene Enhanced Creature walks out of the boutique DNA store.

It's actually not clear exactly what you get. Likely not much for clinical medicine just yet. More likely a boon to the rest of biology. Imagine being able to sequence little bugs / plants / exciting and unusual critters from your pond scum in a hour. That allows you to break open biological systematics so that we can really create finely detailed maps of the ebb and flow of genetic material over the planet.

You could also find out if your sister was really your sister, or indeed even human. But you could do that now with SNP (single nucleotide polymorphisms) for a couple of bucks and a Priority Mail envelope.

Wow. I didn't realize the Canadians were so good at spying.

Oh Canada!

TFA purports that somebody wrote a bunch of code that is a virus, trojan, malware and toaster driver all at once. Nobody knows who did it or why, but they must be very smart. It hijacks data, voice, video and neural transmissions and appears to be able to perform telekinesis. It was likely written sometime after 1996 and before 2021.

It's big.. Really big. So big that it would fit on any USB drive or email attachment created since, well, 1996.

It's smart. Really smart. So smart that it's going to take us literally months of press reports to get it out.

It goes after the Usual Suspects. It may or may not be related to Stuxnet, tilde, Steven P. Jobs or George Bush (either or both of them).

For some strange reason, the coders wrote the thing pretty much unobfuscated. Except that unobfuscated isn't a word.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

R.A. Heinlein

There is a lot to say about this approach. The only extra thing you tend to have to do is to wipe the drive and install a clean OS image (Windows of your particular flavor or Linux). Get rid of the shovelware and weirdo 'utilities' manufacturers still foist on the unsuspecting.

Most people doing word processing, Internet, an occasional picture or movie don't need anything built in the last half decade. That's why tablets work for a lot of people, horsepower wise.

Not surprising. Everyone else has.

Well, we here at Slashdot might as well go out and jump off a bridge. Really.

We're doomed.

You're afraid of these people? I spend more time lying awake worrying about my Furby.