Evolution is a messy business all right. I know some about cystic fibrosis though because both of my brothers children were born with it. The CF gene is carried by about 1 person in 29 but it affects only those that have 2 CF genes. It's a double recessive so it only effects a much smaller percentage of the population.

I don't know a lot about genetics though beyond what you read in mainstream media so I can't say for sure why it doesn't evolve out of our species. My guess though would be that there isn't very much of that kind of evolutionary pressure on humans. We can coddle the sickly with our communities and doctors. Somehow I don't think most nearsighted (like me) neandrathals lasted too long yet we still have nearsighted people. Introduce a lot of chaotic violence and war into a society though and the sick , elderly and handicapped sure are at a disadvantage. I agree with you though that there is a lot more to be learned about genetics and why things have evolved the way they have.

Maybe some of the saving from strokes and heart disease mean you are more likely to eventually die of cancer. But the death rates from all these diseases have declined steadily since the 50s. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/04/23/science/0424-cancer-graphic.html

Nope. There's been a large reduction in cancer deaths due to research and treatment advances (I'm a two time cancer survivor, 1 a stage 4 of the neck) so cancer is having a much smaller reduction on population than it used to. Also, since cancer occurs after the reproductive years in the vast majority of cases there is no breeding it out of the system. If cancer killed people before they reproduced then the genetic causes of cancer would be eliminated pretty quickly.

You can support your family and get support at the American Cancer Society Cancer Support Network (http://csn.cancer.org/). A lot of people there going through the same things you and your friends are.

This is slashdot. It's a mean community with a lot of giant egos that have never had to be forgiven. There is no compassion or forgivness here.

I never had it with Vista x64 and an Nvidia GTX9800. I haven't seen it on Windows 7 x64 either with the same card (maybe I'll get a new card for Christmas). All of my coworkers and I get it on Vista 32bit and these laptops have no problems with XP. I read on the Nvidia board that the issue had been fixed so I took that as fact since the thread pretty much died.

ATI may make fast hardware but their drivers have consistently sucked for years. My work laptop running Vista gets this error, "display driver has stopped responding and has been restarted", a couple of times every day. Do a search on the ATI web site for "display driver has stopped responding" and you will get pages of hits. Nvidia also had this problem for a while with their newest cards and Vista but fixed it pretty quickly. ATI, not so much...

Aargh... this was supposed to be a response to the Universities post just a couple higher.

Since most of them recieve massive amounts of public funding any patents they get should immediately become open source. Contributing to the good of all should be more important than sucking in even more cash.

Yes, it's the Needleworkers Union. Or "UNITE". I found a web link for the UK but can't seen to find the US/Canada one. http://www.unitetheunion.com/sectors/it__communications.aspx

We all suffer. In fact, this truth is a core element of Buddhist teachings (although I'm not a Buddhist so that's about all I know).

This sounds like promising research for those that have list muscle tissue to fires, accidents and disease. I could care less about eating "Soylent" meat (there may be some interesting new flavors) I just hope this can help some of those that have been horribly hurt and maimed.

Was "Microsoft" (as in management) even involved? Most likely it was some guy toiling away in the MS bowels that found this and simply opened a bug tracking ticket (from the announcement:
  [Credit: Thanks to Billy Rios and Microsoft Vulnerability Research (MSVR) and also to Lostmon for finding and reporting this vulnerability responsibly.]
it's hard to tell who is resopnsible).

Is that Billy Rios of MSVR or Billy Rios and MSVR. Anyway, once the patch came out I'm sure MS marketing was all over it.

So just like you or I would simply open an incident and do reponsible disclosure I'm willing to bet that's all that happened here.

Many of these systems are locked in sheds alongside the larger transformer/switching sites. Cut the padlock and you have access to a Windows 2000 SCADA system that is on their SCADA network. Many of these also have modems and PCAnywhere. It really is scary.

Anyone that knows anything about the utility systems (power, water, gas, sewer) knows they are run by the most insecure systems out there. There have been reports of SCADA vulnerabilities for years (GOOGLE it yourself) and many concerns expressed (http://www.darkreading.com/blog/archives/2009/04/scada_security.html).

Once someone can get out of a compromised system and onto a utilities internal SCADA network they have total control. The best place to practice is on a relatively insecure 2nd or 3rd world network where there are few legal consequences to hacking. Once the skills are honed up and scripts can be written to control large numbers of SCADA systems at once the real fun can begin. This is one of the major objectives of terrorists (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cyberwar/vulnerable/scada.html).