That's one reason. The fitness of an individual is very important, but it's not the only issue. Consider the female that is better at nurturing her young than her own mother was. It's a trait that won't benefit that female directly, but will get passed down from her. Also consider sexual selection (check out that tusk.. rawr).

It's really not the ability to be the fittest to survive. It's whatever has the best ability to create successful (non-sterile) offspring. My argument would then also be that two generations are required to test a trait.

I think he's suggesting that coconuts migrate.

Wouldn't anything that reacts to anything have a consciousness, even if it is extremely limited (and non-biological in nature)? I think you're just lucky you got a brain to wire all the inputs into one spot that has an inner voice. Whether your consciousness has any continuity from one moment to the next can't even be determined. Not being nihilistic or anything, we need to count ourselves lucky any of this works at all.

I learned something today. Thankee kind sir. Got a particular stock ticker in mind? :)

Sure it is. Of course you'll have something the equivalent of diesel when you're done, not 87 octane gasoline. We can convert any plant matter into diesel pretty easily (just not on the large scale yet)

I usually can't decide which up to use.

You sure? From the way that they detect planets so far away, couldn't it be possible that these will especially stand out? So maybe we find them 1 in 100, but they exist 1 in 100,000?

Only if it can be turtles all the way down from there

I'd just like to point out here that I've never been a member of facebook, but I've seen more than one slightly humiliating picture of myself in a completely drunken (but conscious) state. One was on someone's page who I knew in real life, the other I did not know at all. Where does that put me?

All the important operations tend to be random.

I can only assume you wrote that backwords, lest my weasel trousers go to waste.

hmm.. Hubble.. Uranus... Porn! Yes the hi-resolution makes sense now.

C++ gets a lot of hate on the Internet but I think it's quite prominent in the business world. I work in a VxWorks/C++/Corba/Windows realtime (vxworks side) environment and Java simply wouldn't do it for us, and C doesn't offer the OOD which is the point of our project. It's actually working right now. The big problem with C++ to me right now is not the language itself but the way that the files are handled and how compilation is done and our reliance on gnu make.

Pitfalls:
Dynamic dependency generation causes make resets!
Make / C++ can't tell the difference between an interface change which requires rebuilds and an internal change which should require no rebuilds.

We ARE using java to build the dependency chain amongst our C++ files. Is that odd?

I'd always heard that it's very easy t obuild a device capabile of an EMP out of a simple circuit with a large inductor given that the inductor's voltage is given as V=DA/DT, that is, the voltage is the inverse of the change in current, which means if you have a large current going through an inductor and you cut it to zero very fast, there's some sort of electromagnetic kaboom. A reasonable home experiment might give you 1A going to 0 in 1/1000th of a second, which should give you a 1000 volt spike, but I think with a bit of finesse a device could be made to deliver a change from 10 A to near 0 to 1/1000000th of a second, or 10,000,000 v, but is that still not an issue? Sorry if I'm rattling but I'd actually curious.

Herpes is localized. Remember that time you passed out at the party? Well I've been to the doctor and well... friendly suggestion.. have your butt checked.

Maybe it's unfair to the entire economy as a whole (and I do agree that capitalism is getting us 99% there) but I think that fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders should not be law. A shareholder should hold TRUST with a company that the company is operating in their best interests given the shareholders' own voting records within the company. Making it a law that a company should have to try to maximize their short term gains is eroding the foundation of our society. It becomes the single duty of every business not to do whatever it was created to do, but to create value for its shareholders, and a good chunk of the time this is going to be completely impossible.

In Microsoft's case, they've taken the law at heart and I can't fault them other than calling them cowards. Does anyone have any ideas why so many businesses go public and subject themselves to this nonsense? I suppose funding would be one thing but such as the case of google or anything where VC is raisable I think it's unnecessary to go out and seek public funding only to sacrifice the rest of the company's history until it's eventual downfall at the face of it's own shareholders.