This bugs me about patents. This sounds like an exact copy of what they've done with maps for years. They add/remove/rename tiny roads in the middle of nowhere and if you distribute maps with those roads then they know you copied their stuff.

Everything is a damn patent these days. Yo dawg, I put a clock in your clock so I can sue you while you check the time.

No one will be able to play Starcraft 2, cats and dogs getting along, mass hysteria.

Yeah, it's for classified documents.

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?