"natural selection" is the process by which traits that improve survival are favoured.
It's producing offspring that's favoured, rather than survival.
What?
If you survive but don't produce offspring then your genes don't get passed on. If you don't survive but do produce offspring (eg, spiders, octopodes etc) then your genes do get passed on. Except for a few specialist cases where the non-reproducer's genes are passed on another way (eg bees, which muddy the notion of the individual) natural selection favours the reproducing.
Both "natural selection" and "artificial selection" have specific meanings. "Artificial selection" is a process by which human breeders arrange selection of traits they prefer
Which therefore promotes the production of offspring in the environment that includes those human breeders (as opposed to dog breeders?:-) and so is still natural selection. The problem with the term artificial selection is that it misleadingly sets humans outside of the process as something standing above nature and controlling it rather than just as much a part of nature as everything else.
Nobody is trying to deny that humans are part of nature. You are just arguing semantics for some unknown reason. Artificial selection is the human-controlled selection of human-desired traits. Natural selection is the selection of traits that improve survival. If you can't see the difference between those two definitions then I can't help you.
A lot of people do deny it, and it results in bullshit like claims of humans putting an end to natural selection. Having a trait that humans like increases the chance of passing on ones genes, and the way in which that works is just as much natural selection as having a flavour that the major predators in the area don't like.
Right-click on "my documents" to move it to a folder on D:
Unfortunately, quite a few applications don't bother checking for the location of "My Documents" and go ahead and recreate it on the C: drive if it's not there, leading to user data being split between drives.
In one of his "Secrets" books, William Poundstone gives the "correct" answers. They're not just what you see but also how you handle the cards -- whether you turn them around and over, etc.
"natural selection" is the process by which traits that improve survival are favoured.
It's producing offspring that's favoured, rather than survival.
Both "natural selection" and "artificial selection" have specific meanings. "Artificial selection" is a process by which human breeders arrange selection of traits they prefer
Which therefore promotes the production of offspring in the environment that includes those human breeders (as opposed to dog breeders?:-) and so is still natural selection. The problem with the term artificial selection is that it misleadingly sets humans outside of the process as something standing above nature and controlling it rather than just as much a part of nature as everything else.
But since humans are part of nature, artificial selection is natural too. So that makes the title "Natural selection or natural selection?"
Re:Blocks by indentation
on
Hello World!
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· Score: 1
Let's see how smart you are when you get someone's code that isn't so clean in the whitespace department, and won't run anymore once you've opened it and saved it...
Can you give me a scenario in which this might actually happen? People pass Python code around all the time, and whitespace simply doesn't cause the problems you imagine.
The whitespace requirement of Python sucks. I don't like programs whose behaviors are dictated by characters that I can't see and that aren't standard across editors.
Except you can see them because oh, look, those lines are all indented and they wouldn't be without whitespace. So you don't like it? Fine. Don't use it. But don't try to pretend it has all sorts of problems that it doesn't, in order to rationalise your dislike.
If you're so into white space, be a man and use Whitespace.
I like honey, but I don't want to live on a diet of nothing else.
I'm a fan of perl, Ruby, and bash when it comes to scripting.
Liking Perl and Ruby seem to go together, because Ruby is essentially a tidied-up Perl. If you're not coming from a Perl background I don't see the point of Ruby. If Python whitespace is a problem for Python, punctuation marks with completely non-obvious meanings is a problem for Perl/Ruby. Oh, that and OS-tie-in: Programming Ruby states that "Ruby is written for POSIX environments", and despite attempts to fit it to Windows it remains a poor fit because it really is written around the OS. Although I have to admit that when I came to the line in Programming Ruby that said "Ruby, unlike less flexible languages, lets you alter the value of a constant" I found it hard to carry on with a straight face.
Help me Slashdot! Me and Steve Jobs were jacking each other off
Disgraceful. It should be "Steve Jobs and I".
Re:Blocks by indentation
on
Hello World!
·
· Score: 1
In fact, if you do this to C code, you can run it through "indent" and it will come out clearly indented for you. It sounds like such a program is impossible for python because it depends so much on how things are indented to start with.
Yes, it's impossible in Python. And also unneccessary. The "indent" program solves a problem that doesn't exist in Python.
Re:Blocks by indentation
on
Hello World!
·
· Score: 1
No, it doesn't.
Whitespace (by definition) is blank - it has no visual representation.
Wrong. Oh so wrong. Try removing all redundant whitespace from a well-formatted program in a language of your choice (other than Python!) and see how readable it is compared to the original. Then try to tell us that the whitespace has no visual representation.
I don't program python, so someone that does will have to answer this question. Does python treat 'tab''sp''sp' at the start of a line as 10 spaces of indent, or two, or 6? Or does it prohibit tabs? The standard 'typewriter' expansion is 8 spaces. When I program, I tell vi to make it four. It's one "character". Which way does python see it? (And the fact that I can ASK this question makes the point that whitespace shouldn't be syntactically important.)
From the documentation:
Leading whitespace (spaces and tabs) at the beginning of a logical line is used to compute the indentation level of the line, which in turn is used to determine the grouping of statements.
First, tabs are replaced (from left to right) by one to eight spaces such that the total number of characters up to and including the replacement is a multiple of eight (this is intended to be the same rule as used by Unix). The total number of spaces preceding the first non-blank character then determines the lineâ(TM)s indentation. Indentation cannot be split over multiple physical lines using backslashes; the whitespace up to the first backslash determines the indentation.
Cross-platform compatibility note: because of the nature of text editors on non-UNIX platforms, it is unwise to use a mixture of spaces and tabs for the indentation in a single source file. It should also be noted that different platforms may explicitly limit the maximum indentation level.
By the time you get out of college things are pretty much certain to have changed. Learn the same language as everybody else and you'll be just like anybody else. Learn a single language and you will get left behind. The only route nowadays is to learn lots of languages, even if you'll never use them, because you'll be learning the real useful skill which is picking up languages quickly and understanding the differences between them. If an employer expects you to be an expert in their flavour of the month then they're not looking for graduate caliber employees, they're looking for a code grunt.
There's only 3 countries that haven't signed on to the Berne Convention (Iran, Myanmar, and another one I can't remember)
The one you can't remember is Afghanistan, Angola, Burundi, Cambodia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Iraq, Kiribati, Kuwait, Laos, The Maldives, Mozambique, Nauru, Palau, Papua New Guinea, San Marino, Sao Tome and Principe, The Seychelles, Sierra Leone, The Solomon Islands, Somalia, Taiwan, Turkmenistan, Tuvalu, Uganda and Vanautu.
No,they were the "wretched, centered only in self" generation.
If anything that was Generation X, not the baby boomers. The baby boomers were all about community, "love and peace", give everything you have away. The hippie 1960s were nowhere near as selfish as the greed-is-good 1980s.
We're waiting on the AARP crowd to die off so we can take control. There's a shit-ton of baby boomers out there, they're active and they vote.
Once they're all dead, we'll "relax" more as a country.
I bet you don't. You'll be their age then, and I bet you'll be pretty much the same. Remember that those baby boomers were the "free love" and "turn on, tune in, drop out" generation!
but they were just trying to find a reason for their slumping sales, and they may have hit the nail on the head, there
Don't think so. I think it's market saturation. I hardly know anybody with a car who doesn't already have one, and as long as you can get map updates there's not much reason to upgrade to newer models.
Oh, I'd love to have a GPS unit to use as my in-car 'minimap'. I'd never rely on one (in my home city at least) because a large part of effective commuting is knowing the traffic patterns. I find I can shave 10 minutes off a 50 minute journey simply by knowing which lanes snarl up where at what time of day.
Yes, and my satnav takes me routes that involve awkward turns (blind junctions, etc). Locally I know to avoid those, so clearly I still have some local knowledge. Cross country I follow signs for the major towns. In places I know, I know the way. The real time the satnav scores is when going to an unfamiliar part of town.
Slashdot Mirror
If we could afford to completely imprison our entire public, we would do it, sure. But now with this recession it's only a dream.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
[Rearranged]
"natural selection" is the process by which traits that improve survival are favoured.
It's producing offspring that's favoured, rather than survival.
What?
If you survive but don't produce offspring then your genes don't get passed on. If you don't survive but do produce offspring (eg, spiders, octopodes etc) then your genes do get passed on. Except for a few specialist cases where the non-reproducer's genes are passed on another way (eg bees, which muddy the notion of the individual) natural selection favours the reproducing.
Both "natural selection" and "artificial selection" have specific meanings. "Artificial selection" is a process by which human breeders arrange selection of traits they prefer
Which therefore promotes the production of offspring in the environment that includes those human breeders (as opposed to dog breeders? :-) and so is still natural selection. The problem with the term artificial selection is that it misleadingly sets humans outside of the process as something standing above nature and controlling it rather than just as much a part of nature as everything else.
Nobody is trying to deny that humans are part of nature. You are just arguing semantics for some unknown reason. Artificial selection is the human-controlled selection of human-desired traits. Natural selection is the selection of traits that improve survival. If you can't see the difference between those two definitions then I can't help you.
A lot of people do deny it, and it results in bullshit like claims of humans putting an end to natural selection. Having a trait that humans like increases the chance of passing on ones genes, and the way in which that works is just as much natural selection as having a flavour that the major predators in the area don't like.
That's the smart way to do it.
Right-click on "my documents" to move it to a folder on D:
Unfortunately, quite a few applications don't bother checking for the location of "My Documents" and go ahead and recreate it on the C: drive if it's not there, leading to user data being split between drives.
That's easy. It's a good way to lure technically minded people into installing Silverlight.
Yes -- it would save me the walk over to the bookshelf to get the dead-tree version.
In one of his "Secrets" books, William Poundstone gives the "correct" answers. They're not just what you see but also how you handle the cards -- whether you turn them around and over, etc.
"natural selection" is the process by which traits that improve survival are favoured.
It's producing offspring that's favoured, rather than survival.
Both "natural selection" and "artificial selection" have specific meanings. "Artificial selection" is a process by which human breeders arrange selection of traits they prefer
Which therefore promotes the production of offspring in the environment that includes those human breeders (as opposed to dog breeders? :-) and so is still natural selection. The problem with the term artificial selection is that it misleadingly sets humans outside of the process as something standing above nature and controlling it rather than just as much a part of nature as everything else.
But since humans are part of nature, artificial selection is natural too. So that makes the title "Natural selection or natural selection?"
Let's see how smart you are when you get someone's code that isn't so clean in the whitespace department, and won't run anymore once you've opened it and saved it...
Can you give me a scenario in which this might actually happen? People pass Python code around all the time, and whitespace simply doesn't cause the problems you imagine.
The whitespace requirement of Python sucks. I don't like programs whose behaviors are dictated by characters that I can't see and that aren't standard across editors.
Except you can see them because oh, look, those lines are all indented and they wouldn't be without whitespace. So you don't like it? Fine. Don't use it. But don't try to pretend it has all sorts of problems that it doesn't, in order to rationalise your dislike.
If you're so into white space, be a man and use Whitespace.
I like honey, but I don't want to live on a diet of nothing else.
I'm a fan of perl, Ruby, and bash when it comes to scripting.
Liking Perl and Ruby seem to go together, because Ruby is essentially a tidied-up Perl. If you're not coming from a Perl background I don't see the point of Ruby. If Python whitespace is a problem for Python, punctuation marks with completely non-obvious meanings is a problem for Perl/Ruby. Oh, that and OS-tie-in: Programming Ruby states that "Ruby is written for POSIX environments", and despite attempts to fit it to Windows it remains a poor fit because it really is written around the OS. Although I have to admit that when I came to the line in Programming Ruby that said "Ruby, unlike less flexible languages, lets you alter the value of a constant" I found it hard to carry on with a straight face.
Help me Slashdot! Me and Steve Jobs were jacking each other off
Disgraceful. It should be "Steve Jobs and I".
In fact, if you do this to C code, you can run it through "indent" and it will come out clearly indented for you. It sounds like such a program is impossible for python because it depends so much on how things are indented to start with.
Yes, it's impossible in Python. And also unneccessary. The "indent" program solves a problem that doesn't exist in Python.
No, it doesn't.
Whitespace (by definition) is blank - it has no visual representation.
Wrong. Oh so wrong. Try removing all redundant whitespace from a well-formatted program in a language of your choice (other than Python!) and see how readable it is compared to the original. Then try to tell us that the whitespace has no visual representation.
I don't program python, so someone that does will have to answer this question. Does python treat 'tab''sp''sp' at the start of a line as 10 spaces of indent, or two, or 6? Or does it prohibit tabs? The standard 'typewriter' expansion is 8 spaces. When I program, I tell vi to make it four. It's one "character". Which way does python see it? (And the fact that I can ASK this question makes the point that whitespace shouldn't be syntactically important.)
From the documentation:
Leading whitespace (spaces and tabs) at the beginning of a logical line is used to compute the indentation level of the line, which in turn is used to determine the grouping of statements.
First, tabs are replaced (from left to right) by one to eight spaces such that the total number of characters up to and including the replacement is a multiple of eight (this is intended to be the same rule as used by Unix). The total number of spaces preceding the first non-blank character then determines the lineâ(TM)s indentation. Indentation cannot be split over multiple physical lines using backslashes; the whitespace up to the first backslash determines the indentation.
Cross-platform compatibility note: because of the nature of text editors on non-UNIX platforms, it is unwise to use a mixture of spaces and tabs for the indentation in a single source file. It should also be noted that different platforms may explicitly limit the maximum indentation level.
By the time you get out of college things are pretty much certain to have changed. Learn the same language as everybody else and you'll be just like anybody else. Learn a single language and you will get left behind. The only route nowadays is to learn lots of languages, even if you'll never use them, because you'll be learning the real useful skill which is picking up languages quickly and understanding the differences between them. If an employer expects you to be an expert in their flavour of the month then they're not looking for graduate caliber employees, they're looking for a code grunt.
So I was off by a few :)
(it's worth noting that more than a few of those are either failed states, dysfunctional states, or in weird political situations (taiwan))
And indeed, Spain is not on the list. And some of those states have signed up to more recent copyright conventions.
There's only 3 countries that haven't signed on to the Berne Convention (Iran, Myanmar, and another one I can't remember)
The one you can't remember is Afghanistan, Angola, Burundi, Cambodia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Iraq, Kiribati, Kuwait, Laos, The Maldives, Mozambique, Nauru, Palau, Papua New Guinea, San Marino, Sao Tome and Principe, The Seychelles, Sierra Leone, The Solomon Islands, Somalia, Taiwan, Turkmenistan, Tuvalu, Uganda and Vanautu.
Taking math out of software is sort of akin to taking carbon out of food.
Mmm, taste that salty goodness!
No,they were the "wretched, centered only in self" generation.
If anything that was Generation X, not the baby boomers. The baby boomers were all about community, "love and peace", give everything you have away. The hippie 1960s were nowhere near as selfish as the greed-is-good 1980s.
I hardly know anybody with a car who doesn't already have one...
Hi! Allow me to introduce myself :)
I hardly know you, so that's consistent :-)
Umm, do we have the same problems with rock music being characterized as devil music?
I think you'll find that was rather earlier than the baby-boomer generation.
And the baby boomers are all vindictive because they're not getting it now. Big improvement. Not.
Dude, WE KNOW.
We're waiting on the AARP crowd to die off so we can take control. There's a shit-ton of baby boomers out there, they're active and they vote.
Once they're all dead, we'll "relax" more as a country.
I bet you don't. You'll be their age then, and I bet you'll be pretty much the same. Remember that those baby boomers were the "free love" and "turn on, tune in, drop out" generation!
My boss' phone has a 8 megapixel camera on it
And -- let me guess -- a tiny little low-quality lens so the pictures it produces are no better than on a 2 megapixel camera?
but they were just trying to find a reason for their slumping sales, and they may have hit the nail on the head, there
Don't think so. I think it's market saturation. I hardly know anybody with a car who doesn't already have one, and as long as you can get map updates there's not much reason to upgrade to newer models.
Oh, I'd love to have a GPS unit to use as my in-car 'minimap'. I'd never rely on one (in my home city at least) because a large part of effective commuting is knowing the traffic patterns. I find I can shave 10 minutes off a 50 minute journey simply by knowing which lanes snarl up where at what time of day.
Yes, and my satnav takes me routes that involve awkward turns (blind junctions, etc). Locally I know to avoid those, so clearly I still have some local knowledge. Cross country I follow signs for the major towns. In places I know, I know the way. The real time the satnav scores is when going to an unfamiliar part of town.
Over here if you smile all day at work they test you for pot.