Except that's exactly what he's doing -- asking the jury to evaluate the facts, before seeing if he needs to evaluate the law and create a precedent. Avoiding unnecessary side-effects is both wise coding and wise judging.
In C-style languages, the && operator is short-circuited, so you put the easier/less-computation bit first.
Unless the easier bit is also the more dynamic bit -- as in more likely to change between true and false. Then you may want to put the other, more static bit first for the sake of branch prediction. That's a minor point and highly circumstantial, though.
More worrisome is basing the criterion for how to order the conditions solely on which order results in more efficient evaluation-- ignoring that one of the conditions also has side effects!
In the pseudo-code of if ( evaluateFacts(caseFacts) && evaluateLawAndCreatePrecedent(caseLaw)){
findFor(plaintiff); } else { findFor(defendant); }
you should be very cautious about reversing the order of evaluation, and have a better reason than saving time.
One branch of this logical-and operation can only run on the "judge" processing unit, and the other has to be run as part of the "jury deliberation" task which involves the other 9 processors working together. Serializing them is not efficient.
Programmers are so cute, assuming that the hardware executes their work in the order they present it and that the right side of an "&&" won't be executed at all, even though the work is independent and a suitable functional unit is available. Don't worry your little heads -- we'll make it look like that's what happened when all is said and done.
Which is to say, the C analogy is perfect if you understand that all that the C language specifies is what the committed system state must be, and indeed if the jury finds their half of the AND to be false, then any work done by the judge in parallel on his half will be discarded and have no effect on the committed state of the legal system.
Bad analogy, since in C-style languages logical AND will not evaluate the right side (jury) until the left side (judge) has completed, and then only if it returned false.
So when converting the scenario to C reverse the order of the operands. Come on, this is trivial.
Also, the judge may not want to wait (stall) until the jury decides the issue of fact before starting to decide on the legal issue if it is required. So to take the analogy a level deeper, it is as if the judge has predicted the early-exit branch around the evaluation of the right side of the && as 'not taken' and is speculatively executing. That work will be flushed and a precedent avoided if the branch ends up taken.
A 'global weather system' is not the same as a climate.
Yes, that's the global climate. And there are local climates at various scales. Whatever "climates" you think comprise the "global weather system" can themselves be decomposed into smaller climates of which the larger climate is just an average -- ergo what you called climate in the first place are actually not but rather "regional weather systems"?. No. They are also climates. It's all about the scale at which you are looking. If we're talking about the climate parameters of the earth, then that's the global climate.
So, yeah, when you manage to make it out of 7th grade let us know...
Oh yeah, I'm so sure it's in your advanced education where you learned that there's no such thing as "global climate", and not an assumption you just made to try to be pedantic. I guess the climatologists NASA, NOAA, and IPCC never got out of 7th grade...
In theory, but not in practice, because in our very best images of Pluto the entire thing is only a few pixels wide, making the edge of the atmosphere visible over the limbs very-very-very-sub-pixel. It's also an extremely thin atmosphere that will be virtually undetectable compared to the body of the planet, and 400 mph relative speed is a tiny amount of ref shift to detect in such a low-amplitude signal.
So it's certainly possible, but I wouldn't expect this hypothesis to be confirmed very soon. Maybe JWST could do it?
Besides, Han shooting first makes him a really excellent anti-hero who eventually becomes a real hero. Han shooting last makes for a pretty boring and rather trite "hero in disguise". A deep, intellectual thinker would have gone with the first Han, but Lucas went with the second.
That's the sad thing: He's still an anti-hero who eventually becomes a hero. He's still a smuggler who cares only about wealth and saving his skin who is more than happy to solve his problems with a blaster. It's not like the changed shot establishes that he's unwilling to shoot first out of a sense of honor, just that he didn't in this case.
So instead, it just takes the edge off his character by not establishing that he definitely is willing to shoot first, makes him seem slow on the uptake, and establishes Greedo as a third-rate-at-best bounty hunter who makes Storm Troopers seem like Mark Wahlberg in Shooter.
If the goal was to change Han's character to a more noble one, then it failed. Instead it only makes the scene suck more.
First, as the AC correctly surmised, the argument was about 'can' and 'could'.
And then you brought in "will", proposing it as the future-tense of "can" which was wrong. The future tense is "could".
And then you provide an example of correctly replacing "will" with "going to" in contrast to "can", amply demonstrating that "will" is not the future sense of "can" because otherwise that sentence would make no sense. As in this sentence: "Just because you can have sex with a man, doesn't mean you could". Actually yes it does. That's exactly what "could" means.
Why does everyone assume that alien species must be so much more advanced than us, technologically? Your logic is immediately flawed in that WE can pick up the SETI signals and we haven't had the technology for thousands of Earth years, so why must every other species?
That's easy -- because the universe is really old it's vastly more likely that aliens evolved and developed civilization millions of years before we did -- or we are millions of years before them -- than it is that they are in the exact same 100-year window of technological development. The odds are literally astronomical.
But is tens of millions of years enough to create those heavy elements?
Yes. It is the same fact of being extremely massive that causes them to burn through their hydrogen fuel quickly that allows them to subsequently fuse additional elements up through iron until they undergo a core-collapse supernova.
And were there enough of them early on in the Universe to have created enough heavier elements so that life - especially intelligent life - is relatively common?
Actually the theory is that there were much more massive stars, and more of them, in the early universe, than form today.
Whether that results in sufficient density of heavy elements in some parts of the galaxy to support early development of terrestrial planets, I just don't know.
First generation of stars create some heavier elements but still nothing for building life. They go nova and what have you. So after the first generation of stars, we're not at what? 5 Billion years?
Massive stars create elements all the way up to iron in their normal life span and all the heavier elements when they go supernova. They have lifespans measured in tens of millions of years.
It doesn't necessarily take a long time to go through several generations of stars. I thought I'd read recently that we'd found extremely old metal-rich stars indicating that they had in fact gone through several generations rapidly.
Maybe they could organize an expedition to colonize this fertile planet 70 percent covered with liquid water, only 200 LY away?
If they're advanced enough to do that then they're advanced enough to have detected our planet and its composition long ago. If they wanted to colonize Earth then the plan would have already been put in place and SETI would have nothing to do with it.
So don't worry. It's only a problem if these aliens are for some reason willing to travel 200 light years just to acquire a bunch of slaves. Maybe we should make it clear in our SETI broadcasts that we are very inquisitive creatures, but also lazy and difficult to train?
I thought you might be interested in more justification for this:
The entropy contained in the slice of solar blackbody radiation that is heating the earth is significantly less than the entropy in the blackbody radiation emitted by the earth in all directions into space. The earth has a net entropy output. Ergo the entropy input to earth is negative.
The entropy of blackbody radiation is S = (4/3)U/T, where U is the total energy and T is the temperature. When the earth is in thermal equilibrium then the amount of energy received by the sun is equal to the amount of energy radiated away from the earth (ignoring the contribution of heat from the earth's core which is relatively small). The sun's surface is at 5800K. The earth's surface is at about 280K. So there's about 20 times less entropy in the energy coming from the sun.
Pfft. "There remain serious engineering challenges", a statement nobody would disagree with, is far from the bullshit "dead end" claim that started this thread. You have, in essence, made everyone else's point for them by backpedaling to their side of the argument.
Maybe the fact that it always seems 50 years away has something to do with this?
I saw that graph for the first time in the MIT fusion research Q&A. Man was it depressing seeing the "actual funding" line drooping way below the "fusion never" line.:(
Slashdot Mirror
Except that's exactly what he's doing -- asking the jury to evaluate the facts, before seeing if he needs to evaluate the law and create a precedent. Avoiding unnecessary side-effects is both wise coding and wise judging.
In C-style languages, the && operator is short-circuited, so you put the easier/less-computation bit first.
Unless the easier bit is also the more dynamic bit -- as in more likely to change between true and false. Then you may want to put the other, more static bit first for the sake of branch prediction. That's a minor point and highly circumstantial, though.
More worrisome is basing the criterion for how to order the conditions solely on which order results in more efficient evaluation-- ignoring that one of the conditions also has side effects!
In the pseudo-code of
if ( evaluateFacts(caseFacts) && evaluateLawAndCreatePrecedent(caseLaw)){
findFor(plaintiff);
} else {
findFor(defendant);
}
you should be very cautious about reversing the order of evaluation, and have a better reason than saving time.
One branch of this logical-and operation can only run on the "judge" processing unit, and the other has to be run as part of the "jury deliberation" task which involves the other 9 processors working together. Serializing them is not efficient.
Programmers are so cute, assuming that the hardware executes their work in the order they present it and that the right side of an "&&" won't be executed at all, even though the work is independent and a suitable functional unit is available. Don't worry your little heads -- we'll make it look like that's what happened when all is said and done.
Which is to say, the C analogy is perfect if you understand that all that the C language specifies is what the committed system state must be, and indeed if the jury finds their half of the AND to be false, then any work done by the judge in parallel on his half will be discarded and have no effect on the committed state of the legal system.
Bad analogy, since in C-style languages logical AND will not evaluate the right side (jury) until the left side (judge) has completed, and then only if it returned false.
So when converting the scenario to C reverse the order of the operands. Come on, this is trivial.
Also, the judge may not want to wait (stall) until the jury decides the issue of fact before starting to decide on the legal issue if it is required. So to take the analogy a level deeper, it is as if the judge has predicted the early-exit branch around the evaluation of the right side of the && as 'not taken' and is speculatively executing. That work will be flushed and a precedent avoided if the branch ends up taken.
What do you call the art of hiding information inside a spikey-tailed dinosaur?
Live music is better than listening to some stupid pop artists from your cd's.
I know, right? I just wonder why they don't ever put other types of music on CD. Seems like an untapped market.
I thought steganography was the study of dinosaurs with large plates protruding from their backs and spikes on their tail?
LOL, I can't believe I forgot about New Horizons.
A 'global weather system' is not the same as a climate.
Yes, that's the global climate. And there are local climates at various scales. Whatever "climates" you think comprise the "global weather system" can themselves be decomposed into smaller climates of which the larger climate is just an average -- ergo what you called climate in the first place are actually not but rather "regional weather systems"?. No. They are also climates. It's all about the scale at which you are looking. If we're talking about the climate parameters of the earth, then that's the global climate.
So, yeah, when you manage to make it out of 7th grade let us know...
Oh yeah, I'm so sure it's in your advanced education where you learned that there's no such thing as "global climate", and not an assumption you just made to try to be pedantic. I guess the climatologists NASA, NOAA, and IPCC never got out of 7th grade...
I can't tell if you're parodying peoples' unfounded concerns over what the reclassification of Pluto would mean or not. It's Poe's Law for Pluto.
This should be fairly easy to do.
In theory, but not in practice, because in our very best images of Pluto the entire thing is only a few pixels wide, making the edge of the atmosphere visible over the limbs very-very-very-sub-pixel. It's also an extremely thin atmosphere that will be virtually undetectable compared to the body of the planet, and 400 mph relative speed is a tiny amount of ref shift to detect in such a low-amplitude signal.
So it's certainly possible, but I wouldn't expect this hypothesis to be confirmed very soon. Maybe JWST could do it?
Besides, Han shooting first makes him a really excellent anti-hero who eventually becomes a real hero. Han shooting last makes for a pretty boring and rather trite "hero in disguise". A deep, intellectual thinker would have gone with the first Han, but Lucas went with the second.
That's the sad thing: He's still an anti-hero who eventually becomes a hero. He's still a smuggler who cares only about wealth and saving his skin who is more than happy to solve his problems with a blaster. It's not like the changed shot establishes that he's unwilling to shoot first out of a sense of honor, just that he didn't in this case.
So instead, it just takes the edge off his character by not establishing that he definitely is willing to shoot first, makes him seem slow on the uptake, and establishes Greedo as a third-rate-at-best bounty hunter who makes Storm Troopers seem like Mark Wahlberg in Shooter.
If the goal was to change Han's character to a more noble one, then it failed. Instead it only makes the scene suck more.
We'll make great pets.
First, as the AC correctly surmised, the argument was about 'can' and 'could'.
And then you brought in "will", proposing it as the future-tense of "can" which was wrong. The future tense is "could".
And then you provide an example of correctly replacing "will" with "going to" in contrast to "can", amply demonstrating that "will" is not the future sense of "can" because otherwise that sentence would make no sense. As in this sentence: "Just because you can have sex with a man, doesn't mean you could". Actually yes it does. That's exactly what "could" means.
Where "anyone" is the Pretentiously Anti-Intellectual.
Yes, you're so special for not understanding the word "conflate" and looking down on people who do.
Unless your food is sequestered carbon like COAL, your breathing is part of the normal carbon cycle.
You mean I'm not supposed to eat the charcoal briquettes?
They were making fun of your "unharmed civilians" typo...
It's the Titanicker!
Why does everyone assume that alien species must be so much more advanced than us, technologically? Your logic is immediately flawed in that WE can pick up the SETI signals and we haven't had the technology for thousands of Earth years, so why must every other species?
That's easy -- because the universe is really old it's vastly more likely that aliens evolved and developed civilization millions of years before we did -- or we are millions of years before them -- than it is that they are in the exact same 100-year window of technological development. The odds are literally astronomical.
But is tens of millions of years enough to create those heavy elements?
Yes. It is the same fact of being extremely massive that causes them to burn through their hydrogen fuel quickly that allows them to subsequently fuse additional elements up through iron until they undergo a core-collapse supernova.
And were there enough of them early on in the Universe to have created enough heavier elements so that life - especially intelligent life - is relatively common?
Actually the theory is that there were much more massive stars, and more of them, in the early universe, than form today.
Whether that results in sufficient density of heavy elements in some parts of the galaxy to support early development of terrestrial planets, I just don't know.
First generation of stars create some heavier elements but still nothing for building life. They go nova and what have you. So after the first generation of stars, we're not at what? 5 Billion years?
Massive stars create elements all the way up to iron in their normal life span and all the heavier elements when they go supernova. They have lifespans measured in tens of millions of years.
It doesn't necessarily take a long time to go through several generations of stars. I thought I'd read recently that we'd found extremely old metal-rich stars indicating that they had in fact gone through several generations rapidly.
Maybe they could organize an expedition to colonize this fertile planet 70 percent covered with liquid water, only 200 LY away?
If they're advanced enough to do that then they're advanced enough to have detected our planet and its composition long ago. If they wanted to colonize Earth then the plan would have already been put in place and SETI would have nothing to do with it.
So don't worry. It's only a problem if these aliens are for some reason willing to travel 200 light years just to acquire a bunch of slaves. Maybe we should make it clear in our SETI broadcasts that we are very inquisitive creatures, but also lazy and difficult to train?
I thought you might be interested in more justification for this:
The entropy contained in the slice of solar blackbody radiation that is heating the earth is significantly less than the entropy in the blackbody radiation emitted by the earth in all directions into space. The earth has a net entropy output. Ergo the entropy input to earth is negative.
The entropy of blackbody radiation is S = (4/3)U/T, where U is the total energy and T is the temperature. When the earth is in thermal equilibrium then the amount of energy received by the sun is equal to the amount of energy radiated away from the earth (ignoring the contribution of heat from the earth's core which is relatively small). The sun's surface is at 5800K. The earth's surface is at about 280K. So there's about 20 times less entropy in the energy coming from the sun.
Pfft. "There remain serious engineering challenges", a statement nobody would disagree with, is far from the bullshit "dead end" claim that started this thread. You have, in essence, made everyone else's point for them by backpedaling to their side of the argument.
Maybe the fact that it always seems 50 years away has something to do with this?
I saw that graph for the first time in the MIT fusion research Q&A. Man was it depressing seeing the "actual funding" line drooping way below the "fusion never" line. :(