From one of those click-bait ad sections...
Is that a bruise across her nose? Or just the worst lighting/makeup choice ever?
From one of those click-bait ad sections...
Is that a bruise across her nose? Or just the worst lighting/makeup choice ever?
I like 3.14 myself.Everything after that is garbage.
I respectfully suggest that 355/113 is much better than 3.14. Not to mention (shudder) 22/7.
Edit: After all, 355/113 is accurate to the one-millionth decimal place.
Proving a negative is kind of a bugger...
It takes much more research than I'm willing to do, because it involves tracing every story back to its source. Urban legends usually lead back to a cycle of stories that never really have an origin; they're passed from source to source to source without having any basis in a real story that can be tracked down.
But they have general characteristics: Horror story (trapped, almost to death), incompetent humans, and/or runaway technology (locked car with no means of exit). They can be quite specific, even given with particular names. They're often designed to trigger people to warn others (chain letter effect).
One thing that is kind of indicative in this case: In a Google search, the earliest story I can find is December 13, 2014 (Otago Daily Times). But Guy Fawkes night is November 5...why wait a whole month?
Like I said, reeks.
But after a little thought, I would argue that it's not deterministic. The whole design of our deterministic systems is to exclude any result but a desired target result. Our computers work because when we add 2 + 3, any result other than 5 is so unlikely that we can basically assume it will be.
Faults in modern processors are usually limited by design to a probability of 100 billion-to-1 or higher.
When we look at the fundamental (quantum) operations of the universe though: Everything is a probability. At the outset, we have Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which (loosely stated) is that we cannot observe quantum particles without affecting (changing the state) of those particles.
But about 80 years later, we find that HUP also interferes with a particle "knowing" if it is observed. So sometimes we can find out both momentum and position of a particle without affecting the particle at all, because the observation has a finite probability of occurring without affecting the observed particle.
Where one cannot predict the results of an interaction, it seems to me there is no determinism.
Continuing the discussion from The Hard Problem:
@caffiend said:On the other hand, our politicians aren't so smart, the one state on the east coast of Australia which doesn't have DST does shuns it on the basis that it "fade's the curtains" and it "confuses the cows".I appreciate the joke, but the real reason they don't do it in Queensland is that solar time in Brisbane is already an hour ahead of Melbourne. In the middle of summer the sun is up for nearly 15 hours and sunset is nearly 9pm. Daylight Savings would make that 10pm. Curtains gonna fade either way.
They don't do it because the north of Queensland outvoted the more metropolitan south. Purely political reasons. It's right there in the article:
(As an amusing side note: like an idiot, I spent like 5 minutes trying to understand why Australia does DST from October to April. Sometimes my own mind is a to understanding.)
Being a farmer's kid, that once worked from "can to cain't" just like all the other farmers [spoiler](only partially an outrageous lie)[/spoiler] I can tell you that pretty much all rural folk think DST is completely dumb. Well, actually the proper dividing line is between those who work an immovable business/industrial work schedule and those who don't.
Really, DST is just a labor extraction tool, to force our urban societies to get up at "can" so they'll be more productive. Otherwise, the lazy sods would all sleep in until the beginning of the utterly regimented and immovable business/industrial work hours, and be unproductive for all that early daylight. It's stated right out by the inventors of the concept:
Because we must, "Early to bed and early to rise...," and we must force our industrial slavesworkers to be productive.
The nickname, "Daylight Slaving Time" is quite apt.
So let's have a proper poll on it:
[poll name=daylightslavingtime]
Addendum: Conclusions here.
Continuing the discussion from The Incredible Shrinking Preview:
I noticed a while back that the number of posts in the preview dropped from 19 to 17. I think it should be dropped to just 1.That way, there'd be a competition to get the frist post, so you can get your name on the preview page.
Added challenge: Posts before the the actual publish time don't count for the frist preview page.
Bonus: The page could be renamed "Frist Preview Page."
Part II had a problem because I tried to create it on a toy. Now trying a Real® computer...
The preview page you reach from main page topics started out as 19 posts, which I thought was an odd number. Now it has shrunk to 17 posts, which is, like, 10.5263158% reduction in one step (billionths are important).
Assuming the page shrinks every month from now on, how long before it disappears entirely?
[poll]
Alton Towers
Ummm...yeah. Roller coasters are supposed to give you the illusion of danger. But they are industrial equipment--lots of energy involved--and bad things can happen if there's any kind of problem.
Sooo...how did they manage to ram a car full of people into an empty car? Failure of the braking system? Empty car left in wrong place?
I had probably the same questionnaire at a previous job. For the best friend one I was always of the opinion that I was there to work, not be great buddies
Did they hold meetings to discuss your deficiencies if your team didn't score high enough? (Not that they want you to answer all 5's or anything like that.)
Let us put it that there is no mandate, but that the hint is strong with our managers.
Eh, anyone can suggest anything. I might as well ask what right you have to suggest he's wrong.
Well, how the hell would anyone argue, if they didn't take that right?
Asking people to do free work at that point is somewhat pathetic.
There's nothing wrong with asking, but expectations are likely to be dashed.
Just like asking an open source project for money--expectations are likely to be dashed.
As resident of ■■■■■■■ I volunteered the good name of my country as a testing subject for the greater good.
It just really struck me as odd. Why pick on grand old Belgium? The person who did the post I linked from was clearly also bemused.
Then @accalia came up with the HG2G reference.
I'd never seen it before that I can recall. As I noted above, I often context-read blocked words because it takes time to look behind the curtain; and often when you do you find out someone just pasted ■■■■■■■ blocks anyway. So if I ever ran across Belgium
before I didn't pickup on it. Especially since words like ■■■■ and ■■■■ and ■■■■ and ■■■■ and etc. aren't listed (don't waste your time looking...I pasted blocks).
As long as it wasn't meant as a smear...and it clearly wasn't, since @PJH volunteered it.
I decided it was fit to be tested, so since we'd recently been discussing H2G2 at the time it was suggested to stick (just) belgium (and elgui) into it to see how effective it was.Not very was the answer, and it's not improved much since. Despite one of the things that would be happening to it would be its removal from core.
As all such filters are ineffective, really. There are only approximately 9,219,381,647 ways around them if people are determined to be expressive.
Among other weaknesses, it is fine with Belgium
in the title; apparently I can cuss in titles all I want. (I had to paste blocks to get the right effect.)
So now that I understand the history...I guess I have no more to say.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3mzhvMgrLE:-D
This is a very cool safety feature...but it doesn't change my argument. It just changes the one statement:
Status: my desktop ram decided to pass away, no crash, simply dissapeared from the bios. i think it's time to upgrade =/
"Warning: Only diagnostic tests 1 through 64 can be run with main memory disconnected." -Frank Durda IV
I noticed a while back that the number of posts in the preview dropped from 19 to 17. I think it should be dropped to just 1.
That way, there'd be a competition to get the frist post, so you can get your name on the preview page.
Added challenge: Posts before the the actual publish time don't count for the frist preview page.
Bonus: The page could be renamed "Frist Preview Page."
Okay, I guessed that.
But...why? Why? WHY? WHY?
Has the country's name been taken for some incredible new decadent sexual act?@accalia said:
according to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:■■■■■■■ (n) expletive
■■■■■■■ is the rudest word in the Universe, yet by a strange coincidence, also the name of a country on Earth. In the Secondary Phase, it is stated as "completely banned in all parts of the Galaxy, except in one part, where they don't know what it means, and in serious screenplays."we're a civilized discussion board so obviously that word is banned.
Oh.
Well that's a totally lame-assed reason.
@Magus said in Win10 is becoming the biggest spyware ever:
@CoyneTheDup said in Win10 is becoming the biggest spyware ever:
My IQ is a tiny bit higher than that and I really resent being condescended to
Your empathy is really high too, it seems.
Did you mean "humility"? I don't think its a failure of humility to suggest my IQ is higher than 40.
Zoo Keeper Helps Constipated Monkey Pass Peanut By Licking Its Butt For An Hour
That's "dedication". Also the start of a new fetish.
Right and there is absolutely no chance that headline was made up by some troll.
Absolutely not. But, if so, this is a mass gullibility event. (Oh, and, yes: I did look there first.)
@boomzilla said in Speedom of Freech:
@CoyneTheDup said in Speedom of Freech:
I look at the First Amendment and I see protection for the people and the press. Nowhere do I see protection for a PAC, which is what this case was about. On that basis, how do you think the SC can possibly justify giving PACs First Amendment Rights?
A PAC is an organization of people. At what point do they stop being people?
At what point did the web stop being people?
There needs to be consistency. If the First Amendment doesn't cover a web full of people, why should it cover a PAC full of people? Neither one is listed in the Amendment.
Originalism says that when you consult the text, you give it the meaning it had when it was adopted, not some later modern meaning. -Justice Scalia
So from an originalist perspective, Citizens United was incorrectly decided. Right? Yet, IIRC, Scalia voted with the majority.
@CoyneTheDup said in Speedom of Freech:
And while we're on the topic, and borrowing from your statement, how do you feel about: "people who have organized themselves into a union and pooled their resources to use those pooled resources to speak out"? I ask because courts have tried to prevent unions from speaking out.
In general I tend to disagree with what they're saying. I disagree that they should be able to force members to pay them. I think that they should be able to speak just like anyone else.
I invest in a company, they don't ask me if they can spend my dividend on a lobbyist. Should they be able to forcibly confiscate my dividend for that purpose? Why not pay the money to me; I should be able to speak for myself.
You can try to make a case that there is more force against a union member than against an investor but I have doubts--no one is making the member work in that industry.
Is your concern for the rights of the union member based solely on the nature of its speech?
Moral of the story: never unzip a zip without looking inside.
I do this all the time and have never had a problem.
Of course, I always move the .zip into its own brand new private folder before I unzip.
@CoyneTheDup said in WHY DOES IT MAKE SOUNDS!?:
Thank you, thank you, thank you for this thread.
Except that, saving blank notification sounds fields does not work. Turning off upvote notifications does not work. So I have used Chrome to block all notifications from https://what.thedailywtf.com -- and how will you go about forcing a sound on me now?
@Tsaukpaetra said in Quotes Out of Context:
@accalia said:
BRB, i need to take a shower to wash this badness off with consecrated soap made from the fat of my former enemies
Just wondering, @accalia - Did you get it the traditional way? Or by raiding the liposuction clinic?
@blakeyrat said in Speedom of Freech:
@CoyneTheDup said in Speedom of Freech:
I look at the First Amendment and I see protection for the people and the press.
We already talked about how analyzing it that way is only useful if you define what they meant by "the press". If you disagree with the definition of "the press" I stated above, you'll have to make a case for it.
But you're wrong. Because that filthy $0.05/page copier in next to the bathrooms at your AM/PM mini-mart is a press. And it's just as protected as the New York Times.
Oh, yes, I agree. "Press" pretty much starts with the general store owner who scribbled, "Caught!" on the bottom of the wanted poster tacked up beside his door.
But the press is a perfect case in point. Look at some of the government and even courts: You're only press if if you own a newspaper or broadcast tower. Bloggers aren't press. Evidently you're not a reporter if you ask unwelcome questions. You can only have protected sources if you're a "pro" (work for a big news agency).
I mean, ain't it funny that Citizen's United can say anything it wants, but the one post a week news aggregator should STFU?
And, BTW, I believe Citizens United was decided correctly.
I don't understand what they're trying to achieve.
Well, duh. Market dominance, app store, walled garden and $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
Another question though: Is it just me, or does their logo look like a transparent potato chip with mold? Must have been designed by Dogbert.
I don't trust unsolicited emails that have links asking me to login. I just type it in how I normally access said page.
Same here.
(Except, of course, for those links in the emails from the Nigerian prince. I'm sure they're really quite safe. )
Addendum: Is it, like, a badge of honor to receive one of those? 'Cause, I never did and I hate to think I'm missing out.
Or, wait, maybe I should have put this in the Good Ideas thread?
No, he omitted the grounding. So it's definitely a bad idea.
Actually, this might deserve its own topic.
Especially since it seems like their argument is, "You shouldn't sanction us financially; instead we dare you to charge us with criminal contempt. Nyahh, nyahh, nyahh, nyahh, nyahh, nyahh!"
I mean, if you followed this stuff...
@Rhywden said in 🙅 THE BAD IDEAS THREAD:
@CoyneTheDup said in 🙅 THE BAD IDEAS THREAD:
Having your hotel equipped with internet-accessible door locks. Nicely hackable door locks.
http://www.thelocal.at/20170128/hotel-ransomed-by-hackers-as-guests-locked-in-rooms
Bit of premature
ejaspeculation:I mean, this should really be quite clear to anyone with a bit of knowledge about publicly accessible buildings:
Brandstätter points out that even with hotels like Jaegerwirt that use electronic keycards, there are always failsafes so people can get in and out of rooms. “The police wouldn’t ever let [us] lock the rooms via computers,” he told The Verge.
It was pointed out on Techdirt that the "hostage" thing may have derived from practicality. Example: You're there with your wife, and either you or she must remain in the room at all times during the lockout...if you both leave then you're locked out for the duration. Sort of crimps the holiday, and I for one would feel trapped.
@Maciejasjmj said in How well do you know your country?:
@CoyneTheDup said in How well do you know your country?:
There are a lot of people who do, though. I remember being told once, by a woman, about a guy she had intercourse with, out of wedlock. No condom, because he didn't like those; and afterward he asks if she was on the pill. But he was strongly anti-abortion...
Uh, that's not a moral dissonance.
"He said he was against murdering prostitutes, but he had unprotected sex with one! Haha, what a hypocrite, he doesn't understand that knocking up a prostitute logically means that you have to shank her and throw the body in the dumpster! Right, guys?"
Durr durr durr durr durr durr durr! Right, guys?
Durr. durr. [upvote]
Durr. durr. [upvote]
Durr. durr. [upvote]
But no. Obama has to deny it because PATRIOTISM!
No, I think he's denying it because they're trying to delete his political win. He directed the capture of bin Laden, something that Bush obviously couldn't do, but brushed off, saying, "I don't know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and really don't care. It's not that important. It's not our priority."
Capturing bin Laden was a coup for Obama. And that's just unacceptable and so it must be turned into a coup for Pakistan: "Oh, Obama was just riding Pakistan's coattails."
@DCoder said in Google's further version insanity: Angular Edition:
what will you see two years from now when you google "how do I <something> with Angular"? How many of those results will still be correct and include best practices, and how many will be rusty solutions for Angular 1? In the PHP world we have that problem with incompetent and insecure tutorials dominating the top of the search results because they've been around for years and misled countless beginners.
Sure, on StackOverflow.
But, and here's the thing: The official docs should be upgraded and released with the software. If you do that, NP; and if you don't, well the job isn't complete, is it? What else would we expect from a half-assed job?
@PleegWat said in How well do you know your country?:
@CoyneTheDup "You can have premarital sex no problem, but preconception and abortion are evil?"
To reiterate, apparently about 20% of the US would shout, "YES!"
Reminds me of a story I once heard (not sure if true). Some high school kids decided to play roulette of the Russian variety, but they were only able to get their hands on a semi-auto pistol. They played anyway.Well, one kid did.
Well, it's true. That's why the kid was nominated for a Darwin Award. (Not sure if he won.)
Overall, I thought that I sucked, but I still managed to rank 7.
Ironically, the ability to generate that exact confusion on demand is the key property of a CSPRNG
Exactly. PRNG's as a class are a perfect example of the same thing I was talking about above. Absolutely algorithmic, yet prediction (without access to the internal state) is difficult or impossible.
"Damn hothouse flowers, these kids these days. Bitching about having to walk three blocks to school. Little wimps don't know how easy they have it.
"Why, when I was in school, my parents made me walk to school eight miles, each way, along the shore of the lake. Except when it was frozen: Then they made us walk across in -30°F weather, two miles across the ice, uphill, both ways!"
(mutter...mutter...)
@Arantor said in In other news today...:
@tufty nah, the third runway is being built so we can export all them 'bloody foreigner immigrants that were stealing our jobs' faster.
Are all those 'bloody foreigner immigrants that were stealing our jobs' being used to build the new runway?
Explosive evaporation was what I thought as well. And from other reading, I recollect that this is why the mold must be absolutely dry: if it's damp (even invisibly damp) this is the kind of problem you get.
Fortunately, he appears to have had sufficient protection.
But what if the "hidden variables" are not hidden at all? What if they're hiding in plain sight, in the form of everything else that we don't think of as "part of" the subsystem whose behavior we're trying to predict? What if the whole thing is all cross-linked such that the precise behavior of any part ultimately depends on the total behavior of the whole?
It doesn't mean much to us even if it is. The nature of iteratively applied functions means we wouldn't be able predict outcomes in the world any better than we could for CSPRNG. Even if everything is crosslinked.
1764839266 is actually not a prime number.
Well, duh! Even!
This is really a side effect of limited liability that @CoyneTheDup mentioned. It is in theory possible to have a free market without limited liability for corporation owners. It just has never been tried for some reason.
From what I've read, the reason is because it makes investment more inviting for investors. Basically, your risk is limited to your investment.
Consider a company that pulled an Enron: It has 100 million shares at $200 each. You laid out $20,000 for a hundred shares. Now the company has gone bankrupt, owing $63 billion.
With limited liability, you've lost your $20,000 but that's the end of it.
If liability weren't limited, you'd be out your $20,000 and be in debt another $63,000 to pay off the company debt. That's not as attractive a risk as the limited liability scenario.
It should work, normally, because lenders are supposed to make sure companies don't go deeper in debt than they can afford to pay, just like they would if you were mortgaging your house. (Oh, wait, ....) Anyway, the banks are supposed to do due diligence to guard their interests with a corporate debtor.
The only reason Bain Capital gets to do what it does, I suspect, is that the bank has some other hook where it gets its money back. One of the things I've suspected is the pension angle.
Consider the deal above and add the supposition that VictimCo has $1 billion in a pension fund.
Now when VictimCo went bankrupt owing $2 billion, the sale of its assets and the pension fund don't cover that; maybe $1.3 billion, leaving the bank "holding the bag" for a $700 million loss. Ostensibly.
But let's suppose the bank was holding the pension fund in another bag. That was $1 billion, and they lent $900 million of that out in loans that went south or paid it out in bonuses and dividends. So there's really only $100 million in the fund, and the bank owes $900 million to the fund. So the bank takes the whole pension fund during the bankruptcy, which means their debt was reduced by $900 million and they collect the $400 million in cash (assets plus pension fund cash). So the bank is ahead by ($900 million - $700 million) + $400 million, or $600 million in cash and loan reduction in the deal.
And no one would know, right?
There has to be something like that, otherwise the banks wouldn't go for these deals...more than once.
It smells to me like the whole asset transfer just before bankruptcy is the key, and if a parent company transfers debt in/money out shortly before the child company bankrupts, then the parent may be liable for that money if they should reasonably have known it would cause bankruptcy.I don't have near enough legal knowledge to know if that would work though.
Sure, but limited partnerships accomplish the same thing, and there's at least one person who has financial accountability (the general partner).
The accountability is held by the officers of, in this example, VictimCo. They're the ones who assumed the debt, according to the law. Note also that accountable does not mean responsible for repayment; they commit VictimCo to repay, not themselves.
So there's a reputation hit on the officers of VictimCo, which is why one of the latest strategies that's been observed is to bring in a woman CEO to VictimCo to take over just before all the sh*t happens. (I'm sure they would explain that charitably by saying, "All the men avoided it.")
But the company that took over VictimCo is just a stockholder. As the rules for stockholders do not permit them to be held liable, no, the company that caused this is completely non-responsible.
The take-over company has stock that is now worthless, but why would they care? VictimCo paid for it.
All this stinks, and I think this nonsense should be prohibited, but the "free marketers" in Congress don't agree.
@Boner WTH did you do to my title?! Oh, wait. Hmmm.... Nice improvement.
@boomzilla said in Science and proving theories:
Absolute bullshit, which they admit in their next sentence where they say that they've only tested anything down to a particular size.
Oh, I see. You didn't understand that the statements are on different topics.
It's like the hypothesis is: "Hunter automobiles can go 300 MPH."
The first statement, the high significance statement would be: "We tested a shitload of Hunter automobiless and none of the ones we tested can even get close to 300 MPH. So we can say with 99.999999% certainty that no Hunter can go 300 MPH."
The second statement was: "And by the way, we proved that we can measure the speed of an automobile within ±0.000001 MPH."
Related by the experiment, but not on the same topic at all.
@boomzilla said in New Gravity:
@CoyneTheDup said in New Gravity:
If your argument is that the statement is imprecise, well so is this...
No, it's not that it's imprecise. It's that it's fucking gibberish. What is a "high level of significance?" I can practically guarantee you that it's statistical gibberish.
@CoyneTheDup said in New Gravity:
If your argument is that the statement is imprecise, well so is this...
"It also proves that if this quantum jitter exists, it is either much smaller than the Holometer can detect, or is moving in directions the current instrument is not configured to observe."
That's not gibberish, though. It makes sense! It's actually a defensible statement.
@boomzilla said in New Gravity:
What is a "high level of significance?"
It is high statistical significance.
In any experiment or observation that involves drawing a sample from a population, there is always the possibility that an observed effect would have occurred due to sampling error alone.[11][12] But if the p-value of an observed effect is less than the significance level, an investigator may conclude that that effect reflects the characteristics of the whole population,[1] thereby rejecting the null hypothesis.[13]
So "high significance" means "it is very improbable the result is wrong."
In science, it is hard to know anything with absolute certainty. Generally, we're exploring a black box by poking it with an input and seeing what output we get. We theorize, and poke the box different ways to determine if the box responds in accordance with the theory.
But if we poke the box once, how do we know the box will respond the same way if we poke it again?
We don't...we never do. We can only estimate the probability it will behave the same way.
This is why this statement...
The fact that the Holometer ruled out his theory to a high level of significance proves that it can probe time and space at previously unimagined scales, Hogan says.
...makes sense. They formed a test hypothesis to validate the theory and they poked the box a lot, and now they have a result. How likely is it that the result is in error? Very improbable, which means the result has high significance.
Which is probably not helpful, so let's put it in the realm of dice, or just one die. We want to know if the die is fair. So first the hypothesis: "This die is fair." Then we roll it 1,000 times in a row...and let's say it rolls a 6 every single one of those times.
Does that prove the hypothesis is wrong and the die is unfair? No. Statistics does not deal in absolutes, only in probability. A truly fair die has 1-in-61000 chance of rolling 1000 6's in a roll, not likely but possible. If we rolled it 9,999,000 more times, we might find out that the die is perfectly fair.
Probability doesn't deal in absolutes like "proven fair" or "proven unfair". It deals only in "how probable?" How probable is it that the die is fair or not?
The testing method is called a significance test, which first requires a hypothesis: "This die is unfair." Then a test, then an analysis, and then and only then we can say whether the hypothesis is accepted or rejected, and the significance of that rejection.
To clarify low versus high significance, let's say I roll the die just 1 time, and it rolls a six. I say, "It is probable this die is unfair, because it rolled a 6." Well, it should be pretty obvious that isn't very probable at all, is it? A test with every low sample count yields a result of very low significance. I roll it a second time, a second 6, now the probability is a bit higher, but still low significance. The significance only becomes high when you do a lot of tests--and there are statistical rules to tell you how many tests are needed for a given significance.
So, translating, they're saying they did a lot of tests, and statistically the hypothesis they were testing has been shown to be extremely improbable.
But not proven, because statistics doesn't deal in proof and neither does science, mostly. That is why this statement disturbs me more:
It also proves that if this quantum jitter exists, it is either much smaller than the Holometer can detect, or is moving in directions the current instrument is not configured to observe.
...because it doesn't prove any such thing. It "makes it highly probable" or "highly significant" but proves nothing.
So, I just applied the 3-second rule to the same piece of candy, twice. Is that a bad idea?
Words I did not know: zebu, botanomancy, ritornelle, clairsentient, dittographic, maulstick, dev, quoit, vermeil, girandole, grogshop, and muezzin.
I guess they count slang ("dev") as words; at least I thought it was just slang.
Oh, you're on mobile? That's different
I've done mobile on this site. She has a point about xkcd, too, because it's impossible to view the tool tip in mobile; you need to use their mobile site to to allow you to select a link to see it.
It's easy to show stuff works in simulation; I bet everyone here can do that. It's a hell of a lot harder to make it work for real, with real-world buggeration factors involved.
This is very true: the problem with simulation is it depends on what you know. Then, when you try the same thing in reality, you find out what you don't know (your buggeration factors...though I don't think that's a word ...but I'll use it).
But that's the reason I think we might now be on the verge of getting somewhere. ITER and the other researchers have been exploring the physics for 50+ years now...and they've worked out most of the buggeration factors. Enough that people like Lockheed Martin think they see an opportunity to apply different approaches--advances in other technologies--to get to the same place.
TIme will tell; it always tells.
But yes, it does take time to learn the buggeration factors. That's why I don't believe in the singularity: No matter how smart you/some entity is, the universe still hides its secrets and those can only be learned by experiment. Experiments take time.
@Gurth said in Cancelable:
@CoyneTheDup said in Cancelable:
There's no obvious reason why the "l" should be doubled.
There’s no obvious reason why “cancel” is spelled with two c’s instead of a k and an s. Or, for that matter, with an a and an e instead of an e and a u (or possibly two e’s).
On the other hand, the reason for the doubled l might just be fairly obvious: in a multi-syllable word, two consecutive consonants after a vowel indicate (in several other Germanic languages anyway) that that vowel is short. Thus, spelling it cancellable could be intended to show that the pronunciation is /-ələbəl/ and not /-eːləbəl/.
You might have a point.
Of course, on that basis it should be "gellable" and "labellable" instead of "gelable" and "labelable". It also doesn't seem to explain why it's "*controllable" instead of "*controlable".
So while you may have a point, I'm not changing my vote.