This poll is poorly designed; karma balances often get downvoted less than the vote options get upvoted, so this will tend to over-estimate how many people no longer dissent.
For example, when I loaded this page, this comment was at 5 and the karma balance was at -3
I have a proposal for a new structure for poll options:
The top-level post is just a statement of the idea, and voting has nothing to do with the poll. This can be omitted if the poll is an article.
A reply to this post is a "positive karma balance" - it should get no downvotes, and its score should be equal to the number of participants in the poll.
Two replies to the "positive karma balance" post, you downvote one to select this option in the poll.
This way voting either way in the poll has the same cost (one downvote), the enclosing post will have a high score (keeping it from being lost), and the only way to "corrupt" the poll results without leaving a trace [downvote the count post and upvote one of the option posts] simply cancels someone's vote without allowing you to make your own.
My non-conclusive arguments for this are as follows:
Are we certain that the amount of time that each rotation takes you actually is an equinoctal hour, or a constant? If broomsticks can use Aristotlean physics, maybe Time Turners can be limited to six solar hours.
I spent a lot of time thinking about this, and now it seems to me that this is a wrong question. The right question is: "how to make the best legible language?" Maybe it will require some changes to the concept of "statement".
Why one statement plus one statement makes two statements, but one expression plus one expression makes one expression; why "x=1; y=1;" is two units, but "(x == 1) && (y == 1)" is one unit? What happens if a statement is a part of an expression, in an inline anonymous function? Where should we place semicolons or line breaks then?
Sorry, I don't have a good answer. As a half-good answer, I would go with the early VB syntax: the rule is unambiguous (unlike some JavaScript rules), and it requires a special symbol in a special situation (as opposed to using a special symbol in non-special situation).
Another half-good answer: use four-space tabs for "this is the next statement" and a half-tab (two spaces) for "here continues the previous line". (If the statement has more than two lines, all the lines except the first one are aligned the same; the half-tabs don't accumulate.)
Why one statement plus one statement makes two statements, but one expression plus one expression makes one expression; why "x=1; y=1;" is two units, but "(x == 1) && (y == 1)" is one unit?
Because a statement is the fundamental unit of an imperative language. If "x=1; y=1;" were one unit, it would be one statement. Technically, on another level, multiple statements enclosed in braces is a single statement. Your objection does suggest another solution I forgot to put in - ban arbitrarily complex expressions. Then statements are of bounded length and have no need to span multiple lines. The obvious example for a language that makes this choice is assembly.
What happens if a statement is a part of an expression, in an inline anonymous function? Where should we place semicolons or line breaks then?
You could ban inline anonymous functions, or require them to be a single expression. You could implement half of Lisp as named functions that are building blocks for your "single expression" anonymous functions, so this doesn't necessarily lose expressive power.
As a half-good answer, I would go with the early VB syntax
That Microsoft changed it is weak evidence against it - it suggests that people really don't like having to add that extra symbol. There is that ambiguity problem, though. (Javascript's rule* technically requires an arbitrarily large amount of lookahead - I think the modern VB rule is more sane from a compiler perspective, but can still have annoying consequences)
Your "other half-good answer" isn't really very distinct from the first: the half-tab takes the role of the special symbol; it being at the beginning of the line just changes how you specify the grammar. (Vim scripting is an example of an existing language that uses a symbol at the beginning of a line for continuations) It also creates an extra burden (even compared to current whitespace-sensitive languages like Python) to maintain the indentation correctly. In particular, it forbids you from adding lots of extra indentation to, for example, line up the second part of a statement with a similar element on the first line (think making a C-style function call, then indenting subsequent lines to the point where the opening bracket of the argument list was. Or indenting to the opening bracket of the innermost still-open group in general.)
*Technical note: Javascript's rule is "put in a semicolon if leaving it out leads to a syntax error". VB's rule is, more or less, "continue the statement if ending it at the linebreak leads to a syntax error". In general, this will lead to Javascript continuing statements in unexpected places, and will lead to VB terminating statements in unexpected places.
Children have spontaneous magic but they can't cast as much as adults normally can with wands.
However, the spells they do cast are fully as powerful as those of adults with wands.
If the "Muggleborns-are-weaker" theory is true, then it makes sense.
Pretty sure this theory has been unambiguously dismissed both in canon and in MoR.
Otherwise your hypothesis is credible, though I still don't accept it as I can't see all the high-level wizards we know being dependent on wands when there are so many advantages to wandless magic (and when high-level wizards tend to be ones with strong, independent personalities).
If the "Muggleborns-are-weaker" theory is true, then it makes sense.
Pretty sure this theory has been unambiguously dismissed both in canon and in MoR.
I think both have been silent on the question of whether there is any notion of inherent "power levels" at all, let alone whether it is heritable or whether it is correlated to being a "muggleborn".
EDIT: It's clear in MoR that - if Harry's hypothesis on magic heritability is true (a big if), then other non-binary factors seem unlikely to be correlated to being a "muggleborn". However, I felt that Harry very strongly anchored on that hypothesis, which was one of my reasons for being annoyed with him and eventually stopping reading (to pick it back up later on, obviously)
Beginners are more sensitive. The cognitive load you call trivial is probably significant to them, because they still think in ACII instead of AST. In the ASCII world, a semicolon or a bracket takes about as cognitively loaded as any other keyword. Indentation, not so much.
I hate writing "begin" and "end" in Pascal, because these words take too much of the screen space, and also visually pattern-match with identifiers. I think Pascal would be 50% more legible if it replaced "begin" and "end" with curly brackets. So I guess removing the semicolons and curly brackets is also an improvement in legibility.
Still, maybe the beginners are trying to move forward too fast. Maybe a lot of problems come from trying to run before one is able to walk reliably. When children learn mathematics, they have to solve dozens of "2+3=?" problems before they move to something more complex. When learning programming, students should also solve dozens of one-line or two-line problems before they move on. But there is often not enough time in the curriculum.
What would you replace the semicolon with?
There are a few obvious answers: One is to simply not allow multiple statements on the same visual line (even if they are closely related and idiomatic). Another is to define the semicolon (or equivalent) as a separator, with the side effect that you can no longer have a single statement split across multiple visual lines. Another is to, along with the 'separator' solution, add an additional symbol for splitting long statements across multiple visual lines - as in earlier Visual Basic. And yet another option is to have a separator and "guess" whether they meant a line break to end a statement or not - as in Javascript and modern Visual Basic.
Yes, and it's Verres, not Veras. What's your point?
I noticed that, I was just answering a different question.
Well, if I were comparing it to spelling out the whole name, you'd be right. But I was comparing it to "MoR!Harry". EDIT: Which makes my response relevant to yours.
It's shorter than "MoR!Harry".
But harder to spell. HPJEV.
Changing the date fixes this because the reader can go look it up and realize that it can't be Riddle after all.
"OhmygodohmygodOHMYGOD! Bones is going to figure out Quirrell is Voldemort! OHMYGOD! What's he going to do?!?! He's surrounded by aurors, he's in DMLE headquarters!... Oh my GOD! Those aurors are so screwed!!"
looks up Tom Riddle online because that's totally what all readers would do
"Oh, hm. That's not Riddle then. I wonder who it is?"
...
Are you really suggesting that EY means the reader to do this? He said he wasn't going to lie to us anymore. See's low-probability theory of tease and WHAM involves EY lying to his readers, but your take on it that they were supposed to be totally tricked until the look it up online (?!?!) is turns that up to ridiculous levels.
The fact that the conversation doesn't end with her actually saying Riddle is what would prompt readers to look it up. Are you saying that readers that are still with the fic after eighty chapters haven't learned enough about rationality to take two minutes to verify an assumption after noticing they are confused?
He said he wasn't going to lie to us anymore.
If that meant he couldn't ever make a conversation that seems to be going one way but turns out to be different a few paragraphs later, it would lead to a VERY boring story.
P.S. My point was that the problem that EY fixed was that the obvious thing to check (looking up canon!Riddle's biography) leads to an apparent confirmation.
If EY originally intended the bait and switch, then regretted it, p>0.8 he would clean out other things that only exist to support his ill conceived tease.
What other things?
The Albanian Shuffle. See says there is a real chance that it is mentioned just to string the reader along and make us think Bones is about to say that Quirrell is Riddle.
"Reader! She's about to undercover the Defense Professor is Voldemort!" as a message intended to be sent to the reader but not the characters at about p=0.25.
I dismiss this because EY changed the date, which comes at the top of the passage, just so readers wouldn't jump to think Bones is talking about Riddle. If EY took such a step to prevent the tease that Bones was about to name Riddle, then I would expect EY would not leave things in that were only there to build up that tease.
So the Albanian Shuffle is dismissively unlikely to be referenced for the sake of making the reader think Bones was about to name Riddle. I really don't know how you could think that in the first place unless you first read that paragraph after already thinking that Bones was going to name Riddle.
Before the date change, there was a legitimate chance that the reader would come away from the discussion thinking that the person Bones was describing actually was Riddle, and that both Bones and Quirrell understood her to have been talking about Riddle. Which if unintended is a far greater problem than "thinking Bones was about to name Riddle, then it turns out no". This was, in fact, my reading when I was actually going through the chapter.
(tl;dr: It's not a "tease" that Bones was about to name Riddle that's the problem, the problem is that it wasn't resolved with a clear indication that they're not talking about Riddle)
Changing the date fixes this because the reader can go look it up and realize that it can't be Riddle after all.
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Actually, I think the proper case is "Two players play a one-player game they can either win or lose. One person follows, so far as able, the tenets of TDT. The other decides by flipping a coin. The coin-flipper outperforms the TDTer."
I mention this because lots of decision theories struggle against a coin flipping opponent: tit-for-tat is a strong IPD strategy that does poorly against a coin-flipper.
Is there any decision strategy that can do well (let's define "well" as "better than always-defect") against a coin-flipper in IPD? Any decision strategy more complex than always-defect requires the assumption that your opponent's decisions can be at least predicted, if not influenced.