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Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2014 March 28

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March 28

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TTC buses code e.g. 54A, 54E fares or metropasses

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What do you need in order to get on the 54A bus on Lawrence Ave? Is metropass enough or do I need more than that? Please and Thanks.

A Metropass is enough. As you see on that page, the only TTC routes where an extra fare is charged are
  • downtown express buses (only routes 141–145)
  • buses operating outside Toronto (it doesn't clearly say so, but that means only when actually traveling outside Toronto)
The 54A and 54E do not go outside Toronto in any case, and neither one is a downtown express, so regular fares apply. (If you weren't using a pass, the regular cash fare or ticket/token fare would also apply, but I can't find anything on the web site that actually says so; apparently they think it's obvious.) --50.100.193.30 (talk) 03:59, 28 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

help with a ? (9*9)

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What is 9*9= ? look for all all poss. answer for math, text lango,to street lango -- Sidnee2727 (talk · contribs) 08:46, 28 March 2014‎ (UTC)[reply]

In Microsoft Excel, the * sign means multiply, so the answer would be 81, unless that's too obvious. Alansplodge (talk) 12:31, 28 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]
And in Fortran, Cobol, and just about any standard language I can think of. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots13:08, 28 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]
I would guess not in Lisp. —Tamfang (talk) 18:54, 28 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]
In APL, 9*9 would mean 99, which is 387420489.
As a regular expression in awk, Perl, grep, sed, and various other languages and programs, 9*9 matches zero or more 9's followed by a 9, which is equivalent to one or more 9's, i.e. 9, 99, 999, 9999 etc.
As a wildcard expression in UNIX shells and some other environments, 9*9 matches anything treated as a single component that starts with 9 and ends with another 9, i.e. 99, 9ABCD9, 96069, 9****9, etc. (but not just 9).
--50.100.193.30 (talk) 06:24, 29 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]
* redirects to asterisk which shows some possibilities which could apply to 9*9 in certain contexts. The most common in computers is multiplication where it's used because the characters in 9×9 and 9·9 are not on keyboards or in ASCII. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:06, 28 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]
The PLATO keyboard had ⟨×⟩, but it printed as ⟨≠⟩. —Tamfang (talk) 18:51, 28 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Is there some emoticon that uses that format? --Jayron32 13:10, 28 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]
I changed title to be useful. StuRat (talk) 13:13, 28 March 2014 (UTC) [reply]

Note that for very large values of 9 it can be equal to 100. Count Iblis (talk) 19:36, 28 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

WP:WHAAOE. See 0.999... --Dweller (talk) 12:14, 31 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Box 9 on the W2

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What's up with that? 50.43.148.35 (talk) 18:36, 28 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

According to this source, it's for advances on an employee's earned income tax credit. However, according to this IRS source, box 9 is to be left blank. This IRS source explains the mystery: Earned income credit advances were abolished in 2010. The box most likely still remains on the W-2 because renumbering the boxes would create more difficulty (for software meant to handle these forms, for example) than leaving a blank numbered box. Marco polo (talk) 19:36, 28 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Interesting...I wish that advance on EITC still existed :( 50.43.148.35 (talk) 19:48, 28 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]