• Peas (unregistered)

    He's lucky he doesn't get fired for the 404! 404 means he doesn't exist. 503 is what he wants, Service Unavailable, try again later.

  • Mike H. (unregistered) in reply to Piper
    Piper:
    Interestingly, $25.99999... is not just very close to $26, but actually exactly equal to $26 (assuming the 9's do continue forever.) It's a weird property of the decimal notation.

    It's easily proved if you don't believe me:

    Piper: Do you have one of those Pentiums with the FPU bug?

  • Mike H. (unregistered) in reply to SchizoDuckie

    I was going to swap the RGB cables on my Boss's PC at April Fools, but we all got laid off before it came.

    This also reminds me of a trouble call a that a guy I know got when he was at Apple Tech support:

    It was from a School Teacher, who couldn't get an error message to go away. They tried various things, but it only went away after rebooting with bare bones drivers.

    It turned out to be that one of her students took a screen shot of an error message, and put that on as the wall paper. :)

  • Alex G. (unregistered)

    Has anyone else noticed that the 404 not found guy is running irssi and left his IRC chat session sitting around?

  • convicted felon (unregistered) in reply to Ilya Ehrenburg
    Ilya Ehrenburg:
    convicted felon:
    Put simply, .999... is (by definition) the sequence {.9, .99, .999, ...} whose nth term has n decimal places, each filled with a nine. The sequence .999... is equal to 1 because for ANY positive number "epsilon", no matter how small, you can find an n such that the difference between {.999...}_n (the nth term of the sequence) and 1 is less than "epsilon". That means that the difference between .999... and 1 is less than EVERY positive number. There is only ONE number for which that is true: 0. That is to say, their difference is 0.
    Sorry to nitpick, but 0.9999... is not the sequence {0.9, 0.99, 0.999, ... }, but the limit of that sequence, which of course is exactly 1.

    Depends on who you ask. The real numbers can be defined in terms of Cauchy sequences (in which case the sequence I mentioned is identified with "the number" .999...), or using Dedekind cuts, etc.

    No biggie though, since the complete ordered field axioms are categorical.

  • convicted felon (unregistered) in reply to convicted felon
    convicted felon:
    Ilya Ehrenburg:
    convicted felon:
    Put simply, .999... is (by definition) the sequence {.9, .99, .999, ...} whose nth term has n decimal places, each filled with a nine. The sequence .999... is equal to 1 because for ANY positive number "epsilon", no matter how small, you can find an n such that the difference between {.999...}_n (the nth term of the sequence) and 1 is less than "epsilon". That means that the difference between .999... and 1 is less than EVERY positive number. There is only ONE number for which that is true: 0. That is to say, their difference is 0.
    Sorry to nitpick, but 0.9999... is not the sequence {0.9, 0.99, 0.999, ... }, but the limit of that sequence, which of course is exactly 1.

    Depends on who you ask. The real numbers can be defined in terms of Cauchy sequences (in which case the sequence I mentioned is identified with "the number" .999...), or using Dedekind cuts, etc.

    No biggie though, since the complete ordered field axioms are categorical.

    I suppose I can nitpick myself now. It is equivalence classes of Cauchy sequences that are identified with numbers. Two sequences are "equivalent" in this sense if they have the same limit.

    Choosing a class representative is a very common form of "abuse of notation".

  • Andre (unregistered)

    Searching for video clips with the terms 'criminal records', 'head trauma' & 'wrongful deaths' == TRWTF.

  • (cs) in reply to Clark Kent

    More power to your pedantry, Sir! Anyone who combats the rise of newspeak-style blunting of meaning is a hero in my book.(& I'm not being sarcastic, either.)

  • (cs) in reply to Clark Kent

    More power to your pedantry, Sir! Anyone who combats the rise of newspeak-style blunting of meaning is a hero in my book.(& I'm not being sarcastic, either.)

  • 1337 (unregistered) in reply to Smash King

    It inverts the colours on a users monitor.

  • Flint Fredstone (unregistered) in reply to Dave

    If they ration our stationary, we have to keep moving about; hence the unoccupied cubicle.

  • iToad (unregistered)

    I fail to see the problem with a price of $25.99999. If you give the clerk $26, you simply get $0.00001 (or 0.001 cent) back in change.

  • Andrew (unregistered)

    Fractions of pennies are nothing new. Gasoline has been expressed that way for at least the last 30 years. The IRS does it. And Richard Pryor's company in Superman II did it. So what is the WTF?

  • Michael Bolton (unregistered) in reply to Andrew
    Andrew:
    Fractions of pennies are nothing new. Gasoline has been expressed that way for at least the last 30 years. The IRS does it. And Richard Pryor's company in Superman II did it. So what is the WTF?
    Didn't they already do that in Superman III?
  • Crungmungus (unregistered)

    OMG UR LUCKAI 2B ALEIVE! USIN UR MOB IN A GAS STASHUN!!! KTHX.

  • Concerned Motorist (unregistered)

    TRWTF is using your mobile at a bowser.

  • (cs) in reply to an odd person
    an odd person:
    Above post was ment to be to somebody asking what ctrl+option+cmd+8 does on a mac (ctrl+alt+win key+8 for non-mac 'boards)
    Um, no, "ctrl+alt+win key+8" for Windows keyboards. There are plenty of non-Mac keyboards that do not have a "windows key".
  • Boris Johnson (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous
    Anonymous:
    anonym:
    shutdown -a in startup menu

    Abort a shutdown on startup?

    For the paranoid, or those who work in an environment where some...delightful colleague...might have added a less helpful shutdown shortcut!

  • (cs) in reply to noryb
    noryb:
    Isn't it possible that the tobacco tax in that locality is some non-whole number of cents?

    Gasoline is always taxed 0.9 cents, for one thing...

    You're wrong. Gasoline is taxed at different federal, state, and sometimes local amounts, but I don't think any of them are 0.9 cents. I think the federal gasoline tax is 18.4 cents per gallon at the moment.

    Gasoline seems to always be PRICED at $x.xx9 per gallon, though. No one seems to know exactly why; the explanation is usually that it seems like a lower price psychologically. See http://www.slate.com/id/2125099/.

  • (cs) in reply to Flint Fredstone
    Flint Fredstone:
    If they ration our stationary, we have to keep moving about; hence the unoccupied cubicle.

    Hmmm, "ration our stationary". How would that work, exactly? Make sure you use only a limited amount of staying in one place?

    So that's why you have to keep moving about....

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