What is the integer part of 0.9? What is the integer part of 0.999? What is the integer part of 0.999...?
Logically your statement is correct, but the actual outcome is dependent on how exactly you define your floor function. If you define it as the integer part of the number, then the integer part is clearly 0. If you were to first evaluate the number 0.999... to the number 1, then the integer part is clearly 1. While 0.999... approaches 1 (and is demonstrably identical to 1), our method of communicating and processing that number has consequences.

Are there any other significant numbers like this, or is it proper just to treat the number (0.999...) as a special case?

(genuinely curious, and definitely not qualified to argue with you :) )

They report it as 0 grams (not 0%, at least in the US), because they can round anything under 0.5 grams PER SERVING to 0. As always, check the serving sizes and assume the worst (~.5g trans fat per serving). What I wonder is why they have to report sodium content in milligrams but not trans fat.

Admittedly I took the optimist's view in my examples. It depends a lot on what exactly the vessel can actually do and under what conditions. However, throwing those out there press-release style did produce at least a little debate. For those jobs where an aerostat would currently be too expensive, there are edge cases where it would be competitive and if they could capture enough economy of scale the edge broadens. For those jobs where the current breed simply can't perform vs. existing gear, then it is often still within the realm of possibility that it could be done. This is a little like the first time you use a tube of liquid nails; from then on you tend to think of the stuff first when something needs to be stuck to something else (or maybe that's just me). I guess the point is that these guys are going to push ahead with what they have, improve it wherever possible, and sell the hell out of its capabilities. They will try to compete in markets where they may not have the edge, and I think it will be interesting to see what happens.

You've hit it exactly. Consider that this is basically pre-alpha technology and it is already in the ballpark for performance while showing exceptional thermal and mechanical advantages. Provided it can be built to withstand ionizing radiation, you've got a perfect match to spacecraft components. Gyroscopes, accelerometers, stellar orientation, sensor polling and alerts, pressure sensors, heat sensors, atmosphere sensors, all of these things require at least some processing. If all of these things could be handled by neat little durable logic blocks made of this stuff, much of the internal systems of a spacecraft would become both cheaper and more reliable. Protection against high heat, vibration, mechanical stress, and radiation in current silicon tech is expensive, very slow, expensive, time-consuming to validate, and expensive.

There is a market, just not necessarily in the skyscraper size class yet. Build them smaller, but big enough to move a house. My house was moved to its present location decades ago. Aside from permanent structures, consider modular homes (trailer houses). I see four or five of those a week pass through on trucks, and I live in a small town. I also see a lot of wind farm equipment like tower segments, generators, and blades. Instead of running a convoy of 8 trucks plus spotter cars, load it all onto one or two of these lifters. Less than half as many people involved, can fly direct, doesn't impact traffic, and can carry objects larger than 2 highway lanes. Similar benefits apply to things like power substations or rail switching shacks, if you can do it cheaper than a helicopter.
  Fit one out with crane equipment like that found at a major port. Now if a freighter has a problem in the open ocean, you can fly one of these to it and offload the cargo to another ship (or ships, more likely). You could also haul out a complete replacement power train, and if new ships were designed with this in mind you would eventually be able to drop-in major components in most ships afloat. Same gear could be deployed to a train derailment, or to replace a malfunctioning locomotive on the track in the middle of nowhere. The way that scale affects LTA craft is very different from how it affects HTA craft like helicopters. If you can build one big enough and fast enough, you could anchor to a sinking ship and keep it afloat, or simply pick it up and haul it to a dry dock. This could be useful for deep-sea salvage, though the existing barge-style ships are quite effective already.
  In short, there may not be much of a market right now for moving large buildings, but there are plenty of other markets that such a device could tap.

Assume that it does include commercial drivers, then combine the general aviation and commercial aviation stats for an apples to apples comparison.

You must not use any sites that have been forced to host and embed ads because their readership blocks the advertisers. I would much rather be able to allow or deny ads not just by advertiser (doubleclick can burn in hell), but by site as well. Then I could block all the ads on various slashdot links while still allowing ads at sites I like. Wish someone would do that with adblock/noscript.

While I do agree with you in spirit, there is a problem. You put your pants on in your own private property. You search Google by using a semi-public service. Instead of comparing it to how you put your pants on, compare it to someone watching and noting which parking spots you prefer at the supermarket or at work. Creepy but not illegal.
  Sometimes the information is used for statistical purposes (people from 9 county prefer the east side of the lot, 22 county prefers the west side). For targeted ads, it's more like having a free parking space downtown, provided you give your name, address, and license plate number. Then they take that and say 'hey, Bob likes to park downtown on Wednesdays, so I'll print up a few flyers with his name and leave them with the attendant to deliver when he gets there.' Then they take the next step and start charging the local shops, as well as exchanging info. Now they can say 'hey, Bob's probably coming back this Wednesday to stop in at the hardware store and the theatre, so I'll print up ads with his name on it for those stores.'
  As with many great ideas, this is very easy to misuse. If I work for the parking lot, I know Bob will be at the theatre for two hours once a week, so I know exactly when to ransack his car. If I've bought this behavioral information, now I know when Bob is away from home and where he is at certain times. Now it's getting pretty creepy. From an advertiser's perspective, I can harm them by buying the info and placing my own flyers under his window with better offers. If I'm an unscrupulous advertiser, now I know where bob lives and I can junk-mail and flyer him unto a psychotic break.

  To get away from that rampantly over-developed example, let's consider what could be done. If the major players were to offer a search engine that specifically advertised privacy, would you or I bother to use it? It would be a nice step but probably an empty gesture if it came to a court case. Some government org could try to regulate or legislate, make a mess of it, and make it both easier for scams and harder for legitimate advertisers. An industry group could form and try to self-regulate, which is what we see here. Individual users could use the tools available (like firefox and noscript), while the less tech-savvy get bombarded to make up the lost clicks. This already happens. What could possibly be done to stop the avalanche while still making it possible to run an ad-supported site? It is similar to the email spam problem in many ways, and while progress is made against both crapfests, it will never really go away.

Just curious, but isn't it a commercial interest in the modern world when search results are used as part of employee screening? If my name brought up a bunch of scams and raunchy porn in a web search, it is quite possible that a prospective employer would decide not to hire me because of it (in whole or in part). This could be an impact in decisions that directly affect my income.

My guess is that the legal meaning of 'commercial' has little to do with the common meaning, thus leading to my irrelevant conjecture above.

As for filesharing, that will happen whether or not net neutrality is allowed. Destroying the open internet in an attempt to reduce filesharing is dangerously naive.

  The group of people supporting network neutrality and the group of scumbag leechers you referred to may overlap a little, but they are by no means the same.
  How would you feel if your ISP decides to restrict or entirely block Google in favor of Bing? Now how would you feel if part of that deal was to filter out search results having anything to do with wrongdoing by Microsoft and by your ISP? What if Blockbuster pays more than Netflix, and you have to pay your ISP for a premium package just to get access to a service that you already pay for?
  What about news sites? Suppose Wikileaks (or insert your favorite troublemaking info site here) gets classified as a news source which then has to pay the ISP's to allow access. Now suppose that the big players are paying enough in access fees that the small sites can't afford to compete. Suddenly all those little sources of interesting information either dry up or start charging.
  Now let's consider social media like Facebook and Twitter. Heavy usage, heavy access fees. Would you use Myspace or Facebook if you had to pay for it? (I don't use either and would be amused to see the sites die, but not at the hands of net neutrality violation)

It seemed like everything they did after taking over Alltel was designed to drive people away. They gave us a few months on the original much more generous plans before booting everyone to overpriced Verizon plans. Viaero has been awesome since I switched, with the same or better plans and coverage as Alltel. It was much much cheaper with Viaero to get unlimited access for both lines compared to any other carrier.

  I'm not a shill (and not AC), just a satisfied customer. I'm sure they are probably just as greedy as any other telco, but so far they have treated me very well.

Don't forget to remind them that money spent on space isn't just stacks of hundreds that get burnt up in orbit, never to be seen again. The money gets spent on payroll, services, materials, facilities, research. Once it has been spent on space flight, the recipients go on and pay taxes with it, then spend most of the rest. The people taking their income from said spaceflight-paid people do the same, and so on. This money does not simply disappear.
  Of course, that is true of anything on which we spend money but it's a good way to shake someone up if they didn't already know about circulation (ie. most people). In the case of space, the money hits the economy at the level of high-tech or precision companies, research groups, and so on. These are all production capacities that are wasting away in the U.S. and I see people here almost every day pointing that out.

Spending a buck on space is spending a buck on America. *

*provided you live here anyway, and yes I used the evil America instead of U.S.A. Sorry Mexico, Canada and South America, nothing personal.

One would presume that in the process of replicating itself, an invading virus may inadvertently repackage some of the host's dna. If it happened upon a functional viral gene in the midst of a string of intron, it is possible that the gene could be merged with the viral dna of the invader. The result would be a new strain of the invading virus carrying a gene (or many genes) from an extinct virus. This could lead to any number of problems for us, such as an altered protein coat (makes most vaccines useless), increased likelihood of transmission, or the ability to produce toxins (cause to be produced, in the case of a virus) to which our bodies no longer have any resistance. If the right kind of virus and the right kind of bacteria were present in the host at the same time, it is also possible for these genes to cross into other pathogens.

The lorentz factor is only 1.4 at 0.7c. The relativistic doppler effect would then be:
z= 1.4(1+v/c)-1
  = 1.4(1.7)-1
  = 1.38

  This is enough redshift to push yellow into the near infrared and to make a medium blue into a medium red... One reasonable estimate of the intergalactic energy density is about 1.8 eV per cm^3. Let's assume a vastly oversized vessel with 25m^2 area in the direction of travel. 1 m^3 is 1x10^6 cm^3, so we encounter 1.8x10^6 eV per m^3 swept. With our 25m^2 surface, we sweep 4.5x10^7 eV per meter of travel. At 0.7c, we travel ~ 2.1x10^8 m/s. Neglecting some ramifications of relativity, we arrive at a figure of roughly 9.45x10^15 eV/s (*1.602x10^-19 j/eV), or 1.51x10^-3 watts (that's 0.00151 watts or about 1.5 milliwatts). I generate more heat than that by breathing, and these numbers are based on a velocity far exceeding 0.2c and a spaceship nosecone the size of a small building. Where exactly is the scary radiation coming from?

  Matter is another story entirely, as even interstellar gas and dust will generate enormous heat through impact. For very small particles, it is likely that some form of ionizing beam (perhaps in combination with a powerful magnetic field) could be used to sweep out the craft's immediate path. Whether or not this would work for something as large as a micrometeorite (or worse, some big chunk of rock) is questionable. Either way some manner of electromagnetic funnel or wedge becomes necessary if only to avoid debris, and may as well be adapted to collect reaction mass.

  As for getting up to speed, use your supply of antimatter to catalyze deuterium fusion. Keep your deuterium in the form of hydrocarbons, or perhaps as water ice. If that doesn't do the trick for you then bring along a good supply of transuranics and blast it with antiprotons.

  The truly difficult part of such a trip is navigation. Even now, with our best technology put to the task, we still have unexpected collisions with space junk. Finding and avoiding all potentially hazardous masses along the flight path with enough time to avoid collision (and enough power to maneuver) is a staggering task. Even if you have a fuel scoop there is no way your scoop could deflect a marble at those speeds, let alone a rogue planetoid with a very low albedo.

For those specific planets, sure. However, the right combination of atmosphere and gravity would result in a human-habitable planet at those ranges. Habitability isn't just mean solar distance, it's whether or not water can exist in all three common states. If you're so far away (or so close) that the gravity + atmosphere required to see water ice and water vapor would render the planet uninhabitable, then you're outside the zone.
This is of course probably not the official word on the subject, but the 'zone of habitability' covers situations which do not occur in our solar system but would render recognizable life possible.