In IEEE floating point math, "(a+b)+c" might not be the same as "a+(b+c)".

And if your code is sensitive to that then you are using the wrong algorithm. So it's the algorithm which needs to be fixed. not the FPU environment.

All floating[-point work is approximate. It's up to you to ensure that the significances are greater than the approximations.

I wouldn't have had much reason to distrust them.

But you would as soon as they asked for your password, or credit card details.

The breakdown includes about $3.1 billion in lost government services, $152 million per day in lost travel spending, $76 million per day lost because of National Parks being shut down, and $217 million per day in lost federal and contractor wages in the Washington D.C. metropolitan area alone.

So this money has all been lost? Completely? Someone burnt it?
If not, then surely it is all still available, and has been/will be spent on other things.

Sounds like an accountancy disappearing trick to me.

Learn about *what* exactly? What's on TV or the internet that they simply *must* learn?

That was really a reference to the "world outside".

I don't know if you have kids or not...

Three - all in their 20's now. And nothing pleased me more than when they worked out that something was "wrong" based on their own experiences, rather than me having to tell them so (at which point they often disagreed, and usually put up some good arguments for their views).

So I prefer to give general guidelines, let them know that I'll (try to) help with any problems then let them get on with it. They did things differently to how I would have done them, but it all worked for them, and I reckon they're the better for having their own experiential learning, rather than any proscriptive edicts from me.

Any parent who just turns the kids loose on the net is NUTS. There is a huge percentage of trash out there and it is irresponsible to just let a kid access this junk either on purpose or by accident.

Do you ban watching TV too? There's a huge percentage of trash there.
And what about the "world outside", or are they banned from there too?

At what point will they be allowed to learn?

"What if you could build a computer that works just like the human brain? You could invent new forms of industrial machinery, create fully autonomous thinking cars, devise new kinds of home appliances.

If they think that one brain can do that, they're deluded. Human brains do not work in isolation, they collude in many different ways. An idea today could be the indirect result of an unrelated (to most people) ideas from a century ago.

So let's hope that they've budgeted for several billion of these things, and a few hundred years before anything comes out of it.

I've always known it as Button2.

And it's always been configurable as to what that does, just as all of the 9 buttons are in X (should you actually have a 9-button mouse).

So is this just about changing the default setting?

Unfortunately graphic (website) designers are completely shit at using it.

Could this be a result of them using design tools that mean they don't need to think - so they don't?

It's actually cellar temperature rather than room temperature. Dig a big hole in the ground (or use a nearby cave). Unlike room temperature, this tends to stay the same temperature all year round (without the need for heating or air-conditioning).

natural ways of interacting with devices

If they are "natural ways" they are presumably "obvious". And hence unpatentable?

Or am I just not thinking as someone trying to extract money for doing nothing?

....python has equivalent functionality...but is actually readable and structured and while its OO system isn't perfect its a damn site better...

But I (and others) can write structured, OO code in Perl (while having non-OO code where it makes more sense)
And since I'm allowed to lay it out logically, rather than the structure being part of the logic, it is far more readable.
Perl allows you to think, which is why I'll continue to use it.

A few years back I had a VMware slice that was mis-behaving, and IT support reckoned that adding a second CPU might help.

That change left the /proc/cpuinfo file insisting that I had one Intel and one AMD processor in the system.

[It didn't fix the problem - nothing ever did. I had it shut-down after 2 years of persistent problems and no useful work. No-one ever did explain why it would totally freeze (system clock stationary) for 60*n seconds]

...will be in the bill? Politicians have a habit of rolling lots of things into one in bills, and you can only get all or nothing. This suggestion (seems to) make sense, so there must be something else in the plan that they are hoping to get through on the back of it.
Or am I just too cynical?

A few years back I had some VM systems that would totally freeze for n*60s (highest n I saw was 15). When it unfroze the system clock was n*60s slow - so it had been a total freeze.
I never did get any explanation.
Those VM systems never did any useful work.
VM systems have their place, but running such services is probably not it, for me.

The forbidder can always return a page to explain why the status code has been set. But it's up to the browser whether it displays it, or whether it just display a standard error page. e.g., IIRC IE6 would only display the returned info it if it was over 256(?) bytes in length.