Err, that's not actually correct. 0.999... != .A, as you could transform any of those 9s (after the first) into an A to have a number between .999... and .A. This is like trying to say that 0.444... = 0.5, which is clearly wrong.

Also, the original comment mentioned "branches of mathematics", which is what I was curious. Hexadecimal is just a different base.

The problem with this argument is that it's clearly fallacious. I've never been on a flight where someone indicated that reading a hardcover book might be a danger, and yet it'd be far more dangerous as a projectile than my frankly damn light mp3 player.

This may be the rationalized argument that you use to convince yourself that electronics are still dangerous, but it's so full of holes as to not hold any water.

(Oh, and as a side note: You seem bitter about people not paying attention to the safety briefing. The issue is that it a) covers ridiculous things (who doesn't know how to put a seat belt on at this point!? And if they don't, you'll catch that by the pre-takeoff belt check) and b) is repeated verbatim on every single flight. I could probably give the thing as well as the flight attendants on most planes.)

Really? I haven't encounter any of those; can you provide any more information?

This is incorrect, and is apparently the source of most of your confusion. 1/3 = 0.333...; there's no approximation going on. 1/3 is approximated by 0.3, and 0.33, and 0.333, but the infinite decimal is *not* an approximation.

The problem here is that people are generally very ill-equipped to handle the idea of infinity, and a lot of common sense doesn't really work. You can't "tack another 5 on the end" of 0.999... to get a number halfway between 0.999... and 1, as some other poster commented, precisely because there is no end for it to be tacked onto. This is why it's ultimately equal to 1.0.

The issue with this, and the reason why CO2 continues to legitimately get the majority of attention, is that methane's half-life in the atmosphere is much, much, much shorter than CO2. As a result, adjusting methane emissions is less urgent, because the effects of the methane in the atmosphere vanish on much shorter timescales- the CO2 just keeps compounding.

So, while methane is a much more powerful greenhouse gas on, say, a 1-year timescale, the comparison is much more complicated averaged over the duration of the substance's lifetime in the atmosphere.

Did you actually read the article?

and

He stated it and Microsoft confirmed it.

Actually, it really depends on the company you're looking at. One of the biggest problems isn't so much the $2000 hammer, but the "not invented here" syndrome that causes it.

The government, and DoD especially, does procurement and research based on contracts. The problem is that the results of contract A are not well shared with the contractor for follow-on contract B- which means that they end up reinventing the wheel, and doing all the same work that A did, just to work on the problem that B was supposed to handle.

Hence, many of the companies that do the work are, in isolation, especially the smaller ones, reasonably efficient. But the system as a *whole* is horribly inefficient, and the *big* companies that are involved in this whole thing can rake in huge profits and support huge bureaucracies in the process, so they have a vested interested in lobbying for the status quo.

That's not necessarily true. A good friend of mine worked in a management position for a few years after college, and one of the stops on his rotations through company departments was shipping. He was expected to be out with the employees he was managing at least part of the time, especially under exceptional circumstances. Just because a job requires a college degree and has excellent compensation (which his did) doesn't meant that it's not going to have its crap moments.

I have not "completely failed to understand it". You have failed to understand my post, and in fact your own examples support my point.

The market has certain inherent biases as a result of the incentives, primarily short-term, built into it. It works very well in many cases, but it is not a panacea and anyone trying to tell you that complete dependence on a completely free market is optimal is lying.

The biggest area in which the market tends to fail is in risk analysis of rare-but-significant events. This is primarily due to the fact that the market can be viewed as a distributed optimization algorithm- and, like any such algorithm, can be caught in local optima. Each player takes an action that is locally rational with respect to his own situation, but is globally suboptimal given more complete knowledge of the system. Another real-world example of this is water rights handling in the western US.

This is where an agent external to the system is beneficial in acting as a globally optimizing force to counter the in-market biases. My point is that with such an agent the supply shocks in the oil market, for instance, could have been avoided- there existed sufficient information over the long term to see that such shocks were coming (and will come again), and though no in-market plan can afford to move the economy in such a direction as to mitigate those shocks (they're too long-term and unpredictable, so the lost opportunity cost is judged to be too high), and external player can and should.

The problem with this is that it assumes that we see the supply shock far enough in advance to reorganize our population for it. That's not necessarily something we can expect to happen. Look at places like LA or NYC: they are wholly dependent on cheap long-distance transportation of goods, and could completely collapse without them.

That's the problem with complete dependence on a market- it'll fix itself in the end, but that interim, while it's doing so, can be incredibly painful if we don't take steps to being heading in that direction ahead of time, especially when the writing is on the wall about what's coming up.

Did you actually read my post, or did you just skim it and then decide to make ad-hominem attacks because you can't come up with anything else?

Nowhere did I comment on the level of punishment. Nowhere did I say anything about "just sending them to counseling" regarding anything; my comments about the war on drugs is merely that it, as a strategy primarily relying on punishment, has failed. This is pretty much indisputable.

In fact, I agree wholeheartedly with your statement regarding the state of discipline for children and its replacement by medication.

Learn to read. Also, grow up; throwing insults around as in your post is a really just a way to be viewed as a child and ignored.

I don't believe that the parent said anything about not *blaming* the perpetrators for the crime. But punishment, in and of itself, is rarely a solution to anything- witness the perpetual failure that is the war on drugs.

It's perfectly reasonable to suggest that we investigate and attempt to fix the causes of crimes, *in addition* the punishing those caught perpetrating them.

The world is not black and white. Your "you must be a bleeding heart who's causing all our problems by not letting us shoot petty criminals" attitude is not a solution, it's part of the problem.

Vietnam was definitely a fuckup. Barbara Tuchman does a great look into how the US government managed to get more and more deeply mired in something that even people at the moment knew was stupid- and yet did anyway; see _The March of Folly_ (Vietnam is the third major section of the book).

(Barbara Tuchman was a multiple-Pulitzer prize winning author who also wrote such classics as _The Guns of August_; I'm not suggesting any partisan hackery here).

I don't think we're actually disagreeing here. You're pointing out that new technology which is initially represented as restricted to a niche can evolve beyond that niche. That's something I agree with- but my point is that, if tablets evolve in that direction, then they (like all your other examples) will effectively become what they have replaced.

The only thing really keeping something like the iPad from begin a general purpose computer is the lack of a document management solution and the walled garden approach to app installation. Once that changes (or a competitor fixes those issues) what will be the difference between the two? Tablet gaming will basically become the same as PC gaming, with the exception of limited interfaces... but even then, I could easily see tablet games coming out requiring certain peripherals.

You could argue that they're closer to the console model, but I'd have to disagree: the product lifecycle is much more similar to the PC, given release cycles and platform fragmentation; even the iPhone has several not-100%-compatible versions out there.

This is pretty much complete BS.

Netbooks, tablets, iDevices, etc *are* taking a lot of people's computing time and interest away from the PC. However, there remain a huge number of tasks- any sort of content creation whatsoever, really, some few app examples notwithstanding- that simply are not suited to that sort of form fact. People's computing will always have, in the background, some sort of general purpose device.

Now, you may say that portables, tablets, etc will evolve to the point that this is no longer true. But if that happens, then it actually proves my point, because such devices will have *become* general purpose computing devices, and therefore the "PC" and its associated games will still be around.

If and when the tablets "win", it will only be because they have become what they defeated.