Actually, the amount of data that can be written is: the capacity of the device that is used × the number of times it can be written. For example, a CD-R and a DVD-R can both be written only once, but you can write at 10MB/s to a DVD much longer than you can to a CD-R. Using only half the capacity of the DVD-R wouldn't help, and would in fact halve the amount of time you could write 10MB/s to the DVD. A SSD is similar, except that it has multiple write cycles. The way wear leveling works is that writes are are distributed evenly across the medium, so you always use the full capacity of the device.

It's tempting to say, well, let's subtract the fractional part of r, that is, the part whose absolute value lies in the range [0,1). But clearly that's not a unique construction either.

That would be floor(r). Why do you think it is not uniquely defined?

One can be used for counting. The other cannot.

Well, one could count "1.0", "2.0", if they really wanted to. In any case, subsets having properties that their supersets do not have is hardly unusual.

E.g. in an OO computer language we may have:
Class Integer inherits from Real
function Count()

We see that we can call function Count on an Integer, even though all Integers are of class Real. Since every Integer is a Real, we can do everything we can do to a Real to an Integer (though the result might not be an Integer). However since some Reals are not Integers there are some things we can do to Integers that we cannot do to (all) Reals.

I am not sure why you find it surprising that the integers are a subset of the reals. An uncountable infinity is a larger infinity than a countable infinity so it isn't any more surprising that a countable infinity would be a subset of an uncountable infinity than a finite set may be a subset of an infinite set. For example the set of single digit numbers {0,1,...,9} is finite and a subset of the infinite set of integers.

Also I am not sure what you mean by the nearest integer that approximates it. Why not just do something like let n = Round(r)?

So strictly speaking they would be quantifiable in real numbers.

In base 8, .11111111 = 1/10 + 1/100 + 1/1000 ... which in base 10 is 1/8 + 1/64 + 1/512 + ... = 0.14285714285711...., which multiplied by 7 is clearly 0.999... (which can be more succinctly represented as "1").

Also a terminology issue, the number of ones in 0.111111... is indeed "Countable".

India has announced a tablet that costs less to manufacture than the memory chips included in their tablet, though for some reason I can't seem to buy one yet. Once I read that the OS could run Windows, and was (to be) developed in India, I just thought "Ah another one of those announcements". I wonder why no government scientists outside India seem to be able to announce results?

You don't need to buy Macaw, you can do the same with opensource utilities: cat keyboard | strings

Hex editors are too bloated. He should use cat instead (not the bloated monstrosity that is GNU cat of course).

Sorry, needed to be said. The first thing I do is move the window controls to the right side of the screen.

Please mod this comment -5 : trying to hard to be funny. Thank you.

As I understand you are not meant to own a facebook account if you are under 13.

We need to heavily censor the Internet to protect predators from children like this. *sigh* I'd use a winking smily but I don't think it is appropriate here.

Tthey always got 6 votes. All that has changed is that before they had to vote for 6 different candidates, but now they can combine their votes.

So how does benefit minority groups? Well say there were 6+ white candidates but only one black candidate. Then voters could spend their votes only on white candidates, but did not have the option of spending their votes only on black candidates. So under the new system, if one sixth of the population wants a black representative, they get one. In principle this doesn't give them real political power, since the 5 white representatives could still out-vote them; however, for various reasons having a non-white representative gives some people warm fuzzies. For example a representative is meant to represent people as well as cast votes, so black people may be glad to have a black representative even if this doesn't directly increase their political power.

Well it seems like you got a +3 "Funny" and a +5 "Informative". Do *you* need the Karma? Maybe you'd like to lend your account to your little brother more often :P.

There are almost 300 comments but only really two arguments against this device: "The third law of thermodynamics says this can't happen!" and "How can you extract energy from the wind when you are travelling at the same speed as the wind?". As it is dozens of people are making these arguments and dozens of people of people are rebutting them. I think it would read a lot better if we could merge threads and see all rebuttals against the same argument in the same place.

Well, I doubt you'd be interested spending a hundred grand building a device that you don't think works, so I guess you'll be glad to know that there is a simplified version of the device demonstrated on Youtube: http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1676544&cid=32477460

(Thanks to http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1676544&cid=32477460)

Energy is conserved. It is transferred from the wind to the vehicle. Consider a 1MW wind power station connected to tiny electric car. It is clear that that car would take off like a rocket.

The only question is how to generate energy from the wind when travelling as fast or faster than the wind. This has been discussed to death in the Slashdot comments as well as the comments on TFA.