it's already not that far from it.
NSA is a perfect example of it.
the death of net neutrality is yet another example of the corruption of the state.
and guess what, that means the state is not serving the people, it's serving power.

You're drawing unsubstantiated conclusions. The issues you mention are rather sadly misrepresented by most of the people who talk about them. The net neutrality issue in particular (assuming you refer to the recent ruling by the D.C appellate court) is due to a failure on the part of the FCC to properly regulate Verizon. Had the government actually done its job properly, the case would likely have passed onto an actual trial for judgement.

Please add Chromium to the list because saying that I use Google Chrome would be saying that I'm using Google proprietary code, and that is not happening.

Uh, they're basically the same browser. One just has integration with google services.

Let's get some pictures of the third most delicious food known to man!

Somehow I like this video. I guess we need to educate people on how to efficiently post in a forum. Stickied, if you guys don't mind.

Unstickied. A set of guidelines is fine, and if anyone wants to draft one, I would be happy to pin it somewhere visible, but there are several issues with this thread.

• The top comment is in the negative, score-wise. That should not be what new users see in a topic if they responsibly choose to look for posting guidelines.
• The video is not clearly linked and would not be obvious to new users
• Both the original post and the video are quite condescending. Being hostile towards new users is precisely the wrong way to introduce them to a forum.

In other RSA-related news: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/12/20/us-usa-security-rsa-idUSBRE9BJ1C220131220

To me, it equals 1.

Simply accept that as long as 41.9999...99958=42, I'm right.

That "notation" is heavily misleading and, somewhat unfortunately, crops up whenever this debate does. What does the use of the ellipsis denote? An infinite string of characters extending to the right. The tricky part here is the word "infinite". An infinite string has very different behavior from a finite one. In particular, the notion of an "end" does not exist. You can't append to the end of an infinite string because there isn't an end to append to. By placing numbers after the ellipsis, you're attempting to denote this. It's not a valid operation and hence what you get is wrong. 41.999...=42 would be the only way to write that statement and thankfully, it's true.

To see why, let's take a quick look at what the reals are:

Reals intuitively consist of all the numbers along a number line. This can be formalized with something called a dedekind cut, which is essentially as follows: For every point X along a line, define sets A and B such that A consists of all the points below X and B consists of all points not in A. We can define the reals as every point that we can do this for. Note that each A has the property that while there is an upper bound on the set (X), there is no greatest member of A. In the discussion 0.9999... = 1, what we're really asking is whether there's a a distinct real number from 1 such that there is an infinitesimal difference between them. In other words, is there a greatest member in set A? As I stated earlier, this is a property of the way the set is defined that there is not. Therefore, if 0.9999... is distinct from 1, it cannot be in A. It must therefore be a member of B, as the smallest member. Unfortunately, this is exactly where 1 is located. Thus 0.999... = 1.

If this confuses you, that's fine. It's simply a more intuitive explanation of the formalization of reals. Note that, unlike what shmibs, says, I am an uninteresting person (err, i mean you can have systems where the equivalence is not true), but it's not possible with the *reals*.


EDIT: Thanks to shmibs for edits and *ahem* punctuation.

Technically testing for equality should consist of comparing each character, so it should be linear-time, but doing so is fast compared to interpreting the "=" operator.

Time complexity has nothing to do with how "fast" or "slow" a particular implementation is. It's how quickly a problem scales with the size of the input. Since strings have to be read character by character and the length of a string in characters is O(n), then the time complexity to compare two strings is equivalent to reading two strings, assuming character comparison is O(1). Thus, we have strcmp() = O(n)+O(n) = O(n)