On Wed, 28 Oct 2015 17:52:25 +0000 Simon wrote: > On 28 Oct 2015, at 5:08pm, James K. Lowden <jklowden at schemamania.org> > wrote: > > > If we accept what you say, above, then why should > > > >> (9.2+7.8+0+3.0+1.3+1.7) > > > > in particular present any problem? There's no division. Each value > > has an exact decimal representation. > > You didn't work it out yourself, did you ? > > 0.2 in binary is 0.0011001100110011... > 0.3 in binary is 0.0100110011001100... > > They both recur at the 1/16th level. 0.7 and 0.8 are, of course, > their complements. Only two tenths don't have problems in binary: > point zero and point five.
I didn't work it out. The assertion was > > any base-2 representation right of the decimal should be > > precise to represent in base-10 which I understood to mean, "if you can represent it in decimal, you can represent it in binary". I didn't think that was true, but there seemed to be concensus that it was. Thanks for doing my homework. :-) --jkl P.S., To OFL, I wish the names were preserved in the From, so that mail software preserves the "Simon said, James said" context. It would also be less damaging if the addresses merely mangled with e.g. "-ciao-alexa" inserted. The malware is unlikely to adapt -- one way in which it is *not* like a real virus -- and human beings can easily remove the extra letters. One trick I've used with success is to insert the HTML zero-width space character into the email address. It looks the same, copies and pastes just fine, but scripts scraping a page will copy it verbatim and get a useless address.
