Quick Questions, Short Answers - No Debate

That could be doable. I've had it a while but not really played very much of it.Now my choice is even harder.

No, it's pretty simple: Skyrim. Seriously, it's the game of the year.

Skyrim it is!

I used to play Skyrim, but then I took an arrow in the knee.(You'll understand soon enough.)

Probably the best game I have played in a long time. I have been extremely disappointed in other releases by bethesda so I was thrilled that this surpassed the other Elder Scrolls games.

My little pony something or other.

In laymens terms, why do gas prices (the prices we pay at the pump) fluctuate on a daily basis? Why is it the only consumer item that does this (if not, what others are priced this way and are at a consumer level)? At it's purest consumer form (I'm talking out of my ass here), gasoline isn't some commodity for every day consumers that they are "lucky" if they can get. No, it is something they have to calculate into their budget (myself especially who has a ~1 hour trip to work each way).If i break it down to how my dumb ass understands it: the fuel mart buys X gallons per month or something at X price, then charges us some portion of what a barrel of oil costs that day as opposed to any other good where the merchant recoups his cost for what he paid. I mean, if your grocery store changed the price of bread daily due to wheat cost or something, we'd surely find a different grocer, yes?If this sparks a huge discussion, I'd be glad to start a topic so we don't muddy this thread.

All your questions are related so I'll just take the first one. Unfortunately there is no general method for figuring out whether a number is irrational or not. Usually each number is shown to be irrational in a way that invokes its own specific definition or the context it arises in. For example all proofs of the irrationality of pi basically revolve around the following:1. Generate some specific equation involving the trigonometric functions sin(x), cos(x), tan(x), e.t.c.2. Assume pi is rational.3. The the equation has some property (A), e.g. it's greater than 1.4. It also has property (not A), e.g. it's less than or equal to 1.5. Hence pi being rational is contradictory, so pi is irrational.Step 1 relies heavily on the trigonometric functions, which are related to pi. For other numbers you have to come up with other functions or relations. There is no general method, it's treated on a case by case basis. I think a systematic method of doing this that works in all cases would be a major discovery.

Anybody do any Java development? When I learned Java as a CS major, they sort of skipped over the part where you actually produce something that can be deployed and installed on someone's computer, so while I flatter myself that I can program, I can't seem to actually work as a programmer even for free.I've written a little bioinformatics application and the problem I have is that it only runs on my computer. I thought NetBeans would build an application which I could distribute, it certainly claims that it's doing that, but what it produces won't run on any other machine, it just crashes the VM with a NoClassDefinitionException.Midway through the project I realized that I was producing code for Java 7, but that Java 6 had a broader install base, so I refactored for 6. At one point, I tracked a bug to the fact that there were a lot of classes that NetBeans never actually recompiled in Java 6.I thought all I'd have to do was compile my classes and the NetBeans application toolkit into a distributable jar, and that jar does run on my computer just like it should, but it doesn't run anywhere else. NoClassDef exceptions usually have something to do with "classpath", but what would NetBeans be doing to my computer's classpath, and how do I get my eventual end-users to be able to run this code?

Certified Java Programmer here, with NetBeans installed and a few demo programs lying around (even if my text is at work).One thing, I can think of is that the CLASSPATH variable has to include the jar file (not just the directory to work).However, the description of the problem is unclear. How are you trying to run the program elsewhere, and which Class definition is missing ?

Maybe I'm myself unclear on what the problem is. In the broad strokes, the problem is that my jar runs fine on my computer, and on my wife's Mac once I found the hidden switch to turn Java 6 on, but what people (who don't really have the troubleshooting skills to tell me much about what's going on) tell me is that they download the zip archive, extract it, and then try to run the jar file but nothing happens. I'm fairly sure they have the right version of Java to run it.Can I ask you to try running my program? It can be downloaded at http://code.google.com/p/bootsie/downloads/list"Bootsie.zip" is meant to be the distributable, and there's an additional archive of data files if you'd like to actually run it on something (it performs a statistical analysis of a certain kind of population genetics data that the entomologists I know need to do.)

I can get it to start up and show the Help screen, even without downloading the test files. No sign of any trouble. I don't think that I can help more without more information.

Thanks, PaulK! That's actually a bit of a relief. I'll try to get more information about what's going wrong with the end users (actually, at this point it's more like "end user".)Thanks for your input. If you don't mind me asking, when/if you develop desktop Java applications, how do you usually distribute them?

My Java work - and it is work, not personal development - isn't really for the desktop, and gzipped tar files is the usual distribution method (or zipped for Windows).

Panda says: I think Tebow, the QB of the 2011 NFL's Denver Broncos, did that first.