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Fraud Threat Halts Knuth's Hexadecimal-Dollar Checks
Barence writes "You may be aware of Donald Knuth, the creator of TeX and author of The Art of Computer Programming, who used to post checks to anyone who spotted an error in one of his books — one hexadecimal dollar, or $2.56. No one cashed them though. This blogger has two of them proudly on his wall, but the sad news is that modern day bank fraud has put a stop to Knuth's much-loved way of keeping his books free of errors." (Here's Knuth's own post about the sad change.)
Obviously we must petition the United States Treasury to release a $2.56 bill with Don Knuth's face on it, which he can then autograph and send to the smarty pants who find errors in his book.
I am ashamed
On second thought, let's not go to the internet. 'Tis a silly place.
Unfortunately there was a bug in Knuth's check writing program, and the last person received a check for the amount of "one carry bit, set."
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Yes, finally someone is taking a stand against the crappy metric-system-obsessed definition of a dollar. Everyone knows a dollar is 256 cents, this whole decimal crap is just a conspiracy by big business in cahoots with the Federal Reserve to rip us off, just like they did with hard disk sizes. I'm voting for Ron Paul.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
It's still wrong though, "cent" is the same "cent" as in "centimeter" or "percent" and means 1/100. The unit is the dollar, so 0x1 dollar = one dollar.
So if you point out this error to Knuth... do you get a check for $0x1 or $2.56?