2012 is Just Around the Corner

[arturis]

Man charged $23 quadrillion for smokes; bank adds overdraft fee

Unruly Teen Charges $23 Quadrillion At Drugstore

Coincidence, or sign of the end times? YOU BE THE JUDGE!

Comments

[anadamous]

Wait, what? How did you factor such a large number so quickly? Am I getting too old for this? Is this not a large number anymore?

[arturis]

I didn't. I used an online calculator which, as it turns out, was wrong. It got a close approximation, though.

[arturis]

I found this in a search:

23,148,855,308,184,500.00 * 100 is 2314885530818450000. Convert 2314885530818450000 to hexadecimal, and you end up with 20 20 20 20 20 20 12 50. Most C/C++ programmers see the error now... hex 20 is a space. So spaces were stuffed into a field where binary zero should have been."

[arturis]

Still this doesn't explain why the two stories have identical numbers.

[cuddlyarmadillo]

There was a mass banking error on prepaid Visa cards from Bank of America. Apparently, all of the errors have been fixed and fees refunded.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/07/15/quadrillion.dollar.glitch/index.html

[arturis]

But that doesn't answer my question. Was it a coincidence, or a sign of the end times?

Anyway, that's pretty awesome. Particularly since, during that brief error, VISA created over 200 quintillion dollars in fake debt, which is about 4 million times as big as the entire value created by the world economy in one year.

[cuddlyarmadillo]

Oh, end times for sure. Cats and dogs will be laying together before we know it.

[mistoffo]

a user on slashdot explains