The irritating thing is that people keep confusing 0.999... (meaning the decimal place is followed by infinitely many nines) with some number where the nines stop. 0.999... is just another decimal expression of the number 1. It's just a matter of notation. Yes, if the nines stopped at any point, that number would be less than one. But every number has two expressions for their decimal expansions. (Ex. 3.00000 = 2.99999.....) It's just the nature of our number system.