* [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Hi,
> >From the fortune file: > You are roughly 2^90 times more likely to win a U.S. state lottery > *and* be struck by lightning simultaneously than you are to encounter > [an accidental SHA1 collision] in your file system. - J. Black Well, cracking the lottery jackpot happens quite often (if people would buy as many lotter tickets as we've got disitinct data blocks as we have in larger data storages or network traffic over several years, it would happen very regularily). Even the amount of lottery players in a smaller city with quite low incomes (so people can't afford playing regularily) is quite small (compared to the rest of the country). The chance of being resident in one specific of these small cities is also quite low. About one or two years ago, it happened that someone in my city cracked the jackpot. Now let's imagine, how many people of those who use to play lottery (in my family, there's exactly 1 - people who play lottery most likely have to believe there's a chance to win or simply don't know how to spend their money, also a quite small percentage of the population) don't want to have the price (for themselves) ? Exactly this happened here. And now take those people (winning, but don't want to have the price) and let's see who many of them even don't want to donate their win to certain projects (neither funding, science or social projects), especially in an region where social projects are *very* needed but are dramatically underfunded (eg. very bad financial situation of medical or social care facilities) and many people are even too poor for giving their childs appropriate food and clothes. Exactly this happened here: the winner really *refused* the win and so gave it away to the lottery company. I really can't say, how low the probabily for such events is, but I suspect, it's *extremly* low. Although I know really a lot of people, I cannot imagine a single one who might probably even think about such an decision. IMHO, such an event (winning && in my local city && refusing the win && the regional public and personal povery) is nearly impossible. BUT: it really happened ! So we've seen again: statistics are *never* reliable. It only helps for vague decisions on very large masses, never for a single case. cu -- --------------------------------------------------------------------- Enrico Weigelt == metux IT service - http://www.metux.de/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- Please visit the OpenSource QM Taskforce: http://wiki.metux.de/public/OpenSource_QM_Taskforce Patches / Fixes for a lot dozens of packages in dozens of versions: http://patches.metux.de/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------
