did you miss the 2^90? rather a lot really compared to lottery (~2^24). brucee
On Thu, Mar 6, 2008 at 3:04 PM, Enrico Weigelt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > * [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/ > --------------------------------------------------------------------- >
