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The odds of an impact at that time are incredibly low — in fact, the chance it will glide safely past us is 99.99998%! But that hasn't stopped some venues from playing up the apocalypse angle.

A 1 in 5,000,000 chance of this asteroid hitting is super high compared to the 1 in 175,223,510 odds of winning the grand prize in the Powerball lottery, yet tons of idiots still line up to play.

NO
The lottery is a random drawing.
The chance of it gliding safely past us (or hitting us) is not based on random events, but rather calculated based on the margin of error in our current measurements and calculations. If we were able to 100% accurately measure and calculate the trajectory, we would be able to simply say yes or no in regards to the Earth being hit.
The ACTUAL chance of us being hit is either 0% or 100%. The "odds" being tossed around are the chances that our math is wrong.

The odds of an impact at that time are incredibly low — in fact, the chance it will glide safely past us is 99.99998%! But that hasn't stopped some venues from playing up the apocalypse angle.

A 1 in 5,000,000 chance of this asteroid hitting is super high compared to the 1 in 175,223,510 odds of winning the grand prize in the Powerball lottery, yet tons of idiots still line up to play.

It has several, here is an example.

Check your tax return. Making a cash donation means 100% of the money goes to your intended recipient, and it's tax deductible so you get a considerable discount on the donation. Money being fungible, your donatation effectively took that money away from the legislature's control at large and re-directed it where you think it should go. Colorado's yield from the lottery is less than 33% of sales (pdf warning, 2003 balance sheet is on page 25).

Staying with the Colorado example. For every dollar spent on lotto tickets, the expected payout is 50 cents, less 15 cents income tax due on the winnings (assuming 25% marginal tax rate to the IRS and 5% flat tax to the state; your tax rates may vary depending on where you live and where you buy the lotto tickets). You expect to pay 65 cents net to deliver less than 33 cents to the intended recipient, about 50% of what you spend.

Instead of buying a lotto ticket, why not make a cash donation? For every dollar you donate, the recipient gets the entire $1--three times more than a dollar spent on lotto. Your donation is tax deductible, so that same 30% tax rate means your net cost is only 70 cents. The recipient gets more than 140% of your net expenditure. Yes, donations are more than four times as effective as lotto games for funding eductaion.

Besides, you are more likely to die in a traffic accident driving to the store to buy a ticket than to win the grand prize.

"The only way to wwin--is not to play!",/i>

All this is immaterial, it wasn't an assertion which was core to my point (I'm not sure it was an assertion at all). My point is that there are people who forsake education because they are convinced that they will hit it big in either the lottery, or with a music contract, or with a sports scholarship. For some of these people who demonstrate no natural phenomenal talent in music or sports, the odds are basically zero that they will land a contract.

But anyway:
There are many types of lottery, and some of them have chances which are substantially better (but of course the payoff is also substantially lower too). Instant scratch cards, pick 3, pick 4, etc.

You get one shot at the pro's in your life, and pro positions only open a fraction of the total per year since most pro athletes are in their position for numerous years. Ignoring this though, and assuming your figures (which by your own admission also ignore factors like non-US-origin players), something is off in your calculations. 1400 / 301,139,947 = 4.65e-6

Meanwhile you can play the lottery hundreds of times a year. Let's assume that you play only 100 times per year for 10 years. This is a VERY generous assumption for those who are looking at it as an escape; the reality is that some such people will play 20-30 times per DAY, basically every spare dollar they have: as it was described to me by one individual, if they are going to make it work, they have to give it everything they have since it won't matter once they win anyway (note the assumption that they *will* win, and it is only a matter of trying hard enough - at the lottery). You're actually looking at .00629 chance of winning the lottery by your figures (or 6.29e-3). To use real figures, Power Ball, the multi-state lottery in my area which sports the biggest payouts (and hence the worst odds) has a chance of winning of 1 in 146,107,962. That's to say that continuing the same generous assumption as before about the number of plays over a life for people in the demographic I'm describing, this comes out to 6.84e-6, for the best payout for the worst lottery odds of which I am aware.

I'm with you 100% on all the points you make, however one small point I'd like to make is that you are (distressingly) not alone in failing to recognize gambling in all its forms, based on my personal experience.

Many years ago when I worked at a liquor store, I had the unfortunate task of operating a Maryland Lottery terminal as well as maintaining a Scratchoff vending machine. Before I started that job, I was more or less "on the fence" about the morality of state-sponsored gambling, though after I left I was decidedly against it. Seeing the same sad people throwing away money they could barely (and often times couldn't) afford to day after day really changed my opinion.

The current state of affairs is as pure a double standard as I can imagine. Tragically, as you mention, the overwhelming majority of gambling operations (including state-sponsored gambling) are targeted at those who are least able to afford the "habit." And it is an addictive habit like tobacco and alcohol usage, though the harm it does is less apparent to the uneducated eye.

POWERBALL!

Ok, I'm not sure about those other companies that were mentioned, but Cisco is a U.S. company. And internet gambling is illegal in the United States. Now, don't get me wrong, I don't give a shit whether people gamble on the internet, and I see the anti-internet-gambling laws as having as much to do with protecting monopolies as anything else.

Now that I've said that, how is this not a legal issue for Cisco? Surely the FBI, DEA, and assorted other federal agencies would be all over Cisco if they were helping Colombian drug cartels in any way whatsoever. How do they "get away" with it? Aren't they essentially aiding and abetting what in the U.S. is considered a criminal enterprise? I mean, as an individual I can go place bets at some offshore casino and fly under the radar, but a big company like Cisco is going to have a hard time doing that, especially if their help is on the front page of Slashdot and other news sources.

In a deeply embedded comment it was said that maintenance of Hubble would be about $200 million / year.

Given that the interstate lottery is paying about about $200 million every six months and that people allow number-crunching scientific computations (project names withheld) on their own computers, I wonder if NASA could benefit from the public, which to at least some extent is interested in science, by fundraising from it directly rather than indirectly through federal tax money.

(OTOH i, too, can understand that some projects must die in order for new ones to emerge.)

The government already runs gambling games.

For reference, I've worked for the past 9 years for a state lottery.

The way a rolling jackpot game works is pretty standard in the industry. I'm going to use Powerball as an example because it's a multi-state game that a lot of people will be familiar with. A certain percentage of the ticket price is set aside for prizes, in the case of Powerball, this is 50 percent. That pool of money is then further divided into a portion to support the jackpot, and a portion to pay the lower tier prizes (for matching say, 3/5 numbers etc.). For Powerball, 60% of the prize pool goes into the jackpot fund (or $.30 of every $1 sold). These games are all backed by operating reserves so that they can guarantee the minimum starting jackpots, even if sales for the first draw don't generate quite enough cash. Powerball starts each new jackpot at $10mil. But that $10mil. actually represents the mature value of the cash jackpot once it's been invested in some fixed rate bonds and whatnot (very conservative/guaranteed return government bonds etc.) and paid out in 25 annual installments. A change in US tax law a couple years ago now lets you choose to just cash out the prize, in which you get a one-time lump sum of the actual cash amount (which is usually roughly half of the advertised annuity jackpot). If no one wins the jackpot at $10mil, the Multi-state Lottery Association, which runs Powerball, makes an estimation on what the sales for the next draw will be, and sets the next jackpot. (these estimates are always conservative, because you'd rather advertise $12mil and pay $12.5mil than give fodder for complaints).

The reason the jackpots seem to grow to astronomical levels is twofold. First, as the jackpot goes up, more and more 'casual' players are willing to spend $1 for the chance at the life-changing experience, so the sales for each subsequent drawing go up, and hence more money for the jackpot pool. Thus, for each drawing where the jackpot isn't won, you take all that jackpot money sitting around, and add more money to it than you did the time before. The other key thing to remember is that the advertised jackpot is the annuity amount. So if we go from having $5mil cash to support a $10mil jackpot, and figure we'll add $2mil more to the pool from sales for the next drawing, we can advertise $14mil. This doubling effect starts things racing when the jackpot gets high, since you can go from having $55mil cash for one draw to $75mil, jumping your advertised jackpot around $40mil.

State lotteries, and the contractors that produce the equipment and such to run them, are regulated pretty strictly. A state lottery is all about public trust, and if that trust is broken it will literally ruin a lottery. Typically lotteries will go over the top in regards to security, auditing and such. For example, the equipment used to draw one of our local games is locked in a cabinet, in a locked room with motion detectors and camera surveilance, inside another locked room with motion detectors, in a locked building with security cameras and live security officers. Every drawing is videotaped and audited by an independent auditor from an outside accounting firm. Equipment used to produce random numbers is tested by the same types of firms who test slot machines (Gaming Labs International being one example).

I won't go into complicated tax advice for jackpot winners, but the reasons you see people getting 'only a fraction of the jackpot' is a combination of the cash vs. annuity option and state and federal withholdings. The Federal Government requires around 25% withholding on lottery winnings, and state tax laws usually add another 5%. This is just like withholding from your paycheck, and it's up to you and your accountant to file your taxes in the spring and

Science: Asteroid Headed for Earth in 2014

Posted by michael in The Mysterious Future!
from the send-in-liv-tyler dept.

FooAtWFU writes "Fresh off of Discovery Channel News (and others), it appears that the Near Earth Objects center thinks a giant asteroid *might* hit Earth around March 2014 (though the odds are slim). Duck and cover, break out the duct tape, and start renting Armageddon, Deep Impact, and other end-of-the-world movies." Chances of losing the rock-might-hit-Earth lottery: 1 in 909,000. Chance of winning the Powerball lottery: 1 in 120,000,000.

See any serious problems with this story? Email our on-duty editor.

( Read More... | science.slashdot.org )

Why do I have the distinct feeling that, in the not-so-distant future, most companies will receive their funding from anonymous people in brown paper bags left on the street corner...the funds in small denominations, unmarked, and non-sequential serial numbers.

Trust me...the day I win Powerball several organizations are going to receive anonymous donations.

I'm not sure that the odds of PowerBall are only 120 Million to 1: that sounds **WAY** too low. But even if that is correct, then yes, if the jackpot is more than $120 Million, you will make money if you buy every possible lottery ticket.

There are two things that go with this. 1) If someone *else* hits the jackpot and you have to split it, you lose money. So, it's not guaranteed to make money. 2) The lottery people don't care who wins, or how much. They get 50% of the income no matter what. So if you spend $120 Million to win a, say, $200 Million jackpot, so what? They still made $60 Million off of you, and next week they have a $60 Million jackpot!

In fact, this has been done: an investment company bought all 42 Million tickets in a lottery worth quite a bit more than that (something like $100 Million?). They were lucky: nobody else hit the jackpot. They had problems, though: several thousand numbers were left uncovered when a lottery ticket machine broke down and they couldn't get more tickets in time.

Interesting. I just checked Google. According to this, you're right: the odds are slightly higher than one in 120 Million...

There is no analogous provision for books or any other form of media. (I'm not sure about software, though. I was under the impression that the license agreement covers backup provisions in that case.) That said, you are probably more likely to win the Powerball than to be prosecuted for making one copy of a book.