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Nigerian Scammers Claim Another Victim
A Florida newspaper ran a story yesterday about a local retiree who fell hard for a 419 scam. The story goes into depth on the methods used to play on the target's beliefs and gain his confidence - in this case, the target (who lost $320,000) is still having a hard time accepting that they were thieves. Truly remarkable.
The Register used to do a great 419 T-shirt, but you can still get an "All my money went to Nigeria and all I got was this lousy t-shirt".
If the jackpot is large enough, each ticket bought that week will have an average return higher than the cost of the ticket. However, that fact alone does not make it a good bet, because the variance overwhelms the positive expectation.
Uhm...you aren't familiar with the formula
?You should have got this in the first week of your first statistics course. :-)
Or maybe you aren't familiar with how lottery prizes work? If no one wins, the prize gets added to the next lottery.
The probability of a given ticket winning is the same each week, but the prize goes up. However, more people tend to play as the prize goes up, so the chances of sharing the prize go up, but the net effect is the "prize if you win" term goes up each week.
If a lottery goes a few weeks without a winner, this can push the expected payoff higher than the price of a ticket.
The grass isn't necessarily greener on the other side of the fence
http://www.419eater.com/index.htm