What would you like if afterwards tell you (your flour per cookies cost 0,8€/pack, just to demonstrate) that i decided to give discount from cookies and tell you that i decided to pay only 0,5€/pack to you.
You have a different understanding of the Amazon agreement than I have.
The Amazon agreement with the app creator has a minimum:
Developers will get to take home the standard 70% of the app's retail price (what the app sells for) or 20% of the MSRP (what the developer thinks it should sell for), whichever is greater.
That would be like you, the cookie maker, deciding you want to get at least 1€ from Amazon, so you set the MSRP at 5€. Amazon sells it for whatever they want.
But you get the GREATER of 70% of the sale price, or 20% of the MSRP (which would be 1€). If they sell it for 1€, you get 1€. If they sell it for 4€, you get 1€. If they sell it for more than 5€, you get MORE than 1€!! So you get at least 1€. Which is what you wanted.
Seems like somebody didn't think this through. If you set your MSRP to be $1,000,000,000, you'll get $200,000,000 for every sale, no matter what they charge for it (as 20% of a billion is going to be greater than 70% of pretty much any retail price.)
Sweet.
But isn't this pretty much how all retail works?
Manufacturer sets the MSRP and the price to the retailer. The retailer can charge however much they want. And the retailer pays the manufacturer a predetermined price.
Typically, not always, the retailer sets the price to for the consumer to be higher than what they pay the manufacturer. I'd expect that to be the case here. If you set the MSRP to $1,000,000,000, the retailer would set the price to the consumer to be something close to that. And you won't sell any.
It seems I have a different opinion than all the other posts. Maybe my (PHB) pointy hair is affecting my thinking.
Sounds like the boss is asking for about 30% more hours. Would you like it better if the boss announced a 30% layoff (in these tough times)? Or maybe he might be demanding more hours, with the expectation that he'll have some attrition. This isn't a bad strategy for him, if all the employees are approximately "worth what they are paid", but a horrible strategy if he has some employees who are a bargain, and others who are overpaid for their contribution. He might want to swiftly eliminate any under-contributors.
There are several factors that you should consider when getting this request from your boss. They are:
What are the company's prospects? What are your personal prospects inside the company? (Are you well respected?) What are your personal prospects outside the company? (How's the job market?) How much do you like the job? What leverage do you have in this situation?
Let's take an extreme example as an illustration. Say you are paid $150K, the people at the company are great, the boss is highly ethical and has a good mind for business, and there is a downturn in business, obviously temporary, because your largest customers went bankrupt. The job market is bad in your part of the world (and so getting a 75K job might take a couple of years of job hunting), The company has treated you more than fairly over the year (even though you have not received ownership, they've paid you well). In this case, if the boss asks for more hours, you'd be a fool not to go along with it. Probably the best thing you can do is to try to negotiate a short duration of the long hours - say a month or two - or request an agreement that back pay will be provided when things turn around. But if you can't negotiate it, you suck it up, and do the hours. Or, as an alternative (if you are inclined), you ask if you can take a lesser salary to simply work 8 hour days.
More likely though, this company has never been profitable, you are burning through the investment dollars (or you are costing the ownership money every month, and perhaps the boss is the owner). He might be looking at a situation where he is "working for free" or even at a loss, simply to pay the employees.
I have been both an employee and a boss/owner in those situations. It's tough. It's very stressful to be the boss/owner, who works hard every day, and at the end of the month, instead of getting a paycheck, he has to write a check ("pay to work here" sucks for a boss!). Let me tell you, it sucks. And it really sucks if when you hear your employees doing normal office social interaction (chit-chat) - and doing everything you can to resist yelling "GET BACK TO WORK".
I found that the best way to handle this as a boss is to think of the business as an engineering problem. And make it a shared problem. Instead of doing something haphazard, like asking people to work 10-11 hour days, you formulate a plan, and make it a shared plan. This is more of advice for your boss, not for you, but perhaps you can direct him to it.
This approach requires a lot of honesty of the boss, and a trust in the maturity of the workforce. But I have seen it work MANY times. (get Jack Stack's books (1, 2, 3) to read about one of the more high profile cases of this working, with factory workers!)
First, start out with the statement of the problem. The boss has to lay it all out there. And he has to approach this like a problem-solving exercise, not a threat.
I didn't do it, or even talk about it, for your approval. And I know what happened.
I'm not here to convince you otherwise. You can believe what you want to believe.
Really, I'm surprised that there aren't more people on Slashdot who believe that kids are a burden and an expense. I don't know why that's hard to believe. Because I know when I was 18, I felt that way, and when I was 28 and got to experience freedom and money, I felt that way even stronger.
When we were married with no kids, freedom was everything. Not having been exposed to young children before, we had no concept of the joy of having children.
Honestly, when we talked about the monumental decision of having children, ALL of the selfish items appeared to support NOT having children.
This was quite a while ago, but I remember that very distinctly. Do we REALLY want to pin ourselves down for 20 years? It's a huge commitment. It's a huge cost.
I do remember thinking that it would make the grandparents happy. And on the second child and beyond, we discussed the impact to the other children (i.e. is it a good thing or a bad thing to give child-1 a sibling).
Maybe the thought crossed my wife's mind, but there was absolutely no thought of some vanity, or selfish "what's in it for me" (except for what an inconvenience it would be).
Now, having had children, I can tell you that there is a lot more benefit than I ever gave it credit for. But even after child #1, after a year of crying and sleepless nights and outrageous cost, I was definitely NOT looking at having #2 as a perk! At that point it was "we've decided to be the 'family type', and the incremental cost of #2 isn't as great as the cost of #1." (That is, we're already committed to 18 years of this, what's another 2?)
no, what I said was that "self" was never a concern, therefore it was not selfish.
There is still the concern for the planet, for the other children that we have, and for the unborn. Those are real concerns that factor into the "equation".
There's a cost / benefit equation with each prospective child.
My point is that it was NEVER part of the discussion as to what WE want or how many kids WE want, or what will be nice for us. It was never about us (except for how many children we could afford without being a burden to society).
On the contrary, we have considered what sort of life each child will have. And what the impact to the planet is.
And sometimes you have to go with your gut as to what is right. But at least for us, it was never a selfish decision. In fact, all the "benefits" that the GP post talked about weren't even considerations... we were thinking of the huge COSTS, not benefits.
That's assuming they wanted life, that they want to live. See, the curious thing is if they never existed, it would have never mattered anyways. It's funny that people talk about how "life itself" is a gift, but that really doesn't make any sense.
Yes, I am definitely basing my logic on a belief that life itself is something of a gift. If I don't like life, I can check out. But I was given a choice. The gift is life, and a choice.
Of course, everyone I have surveyed about this issue was alive at one point - I have not surveyed any people who never existed.
You need to understand that the latency in Internet connectivity would make playing real-time online games almost impossible. Even simple IM messages could take 20 minutes or so to get across.
There would be more creative online games available. Instead of instantaneously reacting to the events of the game, you would be sending instructions that would determine your outcomes for 20 minutes.
The analogy is this: Madden Football 2011 is the gaming equivalent of being the on-field quarterback in the NFL. Mars Madden Football 2031 would be the gaming equivalent of being the owner, who could only be involved before the game and at halftime.
Any decisions you make won't have an impact for 20 minutes. Instead of "making a move" in a game, you'd be sending a set of instructions (a program) that would make moves for you.
Who else but the selfish can bring themselves to thrust children into this world of ours?
I totally disagree with this.
Prior to having children, my wife and I talked about the massive expense and inconvenience, and weighed it against our responsibility to THEM, the unborn children. We literally held their lives in our hands (in the form of Birth Control devices), and decided that the right, UNselfish thing to do was to give them life.
So we have length, mass, energy, and force, along with the hundreds of associated units, all in base 10. We have a single measure, time, which is _typically_ not base 10 (it is in science). How is that "half", troll?
Let's see, my argument is to people who say the US should convert to metric is that we are already half on the metric system, and you call me a troll, because the US is MORE THAN half metric? Good logic, troll.
The article I referenced recommended that the day be split in 10 units (metric hours or some other name), and each of those 2.4 hour units be split in 100 units (metric minute or some other name), which would be about 1.44 minutes long), and each of those units could be split into 100 units.
The new metric second would be about 86.4% of a current second.
So instead of counting seconds like "1-Mississippi, 2-Mississippi, 3-Mississippi", it'd be more like "1-Arkansas, 2-Arkansas, 3-Arkansas".
Thanks for reviewing the code. After I posted it, I realized that I should have tossed in a comment or two. Sorry about that!
I'll try to answer your three responses in one post here.
First, the code that I posted (which showed up in the courier font) was 2 things. The top part was the program output, and the second part was the program listing.
You are correct in saying that the first line of the program is "from __future__ import division". (FYI, one of Python's biggest faults, in my opinion, is integer division. This fault has been fixed in Python 3, but I think most installations are on version 2 (2.5, 2.6, 2.7...), and so you need the line "from __future__ import division" so that division works properly. It's the difference of 3/2 being equal to 1 vs. 1.5. I want math to be accurate (3/2 = 1.5), so I include that line.)
The next section (about 7 lines, starting with def choose...) is a function definition, calculating how many combinations you come up with, when you have a certain size pool that you choose from. For instance, if you choose 3 items from a pool of 5, that would be choose(5,3), and would return 10. There are 10 ways to choose 3 items from a group of 5 (if you don't care what order you choose them in). The math in this example is 5*4*3/3/2.
The next line, win=((56,5),(46,1)) , is the definition of Mega Millions. For Mega Millions, out of the numbers 1-56, you choose 5 numbers, and out of 1-46, you choose 1 number. You WIN if you get the 5 and 1 correct. So I called the field "win". Stupid name. This is the ONLY line you need to change, to adapt for other lotteries where you draw numbers from 2 pools.
The next line (combinations = ) calculates how many DIFFERENT lotto tickets are available.
The win chart is taken from the website. I use this for payouts. For example, 5,0,250000 means if you get 5 right (of the first draw) and 0 right (the mega ball), then you win $250,000.
Then there are a couple of print statements that should be self-explanatory. The 2nd one is a little long and wrapped. The "int(combinations)" should be part of the second print statement.
The program is designed to print out the payout and probability chart that appears on the Mega Millions site. I wanted to make sure my calculations matched their official calculations. They do.
As I am printing the chart, I calculate certain values for later use. And I initialize them prior to the loop. winners=1 and payouts=0 sets these two initial values. winners is tracking how many winning ticket combinations there are. I start it at 1, to account for the 1 combination that is a jackpot winner.
Payouts is an accumulation of all of the winning payouts for all of the possible winning ticket combinations. Since I don't know what the jackpot is, I set payouts to 0, ignoring for the moment that the jackpot will be part of the payout (I'll come back to this on the last line of the program).
Then I loop through for each line in the win_chart. I am calculating the odds by calculating how many ticket combinations meet the parameters to be considered a winner. For instance, in Mega Millions, there are 45 possible $250,000 tickets where you get 5 right but the Mega Ball wrong. So the first time through the loop, winning_combos gets set to 45.
So, of course, with 45 possible winning tickets out of 175 Million total combinations, the chance you win $250,000, is "1 in 175M/45."; 1 in the total number of possible combinations divided by 45. The line "chance =..." performs that calculation.
Then I print that out.
Then I increment the number of winning combinations (on the line "winners +=..."). This accumulates the number of possible winning tickets (so that later I can say that the odds of winning something are 1 in 40).
The "payouts +=..." line accumulates how much gets paid out to all ticket winners, if each possible ticket combination is purchased once.
I've been using this line for technologies ever since the 70's. Compuserve? remember the CB? AOL? remember the CB? MySpace? remember the CB? Facebook? remember the CB?
Trouble is, no one under 30 remembers the CB. It was huge - the hottest thing, everyone was going to have one. Sales skyrocketed. All the cool people had them. Even Grandmas were on CB. Movies were made about CBs (Smoky and the Bandit being the hugest). Then it fizzled.
Sounds a lot like Facebook.
Sure, CB's are still around. Facebook will be around in ten years, too. But if I were Zukerberg, I'd be selling now too. It will NEVER get hotter; it has no place to go but down. Even if not, only a fool would have 99+% of his net worth tied up in one stock.
Slashdot Mirror
What would you like if afterwards tell you (your flour per cookies cost 0,8€/pack, just to demonstrate) that i decided to give discount from cookies and tell you that i decided to pay only 0,5€/pack to you.
You have a different understanding of the Amazon agreement than I have.
The Amazon agreement with the app creator has a minimum:
Developers will get to take home the standard 70% of the app's retail price (what the app sells for) or 20% of the MSRP (what the developer thinks it should sell for), whichever is greater.
That would be like you, the cookie maker, deciding you want to get at least 1€ from Amazon, so you set the MSRP at 5€. Amazon sells it for whatever they want.
But you get the GREATER of 70% of the sale price, or 20% of the MSRP (which would be 1€). If they sell it for 1€, you get 1€. If they sell it for 4€, you get 1€. If they sell it for more than 5€, you get MORE than 1€!! So you get at least 1€. Which is what you wanted.
No biggie here.
Seems like somebody didn't think this through. If you set your MSRP to be $1,000,000,000, you'll get $200,000,000 for every sale, no matter what they charge for it (as 20% of a billion is going to be greater than 70% of pretty much any retail price.)
Sweet.
But isn't this pretty much how all retail works?
Manufacturer sets the MSRP and the price to the retailer. The retailer can charge however much they want. And the retailer pays the manufacturer a predetermined price.
Typically, not always, the retailer sets the price to for the consumer to be higher than what they pay the manufacturer. I'd expect that to be the case here. If you set the MSRP to $1,000,000,000, the retailer would set the price to the consumer to be something close to that. And you won't sell any.
It seems I have a different opinion than all the other posts. Maybe my (PHB) pointy hair is affecting my thinking.
Sounds like the boss is asking for about 30% more hours. Would you like it better if the boss announced a 30% layoff (in these tough times)? Or maybe he might be demanding more hours, with the expectation that he'll have some attrition. This isn't a bad strategy for him, if all the employees are approximately "worth what they are paid", but a horrible strategy if he has some employees who are a bargain, and others who are overpaid for their contribution. He might want to swiftly eliminate any under-contributors.
There are several factors that you should consider when getting this request from your boss. They are:
What are the company's prospects?
What are your personal prospects inside the company? (Are you well respected?)
What are your personal prospects outside the company? (How's the job market?)
How much do you like the job?
What leverage do you have in this situation?
Let's take an extreme example as an illustration. Say you are paid $150K, the people at the company are great, the boss is highly ethical and has a good mind for business, and there is a downturn in business, obviously temporary, because your largest customers went bankrupt. The job market is bad in your part of the world (and so getting a 75K job might take a couple of years of job hunting), The company has treated you more than fairly over the year (even though you have not received ownership, they've paid you well). In this case, if the boss asks for more hours, you'd be a fool not to go along with it. Probably the best thing you can do is to try to negotiate a short duration of the long hours - say a month or two - or request an agreement that back pay will be provided when things turn around. But if you can't negotiate it, you suck it up, and do the hours. Or, as an alternative (if you are inclined), you ask if you can take a lesser salary to simply work 8 hour days.
More likely though, this company has never been profitable, you are burning through the investment dollars (or you are costing the ownership money every month, and perhaps the boss is the owner). He might be looking at a situation where he is "working for free" or even at a loss, simply to pay the employees.
I have been both an employee and a boss/owner in those situations. It's tough. It's very stressful to be the boss/owner, who works hard every day, and at the end of the month, instead of getting a paycheck, he has to write a check ("pay to work here" sucks for a boss!). Let me tell you, it sucks. And it really sucks if when you hear your employees doing normal office social interaction (chit-chat) - and doing everything you can to resist yelling "GET BACK TO WORK".
I found that the best way to handle this as a boss is to think of the business as an engineering problem. And make it a shared problem. Instead of doing something haphazard, like asking people to work 10-11 hour days, you formulate a plan, and make it a shared plan. This is more of advice for your boss, not for you, but perhaps you can direct him to it.
This approach requires a lot of honesty of the boss, and a trust in the maturity of the workforce. But I have seen it work MANY times. (get Jack Stack's books (1, 2, 3) to read about one of the more high profile cases of this working, with factory workers!)
First, start out with the statement of the problem. The boss has to lay it all out there. And he has to approach this like a problem-solving exercise, not a threat.
Gather the team together,
I understand that space suits are not exactly cheap to manufacture here on earth - can you imagine trying to make on one Mars?
Building a space suit on Mars only costs 10 tanpi.
There aren't magic bullets.
The one bit of wisdom that I held on to from talking to a wealthy person was:
"Building wealth is simple: Spend less than you make."
That really is the magic bullet. Work from there.
Since the site is Slashdotted, I thought these links might help:
Google cache takes a long time to come up, and won't show the image, but you can read the text. Click on the word Cached.
NSFW google images of the model.
Pixels for you to cover the previous images with.
It did get hit twice by lightning, though...
God didn't like the porn?
You are not attracted to the unkempt jungle thatch of 60s era bush?
I thought the Bush era was 1988-1992 and then smaller Bush in 2000-2008.
This took way too long. I already caved and got myself a Android phone, which I'm very happy with.
Agreed! Actually, I'd say "Too little, Too late"
It isn't AI. AI is whatever it is that machines can't do yet.
I'm glad you said that. So many people react immediately with "This isn't AI!", and you defined AI perfectly.
Your disbelief says more about you than me.
I didn't do it, or even talk about it, for your approval. And I know what happened.
I'm not here to convince you otherwise. You can believe what you want to believe.
Really, I'm surprised that there aren't more people on Slashdot who believe that kids are a burden and an expense. I don't know why that's hard to believe. Because I know when I was 18, I felt that way, and when I was 28 and got to experience freedom and money, I felt that way even stronger.
When we were married with no kids, freedom was everything. Not having been exposed to young children before, we had no concept of the joy of having children.
Honestly, when we talked about the monumental decision of having children, ALL of the selfish items appeared to support NOT having children.
This was quite a while ago, but I remember that very distinctly. Do we REALLY want to pin ourselves down for 20 years? It's a huge commitment. It's a huge cost.
I do remember thinking that it would make the grandparents happy. And on the second child and beyond, we discussed the impact to the other children (i.e. is it a good thing or a bad thing to give child-1 a sibling).
Maybe the thought crossed my wife's mind, but there was absolutely no thought of some vanity, or selfish "what's in it for me" (except for what an inconvenience it would be).
Now, having had children, I can tell you that there is a lot more benefit than I ever gave it credit for. But even after child #1, after a year of crying and sleepless nights and outrageous cost, I was definitely NOT looking at having #2 as a perk! At that point it was "we've decided to be the 'family type', and the incremental cost of #2 isn't as great as the cost of #1." (That is, we're already committed to 18 years of this, what's another 2?)
Wow, sorry you had such a rough life!
Seriously, "Self" was on the other side of the ledger - the side to NOT have children.
Because you give up a whole heck of a lot of fun, opportunity, and money to have kids.
no, what I said was that "self" was never a concern, therefore it was not selfish.
There is still the concern for the planet, for the other children that we have, and for the unborn. Those are real concerns that factor into the "equation".
There's a cost / benefit equation with each prospective child.
My point is that it was NEVER part of the discussion as to what WE want or how many kids WE want, or what will be nice for us. It was never about us (except for how many children we could afford without being a burden to society).
On the contrary, we have considered what sort of life each child will have. And what the impact to the planet is.
And sometimes you have to go with your gut as to what is right. But at least for us, it was never a selfish decision. In fact, all the "benefits" that the GP post talked about weren't even considerations... we were thinking of the huge COSTS, not benefits.
That's assuming they wanted life, that they want to live. See, the curious thing is if they never existed, it would have never mattered anyways. It's funny that people talk about how "life itself" is a gift, but that really doesn't make any sense.
Yes, I am definitely basing my logic on a belief that life itself is something of a gift. If I don't like life, I can check out. But I was given a choice. The gift is life, and a choice.
Of course, everyone I have surveyed about this issue was alive at one point - I have not surveyed any people who never existed.
You need to understand that the latency in Internet connectivity would make playing real-time online games almost impossible. Even simple IM messages could take 20 minutes or so to get across.
There would be more creative online games available. Instead of instantaneously reacting to the events of the game, you would be sending instructions that would determine your outcomes for 20 minutes.
The analogy is this:
Madden Football 2011 is the gaming equivalent of being the on-field quarterback in the NFL.
Mars Madden Football 2031 would be the gaming equivalent of being the owner, who could only be involved before the game and at halftime.
Any decisions you make won't have an impact for 20 minutes. Instead of "making a move" in a game, you'd be sending a set of instructions (a program) that would make moves for you.
I know I don't have anything to offer a colony to help it start and last.
If you have reproductive capabilities, then you have at least one thing to offer.
Who else but the selfish can bring themselves to thrust children into this world of ours?
I totally disagree with this.
Prior to having children, my wife and I talked about the massive expense and inconvenience, and weighed it against our responsibility to THEM, the unborn children. We literally held their lives in our hands (in the form of Birth Control devices), and decided that the right, UNselfish thing to do was to give them life.
Is how a father of three could volunteer to depart on what would most likely be a suicide mission.
Isn't "choosing to stay on earth" a suicide mission?
So we have length, mass, energy, and force, along with the hundreds of associated units, all in base 10. We have a single measure, time, which is _typically_ not base 10 (it is in science). How is that "half", troll?
Let's see, my argument is to people who say the US should convert to metric is that we are already half on the metric system, and you call me a troll, because the US is MORE THAN half metric? Good logic, troll.
The article I referenced recommended that the day be split in 10 units (metric hours or some other name), and each of those 2.4 hour units be split in 100 units (metric minute or some other name), which would be about 1.44 minutes long), and each of those units could be split into 100 units.
The new metric second would be about 86.4% of a current second.
So instead of counting seconds like "1-Mississippi, 2-Mississippi, 3-Mississippi", it'd be more like "1-Arkansas, 2-Arkansas, 3-Arkansas".
Thanks for reviewing the code. After I posted it, I realized that I should have tossed in a comment or two. Sorry about that!
I'll try to answer your three responses in one post here.
First, the code that I posted (which showed up in the courier font) was 2 things. The top part was the program output, and the second part was the program listing.
You are correct in saying that the first line of the program is "from __future__ import division". (FYI, one of Python's biggest faults, in my opinion, is integer division. This fault has been fixed in Python 3, but I think most installations are on version 2 (2.5, 2.6, 2.7...), and so you need the line "from __future__ import division" so that division works properly. It's the difference of 3/2 being equal to 1 vs. 1.5. I want math to be accurate (3/2 = 1.5), so I include that line.)
The next section (about 7 lines, starting with def choose...) is a function definition, calculating how many combinations you come up with, when you have a certain size pool that you choose from. For instance, if you choose 3 items from a pool of 5, that would be choose(5,3), and would return 10. There are 10 ways to choose 3 items from a group of 5 (if you don't care what order you choose them in). The math in this example is 5*4*3/3/2.
The next line, win=((56,5),(46,1)) , is the definition of Mega Millions. For Mega Millions, out of the numbers 1-56, you choose 5 numbers, and out of 1-46, you choose 1 number. You WIN if you get the 5 and 1 correct. So I called the field "win". Stupid name. This is the ONLY line you need to change, to adapt for other lotteries where you draw numbers from 2 pools.
The next line (combinations = ) calculates how many DIFFERENT lotto tickets are available.
The win chart is taken from the website. I use this for payouts. For example, 5,0,250000 means if you get 5 right (of the first draw) and 0 right (the mega ball), then you win $250,000.
Then there are a couple of print statements that should be self-explanatory. The 2nd one is a little long and wrapped. The "int(combinations)" should be part of the second print statement.
The program is designed to print out the payout and probability chart that appears on the Mega Millions site. I wanted to make sure my calculations matched their official calculations. They do.
As I am printing the chart, I calculate certain values for later use. And I initialize them prior to the loop. winners=1 and payouts=0 sets these two initial values. winners is tracking how many winning ticket combinations there are. I start it at 1, to account for the 1 combination that is a jackpot winner.
Payouts is an accumulation of all of the winning payouts for all of the possible winning ticket combinations. Since I don't know what the jackpot is, I set payouts to 0, ignoring for the moment that the jackpot will be part of the payout (I'll come back to this on the last line of the program).
Then I loop through for each line in the win_chart. I am calculating the odds by calculating how many ticket combinations meet the parameters to be considered a winner. For instance, in Mega Millions, there are 45 possible $250,000 tickets where you get 5 right but the Mega Ball wrong. So the first time through the loop, winning_combos gets set to 45.
So, of course, with 45 possible winning tickets out of 175 Million total combinations, the chance you win $250,000, is "1 in 175M/45."; 1 in the total number of possible combinations divided by 45. The line "chance = ..." performs that calculation.
Then I print that out.
Then I increment the number of winning combinations (on the line "winners +=..."). This accumulates the number of possible winning tickets (so that later I can say that the odds of winning something are 1 in 40).
The "payouts +=..." line accumulates how much gets paid out to all ticket winners, if each possible ticket combination is purchased once.
So, I know how much it costs to buy every
oh, the (not irony - what's the word I'm looking for?)
The fact that you caught yourself and DIDN'T use the i-word was actually quite ironic.
I wish I could mod you up.
I've been using this line for technologies ever since the 70's.
Compuserve? remember the CB?
AOL? remember the CB?
MySpace? remember the CB?
Facebook? remember the CB?
Trouble is, no one under 30 remembers the CB.
It was huge - the hottest thing, everyone was going to have one. Sales skyrocketed. All the cool people had them. Even Grandmas were on CB. Movies were made about CBs (Smoky and the Bandit being the hugest). Then it fizzled.
Sounds a lot like Facebook.
Sure, CB's are still around. Facebook will be around in ten years, too. But if I were Zukerberg, I'd be selling now too. It will NEVER get hotter; it has no place to go but down. Even if not, only a fool would have 99+% of his net worth tied up in one stock.