If you stopped to pick up the penny you'd get hit by lightning and fail to cash in your lottery ticket while getting bitten by a moose!
brucee On Fri, Mar 7, 2008 at 6:45 AM, Paul Lalonde <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > You don't have to care about the chance of a collision. Work out the > expected value of the collision by estimating the maximum that might > cost you. I'll go nuts, and claim that a collision will cost *one > BILLION* dollars. > Not checking for a collision, assuming a 2**-90 collision rate (which is > a huge over-estimate, but that I've seen bandied about here), you wind > up with an expected dollar cost of 2**-60 dollars on that collision. > > I don't pick up pennies in the street. I certainly won't dedicate any > more brainpower to this silliness. > > Paul > > Enrico Weigelt wrote: > > * Bruce Ellis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > >> it's even sillier, if everyone bought 1,000,000 times as many tickets > >> guess how that would change the probabilities. not at all! > >> > > > > The main problem is: statistics is not reliable. You just can > > guess how many times approx. something will happen if you take > > a really large number of tries. You can never be sure for a > > single case. > > > > > > cu > > > >
