There was a group that did buy up every possible lottery ticket here in Kentucky back in the early 90's. They did it a couple of times before anybody caught on, always only when the lump-sum payoff was enough to cover the tickets plus a significant profit. Once the lotto figured it out they stopped selling the pre-printed lotto tickets, actually catching the group about 80% of the way through another round of tickets. The thieves (thinkers?) (un)fortunately had the winning number already though. I think the major problem with actually doing this is filling out enough tickets in the short time between the jackpot growing large enough and being won. Apparently the tickets used to be procured in a pre-printed format which made this easier somehow. I'm sure someone else could explain it better, I just read about it in the paper over half my life ago. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Dipperstein, Michael" To: Sent: Friday, June 25, 2004 6:16 PM Subject: Re: [OT:] Challenging...(another thought) > > -----Original Message----- > > From: pic microcontroller discussion list > > [mailto:PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU] On Behalf Of T.C. Phelps > > Sent: Friday, June 25, 2004 3:01 PM > > > > I think the more important question is, what is the > > EXPECTATION value of the time required to produce a > > "useful" image? Having a picture of yourself drinking > > coffee with a space alien dressed as John Lennon would > > be cool but if you saw next week's lotto numbers after > > only 20 minutes of CPU time is there really that big a > > push to continue the experiment? Wouldn't you rather > > be surrounded by many beautiful > here> while window shopping for a sports car in Italy? > > > > Huh... maybe I should get cracking on this program. :) > > > > - Todd. > > You'd have no way of knowing if the image was of the winning lotto numbers. > > If you wanted, you could just try long enough to get an image of you surrounded > by many beautiful while window shopping for a sports > car in Italy. > > Years ago I tried to come up with a reasonable calculation of how long it would > take to buy one of every possible lottery ticket. Just in case the jackpot got > big enough to pay for all the tickets. Unfortunately, it didn't seem possible > to buy all the numbers in one week. > > -- > http://www.piclist.com hint: PICList Posts must start with ONE topic: > [PIC]:,[SX]:,[AVR]: ->uP ONLY! [EE]:,[OT]: ->Other [BUY]:,[AD]: ->Ads -- http://www.piclist.com hint: PICList Posts must start with ONE topic: [PIC]:,[SX]:,[AVR]: ->uP ONLY! [EE]:,[OT]: ->Other [BUY]:,[AD]: ->Ads