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Originally Posted by BigBen
The lottery allows us to dream. I buy a ticket every once in a while (just one ticket, since it was proven mathematically that my chances are the same with one ticket or a thousand).
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I don't mean to threadjack, but I did want to counter this misinformation.
Let's say that you're playing Pick Three, where you select three numbers from zero to nine. There are 10^3 (1,000) possible numbers. Thus if you buy one ticket, your odds of winning are 1/1000. If you buy ten tickets, your odds are 10/1000, or 1/100. Buying ten times as many tickets makes you... ten times more likely to win! (Caveat: if you buy the same number more than once, this rule does not hold true.)
The same rule applies for lotteries with more numbers, too: It's just that the difference between one out of 10 billion and one out of 100 billion aint really significant in the real world.
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The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. ~John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
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