Ok, well you keep being the righteous police of the public interest, and I'll keep reading whatever articles interest me regardless of who submitted them.

Why would you not click on an article just because the author is the one who submitted it?

Yeah, that'd be awful, to have choices like that.

Forget that one person bought 300,000 tickets and instead assume that 300,000 new players each bought a ticket. Are you still upset that more people are playing the game?

I'm not seeing how you're figuring this. My understanding of the game is that the jackpot is capped at $2M and is the only prize that is split if more than one person hits it. All the other prizes (except for the free ticket I guess) increase in size every week the jackpot is at $2M. Eventually all those lesser prizes will have +EV payouts and at some point the game will go +EV. If that wasn't the case, nobody could ever make any money on it. How does more people playing the game change anybody's chance of winning? The odds of hitting any of the payouts are always the same. And how does more money in the pool somehow make payouts lower on average? That can't possibly be true--more money = higher payouts for the lesser prizes, unless there's something I'm missing and at some point all the other prizes cap too and the state just confiscates whatever excess there is.

"The fixed payout of the minor prizes reduces the remaining purse size for the larger prizes." So? That's the case no matter how much is in the prize pool, as long as it's in excess of $2M. The only prize that becomes a worse and worse bet the more people play is the $2M jackpot, because that apparently gets split. And the article claims that's only been hit once in the history of the game anyhow. The people making money are making money because the game has become a positive expectation game. But the only reason they have a good chance of showing a profit is because they buy so many tickets. Each ticket still has a positive expectation, though. It has to, or you couldn't possibly make any money no matter how many tickets you bought (if don't think so, then you must also think it's possible to "sell each unit at a loss, but make up the difference in volume!")

If I routinely play the game each week and only buy one $2 ticket, I get the same (bad) odds every week to hit each of the offered prizes. But when the jackpot goes over $2M and money starts spilling back into the other prizes, my odds suddenly get better and better. At some point, the game goes +EV and the big money players show up and start pouring more and more money into the prize pool. Why would I possibly dislike this? Sure, they're much more likely than I am to make money. But their expected profit per ticket is exactly the same as mine. Unless there's some kind of diminishing returns built into the game (and that would have to be in the form of the non-jackpot prizes eventually capping and any excess money simply disappearing from the prize pool) I don't see how the expected value of each ticket can do anything but increase the more money that goes into the pot. Yes, the $2M jackpot keeps becoming a worse and worse bet the more tickets are sold, because of the higher chance that more people have your exact six numbers. But that is offset by the 5 of 6 and lesser prizes becoming better and better bets. It *has* to be, or else the game would never become positive expectation and the sharps could never win.

Yeah, it's a shame when someone other than the state makes money from the lottery.

Seriously though, the lesser prizes are not split. You get a guaranteed payout from those, based on the amount of rollback from the jackpot being over $2 million. And only once in the history of the game has the jackpot even been hit, apparently. So nobody is taking anything from anybody. No matter how you slice and dice it, the prize pool gets bigger when the sharps play, and the marks still have the same chance of winning as they always did--but now their expected payout if they do hit one of the prizes is much higher.

And honestly, if it killed big money interest in the game, why would the state bother to "fix" this? They get their cut off the top (looks like 40% of the ticket price goes right to them) and then they get their cut in taxes if a Mass resident wins anything. There's absolutely no incentive for them to "fix" this except maybe a misplaced outrage from the marks--who, by the way, are marks no matter what, since they're playing a negative EV game no matter if the sharps are playing or not.

Do you understand that each ticket has the same odds of winning these higher payouts? How does selling more tickets (and increasing the pool, as I said) result in your ticket becoming less likely to win any of these payouts??

I'm still not seeing a problem. Every ticket sold has the same odds of winning. The solution is to STOP PLAYING if it upsets you that the "richies" are coming in and taking "your" money. In fact, the average player should be happy these people come in and pour money into the system. They just made the jackpot bigger, and didn't decrease your odds of winning an iota.

How are you getting poorer? The only way you get any poorer is if you're actually playing the game the sucker's way. Are you? If you are, well then, you deserve to lose. And you'd still lose, even if these people weren't playing. So what's the problem?

I'm just telling you my experience. Hey, I'm glad it's always "just worked" for you. That's not ever been my experience.

Well, then explain to me why every place I've ever worked I've had to maintain several different versions of Java on most servers/desktops because certain apps refuse to work correctly with the most recent version and require an older version? Hell, many apps now go as far as to just install their own version of Java somewhere to get around the fact that their shit probably won't work with whatever version you have have installed.

Currently where I work our time and attendance software (from a major vendor) simply won't work with any version of Java past 1.5. And we keep installs for several different update levels around just in case. I've seen apps that literally will refuse to run unless a very specific version of Java is installed (as in, the code actually checks the Java version, and if it isn't the specific one it wants--not "this version or newer" but literally the specific version it was written for--it bails.)

You've never been a system admin if you think Java is anything but a gigantic pain in the ass.

And unfortunately it infects many, many computers.

Can anybody honestly tell me why people still develop in Java? It's nothing but a gigantic pain in the ass. And why does each new version of the JVM break programs written for previous versions? Is there no backwards compatibility at all??

It's not so much the noise of the buckling spring (although yeah, many people seem to fetishize it anyhow) as it is the tactile feedback. After typing on my Model M for awhile, a typical modern keyboard feels mushy.

Some people are willing to spend extra for a BMW because of the "driving experience." Some people are perfectly happy with their Toyota.

And anyhow, a better answer to that complaint would be to point out that you can still buy the things, brand new. Unicomp still makes them.

No, he's right, it was often a nightmare right up through the early 2000s. It all depended on how well the auto-detect worked--which, unfortunately, was often not well at all. I can recall banging my head against X config files trying to figure out the magic strings to put in that would make my display work.