And of course no ticket diminishes the chance of any other ticket are you arguing with voices in your head or something?

Hmm perhaps I am... :)

I'm about 12 years removed from the class where I first encountered this. I'm a bit rusty on the formulations of permutations and combinations. As I'm typing this, I see my own confusion. For some deranged reason I applied a formulation that describes playing the game anew 50 times, rather than 50 tickets for one game. Kind of laughing at myself now. Cheers.

It's not a liniar relationship. Why don't you roll a few dice and see? For one, the winning combination is picked from one set, with indifferent order. Which means you can't have a repeated number, and they can come in any combination. You can pick exactly 50 different combination on the cards. However, you can choose the same number on different cards, this means that out of the 50 different combinations, you may or may not have overlaps on the digits themselves. That's just one case where it will not line up. Secondly, the individual ticket's chances DO NOT GO UP, individually each ticket has the same chance, but NO TICKET DIMINISHES THE CHANCE OF ANY OTHER TICKET, again, this is because of overlapping possible conbinations. This situation gets even more complicated when you start to concider that you can have 3 tickets, and each one covering only 2 of the winning numbers, but on their own, are not winners (I picked 6 total just for illustrative purposes). This isn't even getting into the math itself. In short, nope, sorry, it ain't how it works, even if you don't believe me.

Replying to myself... all yous forgot how to google. http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=554420. Still don't believe me, do the actual math. Why in the world would think this relationship is liniar is beyond me.

Kids, this is a great example of completely misunderstanding probabilities. You are most definitely are not going to be "50 times more likely to win". It ain't how it works.

Probably the most ignorant thing I've ever read in my life. The delusion is strong with this one.

The word that's used in hebrew for "God" is "Elohim" (roughly, the alphabets are too different to make this transliteration proper). The "him" part at the end of the word indicates that the word is plural (this is just basic grammar). So the very word, as it is written in the bible, is plural to begin with. What I'm saying is that it's not even THAT subtle, it's blatantly stated as "fact".

I suggest to you another stance: The entire question is absolutely meaningless and needs not to be pondererd at all. The main difference from agnosticism is that it's an active refusal to concider the question at all.

All that you see, think and feel is nothing more than a manifistation of the mind, without real substance or identity. All that is seen by the (mind's) eyes is void.

Trying to argue away insanity using logic is insane. Just saying.

I like both. For different reasons. Python's mental model is a bit simpler to reason about usually. Equating modules to files and the like is very clean. With Ruby any object's definition is open, and can be continued in any part of the program. This does make it harder to reason about, but like with many advanced features, this is best used sparingly. It does open the door for other programming syles though. I've seen this applied to create AOP and SOP type programs. Another element I enjoy is the block parameter, which allows you to pass a block of code from the current context as a parameter to any method you're calling. This block could be called at any point within that method's call stack, referring back to objects from the call site.

You're describing inexperienced programmers not understanding the pros and the cons of the available constructs. That does not make the constructs inherintly bad. Attribute definition is done with metaprogramming in ruby, generally, but there's not a lot of confusion as to what the code is doing. It all has to do with conventions and applying them appropriately.

While vid that was amusing... what is it about metaprogramming that is so taboo, specifically?

Pretty sure I meant the same thing by contradicting his statement.

The original question implies that you have to wrap everything withing a class Foo ... end construct, which is false.

Too many people here suffer from butthurt. Detach yourselves from the desire for more butthurt. There are two types of languages: the ones people complain about, and the ones nobody uses. All this butthurt proves this point.