Uhh, I hate to break it to you, but it's a slot machine. It -is- a scam. Lottery games should be played for entertainment purposes only and not investment. The same sort of entertainment you get from going to an arcade for hours on end: the thrill of pushing the buttons on the screen/controller.
They pay out a fixed percent, and the lottery commissions work extremely hard to ensure that the percentage is perfect. I can't imagine a casino being any less stringent, or being more fair, than a government-run lottery commission. On the flip side, most of those lottery machines run Linux, and watching a dmesg scroll across one of their screens is quite enjoyable, especially when you enter its test mode and play the ogg files on it that make up the background tracks, or watch the game load a series of png graphic sprites. That "Walk Like An Egyptian" song sure does get stuck in your head after a few hours of it though.
Why would Los Angeles want people's hair?
(:
The floppy did grow a bit, it was just too little, too late. Don't you remember the Superdisk LS-120 Zipdisk killer? It was a whole 20 MB bigger than an Iomega Zip100, and then Zip released their Zip250. So awesome I almost switched back from Zip because it was backward compatible with regular 1.44 MB floppies. Sadly, it was too late, I replaced my Zip drive with a 4x CD-RW as the Zip250s were coming out. Later the Zip 750 came out which beat out my 640 MB CDs but at too great a cost. I was almost sorry to see both those magnetic technologies react too slowly to optical media. Sure they had Jazz drives that offered gigabyte storage, but optical had won due to lower costs and nearly ubiquitous compatibility.
Now we see the wheel rotating again where Flash media is a better deal than optical media, and opitcs are reacting too slowly to electronic media. I mean, even if every PC had a blu-ray player, and blu-ray disks were only $5 each, I think at this point people would prefer the small form-factor, reliability, and reusability of their microSDHC cards in USB readers and Lexar Jumpdrives.
A list is only as strong as its weakest link. -- Don Knuth