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posted by janrinok on Tuesday June 09 2015, @05:58AM   Printer-friendly
from the don't-laugh-at-geeks! dept.

Several years ago, while doing research for a school project, a group of MIT students realized that, for a few days every three months or so, the most reliably lucrative lottery game in the country was Massachusetts' Cash WinFall, because of a quirk in the way a jackpot was broken down into smaller prizes if there was no big winner. The math whizzes quickly discovered that buying about $100,000 in Cash WinFall tickets on those days would virtually guarantee success. Buying $600,000 worth of tickets would bring a 15%–20% return on investment, according to the New York Daily News.

When the jackpot rose to $2 million, the students bought in, dividing the prize money among group members. But they didn't stop there; they were so successful in their caper that they were eventually able to quit their day jobs and bring in investors to front the money they needed to purchase the requisite number of lottery tickets.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 09 2015, @11:41PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 09 2015, @11:41PM (#194303)

    I inspired myself to fix the problem.
    If anyone else would prefer an explicit warning of MDC content before reading it, here's a quick and dirty way to do it:

    (1) Install FoxReplace [mozilla.org] add-on.
    (2) Turn on Auto-replace on page load from the Tools->FoxReplace menu
    (3) Add the following filter:
    Name: MDC Remover
    URL: *soylnetnews.org*
    Substitution:
        HTML: Input & Output
        RE (regular expression)
        Replace: (MichaelDavidCrawford \(2339\)[^]*?<div id="comment_body_\d+">)([^]*?)</div>
        With: $1MDC Warning:<br><div style="background-color:white;color:white;">$2</div></div>

    That will cause the text of his posts to be rendered as white on white - you can still read them if you highlight it with your mouse.