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Re:Cory Doctorow: Our dangerous statistical ignorance by iamwil on Wednesday May 21, 2008 @06:44PM (#196637)
No, just a mismatch with understanding your wording. With your original wording, it didn't make sense, since each roll would have the same prob, no matter how many times you rolled. That's why I figured you meant that rolls weren't independent from each other.

But it seems that you mean, what's the chance that given x number of rolls, the very last one is a "1" (assuming you only need/want to get rich once). As the number of rolls increase, the chance of that scenerio (a string of non-1s with the last one being 1) becomes smaller and smaller when taken as a whole.

Re:Cory Doctorow: Our dangerous statistical ignorance by SwellJoe on Wednesday May 21, 2008 @07:58PM (#196682)
How else could I possibly mean "keep trying for 10-15 years"? One can't take 2-5 year increments of your life in isolation, since, as you've noted, you only need to get rich once to be rich.

But, I'm glad we're all clear now.