[Foundation-l] Data retention

Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton at gmail.com
Wed Sep 17 16:36:57 UTC 2008


> So there is a one percent chance of initiating a checkuser data purge,
> and a 0.99 chance that all data will remain intact for the time being.
> This 99% may seem high, but it becomes negligible over a month. I
> don't know what the exact odds is as I cannot find a calculator that
> gives me a non-zero result for "0.99 ^ (6.5 million)" [4].

0.99^6500000=5.819478586x10^-28372

To put that in perspective, if we'd done this every month since the
universe began (about 14 billion years ago), the probability of there
being at least one month in which it didn't get purged would be...
hmmm... "0". So much for Maple...



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