[Foundation-l] Data retention

[Thomas Dalton]

2008/9/17 Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com>:
>> 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...

After realising that with numbers this small 1st order approximations
are almost exact, it's 9.776724024x10^-28364, which is no more in
perspective than before... I think it's best just to say "It'll never
happen" and be done with it!.