Portsmouth, we have a problem...
This story was posted on Engadget. What I find most intererting is how the probability of this happening has quite obviously been compared to the chances of winning the lottery with just the one ticket. Is this now regarded as the de-facto measure of not very fucking likely?
UK STB sends out SOS
A digital settop box in the UK recently pulled off a feat that is said to
have odds of "far more than 14 million-to-one" when it somehow broadcast
an SOS distress signal on the very channel that the Royal Airforce uses for
emergencies at sea. A Moray-based helicopter spent two hours searching the
Portsmouth Harbour area for the supposed "distressed vessel" before
ground-based techs at telecom regulator Ofcom were able to trace the signal
to a malfunctioning Freeview box located on dry land. Thankfully for the owner of the box, it sent out a mayday as opposed to broadcasting the international signal for "step up, yo," in which case he/she may have ended up suffering the full wrath of the British war machine.
UK STB sends out SOS
A digital settop box in the UK recently pulled off a feat that is said to
have odds of "far more than 14 million-to-one" when it somehow broadcast
an SOS distress signal on the very channel that the Royal Airforce uses for
emergencies at sea. A Moray-based helicopter spent two hours searching the
Portsmouth Harbour area for the supposed "distressed vessel" before
ground-based techs at telecom regulator Ofcom were able to trace the signal
to a malfunctioning Freeview box located on dry land. Thankfully for the owner of the box, it sent out a mayday as opposed to broadcasting the international signal for "step up, yo," in which case he/she may have ended up suffering the full wrath of the British war machine.
posted by AntToeKnee at 12:02 PM
3 Comments:
Apparently the chances of a set top box sending out an SOS are smaller than winning the lottery, so since that actually happened, winning the lottery is now a dead cert for the owner of the STB! ...at least according to RAF spokesman Michael Mulford as reported on the BBC news online article.
I have another concern with this statistic. How many STB's are there in the country? Surely we are close to 14 million by now, so isn't this kind of thing enevitable?
I should think that was the least of Portsmouth's problems.
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