Iowa Computer Programmer Gets 25 Years For Lottery Scam (desmoinesregister.com) 131
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Des Moines Register: Eddie Tipton, the Iowa brainpower behind a case of multi-state lottery fraud, will spend up to 25 years in prison for rigging "random" drawing jackpots. It's unknown how many years Tipton will actually spend in prison. He could be paroled within three or four years, his attorneys noted. Tipton, 54, was a longtime computer programmer in the Iowa offices of the Multi-State Lottery Association who installed software that allowed him to pick winning numbers in some of the nation's most popular lottery drawings. His scam began to unravel following unsuccessful attempts to anonymously collect a $16.5 million Hot Lotto ticket that was purchased at a Des Moines convenience store in 2010. "I certainly regret," Tipton said. "It's difficult even saying that. With all the people I know behind me that I hurt and I regret it. I'm sorry."
well i know one thing (Score:2)
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At 54, he's someone who didn't like his job.
Heh. Makes you wonder how many dissatisfied people did a one-off, and didn't get caught!
Re: well i know one thing (Score:1)
What a jerk! (Score:1, Funny)
He should be ashamed for scamming stupid people out of their money...oh wait.
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These people glorify gambling in the eyes of children everywhere with billboards and commercials that look more like they're advertising Chuck'e Cheese than a addictive drug with almost zero (by almost zero, I mean zero... it's designed like that) chance
Re:What a jerk! (Score:5, Insightful)
Historically, whenever I've wanted to call someone stupid and embarrass them publicly, I ask them "What's your lotto numbers" and when they respond, I say "I don't know what's worse... that you're the type of person that plays lotto or that you think that by choosing your numbers it will increase your odds"
Although choosing your numbers won't increase your odds, it can improve the expectation value of your winnings (if you win a shared prize). For example, since many people choose numbers that have to do with dates, by picking random numbers that cannot be dates will decrease your expected loss value of playing the lottery. Doing this exercise once making them your "lotto number" is an efficient way to get this small improvement...
Anyhow, you can now return to your standard mocking program...
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IIRC you can also avoid playing 1,2,3,4,5,6 because something like 50k people play it each week which really eats into your share.
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No. I think that's mathematically unsound.
If you want to go on a thought exercise, imagine you're ...
1) Rolling one die, and always trying to hit a predetermined number.
2) Rolling two dice, and trying to get them to match.
The odds will be exactly the same.
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Look, you'll believe it better if you do it yourself. Just type it out in Excel. With cut and paste it's about 8 seconds of work. You'll see 36 combinations with two dice, of which 6 are hits and 30 are not. 6/36 = 1/6, which is the same thing as a static die.
Basically, the idea that there are "two moving targets" is wrong. There's a target. It doesn't matter if the target is moving or not, because the odds of any of the targets is the same. It doesn't matter if you always pick 6, always pick 1, or have som
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And if you still don't believe that, dumb it down further to heads and tails.
Do you really think that you're more likely to win if you always pick tails, than if you flip two coins and see if they match? It's 50% either way.
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I can't wrap my mind around two moving targets having equal odds as one moving target and one stationary target.
Imagine that instead of rolling the two (six-sided) dice together you roll them one at a time. Same result, right? The timing shouldn't make any difference. When you roll the first die any result will serve, so the probability of success is 100% and the problem can be simplified to the single-die case: you're trying to match a fixed number, which happens to be the result of the first roll. In the end it doesn't matter how the first value is selected. It wouldn't even make a difference if one die was loaded,
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No.
Each roll of the dice is completely independent. The odds of getting 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 are exactly the same on any given day - even if they come in yesterday. Equally, each possibility is equally possible. It doesn't matter at all what you pick... ...except for commonly played numbers. If one of those do come in, you split the jackpot with many other people.
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Wouldn't always picking the same numbers also slightly increase your chances of winning
No
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You know what? I'm stupid! The state "fixed" this like the "Bobs" in Office Space. If you're under 18, if you win your ticket is void and you can't collect your prize. Of course, you don't get your ticket money back.
They fixed the glitch!
Innocent! (Score:3)
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The whole US health care scam runs to the tune of $2T a year. Nobody in jail. Everybody whining that they need another blood funnel called "healthcare" jammed in as well..
Re:He should have robbed banks for less jail time (Score:4, Insightful)
Killing someone or popping off a minimart isn't cheating the government out of taxes.
Rigging the lottery could impact lotto ticket sales which could cost the government millions in lost revenue from taking advantage of the poor and the weak.
Publicly flailing this guy for messing with the system builds confidence in the people that the government is out to protect their interests and guarantee their 1 in 292,201,338 (powerball) or as they say "The overall odds of winning a prize are 1 in 17.22" which means that since the vast majority of prizes is the cost of your ticket back, you would have to spend $17.22 to win $1.
I can't find ANYPLACE that explains Iowa State's Megamillions game play or odds. If they are similar to most others, then it's probably something like 1 in 7.1 million odds. The break-even chances are probably in the ballpark of 1 in 15 overall.
So that being said... the only people who would ever play this are people who are simply too stupid to figure out that that $5 a week they spend is really $260 a year or $5200 every 20 years which is a luxury cruise for two plus airfare when you retire. So, after 50 years of work, you can be guaranteed at least a little bit of the rich life... or you can pay the stupid tax and wonder why when you retire that you can't do those nice things.
The government will always punish harshly anyone who threatens their ability to tax the stupid.
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So that being said... the only people who would ever play this are people who are simply too stupid to figure out that that $5 a week they spend is really $260 a year or $5200 every 20 years which is a luxury cruise for two plus airfare when you retire. So, after 50 years of work, you can be guaranteed at least a little bit of the rich life... or you can pay the stupid tax and wonder why when you retire that you can't do those nice things.
I think you're leaving out the desperation factor. If you know for a fact the wealth you need to do anything substantial with your life is based on chance encounters, who you know and how well you can sell out others without getting caught and you have a reasonable assessment of your life while not being born into a billionaire family, you know that's not you. It's a case of 0% chance of ever achieving anything of note vs a 1-in-a-few-hundred-million chance. The lottery is infinitely better odds than zer
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Lighten up. Looking at everything in life as a math formula or a calculated risk is boring. Some of my fondest memories were of doing things that probably weren't a very good idea.
Once the Lottery gets up this high, casual people start buying tickets, which really makes the jackpot jump. That's usually when I will buy a ticket, too. I realized the stupidity behind the a) chances of winning, and b) the fact that a shot at a mere 300 million isn't worthy of my $2. However, it does make a great escape, im
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So that being said... the only people who would ever play this are people who are simply too stupid to figure out that that $5 a week they spend is really $260 a year or $5200 every 20 years which is a luxury cruise for two plus airfare when you retire. So, after 50 years of work, you can be guaranteed at least a little bit of the rich life... or you can pay the stupid tax and wonder why when you retire that you can't do those nice things.
Here is what I disagree with on this part. I understand why you want to call those who play lottery stupid because majority of them wasted their money on it. However, would you still call those who won "stupid" too even though they may not know the maths you explained? Your maths shows that the risk is very high, and it is correct. But why do people still play? Because if they think that the reward is high enough for the gamble (subjective feeling), then they will play. Would that be called stupid? I don't
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The slashdot response you are making fun of is driven by the strange quirk of US law that often committing an offense with a computer will be much more harshly punished than an equivilent offense without.
As a trivial example, downloading a song from a p2p network may be punished with up to five years imprisonment under the NET act - substantially longer than walking into the store and shoplifting the CD.
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His big mistake (Score:5, Insightful)
(Outside of deciding the break the law in the first place, of course)
My big mistake (Score:2)
My big mistake was to mine reddcoins instead of mooncoins.
Uh, wait...
don't go for the big prize keep it small under X (Score:2)
don't go for the big prize keep it small under X that can be paid out by the local lotto store is unlike to rise a flag even more so then there like 1000's of them in a urban area. At least 30+ within 4 miles.
The big prizes lead to audits
Re:don't go for the big prize keep it small under (Score:4, Insightful)
That's was my reaction. Take out just enough, in cash, that with your probably meager pay you're doing pretty well for yourself. Then I noticed where he's from: Iowa. If you lived in New York City you could cash a couple dozen lottery tickets a week an never visit the same lottery agent twice, but if you lived in Cedar Rapids you'd get noticed eventually.
Still, trying to take out over a million bucks is crazy. In most states you can't take a large lottery prize anonymously, which he should have known.
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In most states you can't take a large lottery prize anonymously, which he should have known.
True, but I believe there are tricks around that. A competent lawyer can create a trust and the trustee collects and manages the winnings on your behalf.
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What he needed was a trusted accomplice.
Someone he could trust to play it straight while collecting the winnings and be fair about dividing up the spoils.
Have your agent do his/her thing, collect your share and play out your exit strategy.
Retire to an island somewhere.
And historically, this scheme hasn't been working very well because of human greed. Whoever is willing to be accomplice, the person is greedy. When the person sees that much money in hand, the person wants it all -- human nature. Very rare to see this scheme succeed...
Re: don't go for the big prize keep it small under (Score:2)
If it succeeded, we wouldn't know.
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If it succeeded, we wouldn't know.
Right. But human nature usually urges them to brag or disclose to someone else. Still not easy to keep secret. So it is still rare...
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I wouldn't bet on it being all that rare. This definitely falls under white collar crime, which gets a lot less press coverage and consequentially less funding, than violent street crime. Just look at the numbers for bank robberies from the FBI. The last time I looked in a good year the FBI was only able to identify half of the suspects. That doesn't even equate to catching half of the suspects. Bank Robberies are unlikely to not be reported as the FBI is responsible for them, and so you can bet that the nu
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> But human nature usually urges them to brag or disclose to someone else.
Does it?
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Was he actually legally allowed to play the games to begin with? I would think not, if you work for the company/agency in charge of the games.
You see this a lot for contests were employees that work for the company cannot take part, or casinos which usually don't allow their workers to play games at the casinos they work for.
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Okay, good point. Related, how does this not get audited and caught before it gets implemented? Shouldn't there be more checks than one guy could bypass?
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I don't know who he thinks he is. Only CEOs of mega corps and politicians can get away with robbing the system. Not peons like him!
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... was going back for more. If you're going to rig a lottery, rig just one lottery, one whose prize will be big enough so you don't have to go back for more later. Then delete all traces of your hackery and never do anything illegal again. Otherwise a pattern starts to develop, leading to you getting caught.
Probably more sensible would be to rig it so you can get small payouts whenever you want. Most folks wouldn't consider that horribly suspicious, and if someone catches you winning $1,000 twice, you can just claim you play a lot and are lucky. You can even get other people (a different person each time) to go pick up your winnings, with a reasonable expectation they won't run off with it or turn you in. Your only real worry would be an IRS audit.
However, NOBODY is going to look at a former lottery program
the ball based ones are harder to rig and easier t (Score:4, Informative)
the ball based ones are harder to rig and easier to test for loaded balls. Not some software with an RGN that can be hacked or worked out due to it being buggy.
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Ingenious of you to randomly shuffle the letters so that only crypto-experts like me know what you're talking about!
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RNG
Joe_Dragon was clearly using the French ordering. Randome Nombre généré .
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You don't rig the drawing. You find a way to insert a record of the winning number being sold after the drawing. You get some blank lottery ticket paper and print yourself that winning ticket.
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the ball based ones are harder to rig and easier to test for loaded balls.
The balls can be manipulated in a lot more ways than loading them. Imperfect roundness, surface tension, expandability with temperature changes, vibration when exposed to ultrasounds - there are so many ways that are very hard to detect that may skew the odds of some balls being picked more often than others.
But you still have a computer that has all the sold tickets registered, at least with a checksum to prevent forgery, and that's a big fat target. It doesn't help much if the balls are random if the t
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The balls can be manipulated in a lot more ways than loading them. Imperfect roundness, surface tension, expandability with temperature changes, vibration when exposed to ultrasounds
More difficult to do discretely. Even if you work in a position where you have access to the drawing machine and the balls, it's a lot more likely that some coworker notices you swapping balls with doctored balls. Not to mention the need to have them manufactured in such a way that they look exactly like the real balls. No off color, off smell, off sound when they bump, etc. And don't think about going to the same manufacturer as the original balls, he'd likely mention the strange order to your employer.
- there are so many ways that are very hard to detect that may skew the odds of some balls being picked more often than others.
...
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I'd hope they go pretty far to prevent that from happening.
1) Balls are cheap, so you keep a dozen sets of them, split into two pools, the use pool and the hold pool. A die is rolled to choose the set of balls used in the drawing. After the drawing, the die is rolled again and a hold pool box is put into the use pool and the recently used box of balls goes into the hold pool. This makes sure nobody knows which balls will get used and no way to keep a single set of balls in use consistently.
2) Balls are
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1) Balls are cheap, so you keep a dozen sets of them, split into two pools, the use pool and the hold pool. A die is rolled to choose the set of balls used in the drawing. After the drawing, the die is rolled again and a hold pool box is put into the use pool and the recently used box of balls goes into the hold pool. This makes sure nobody knows which balls will get used and no way to keep a single set of balls in use consistently.
It's still a problem if the balls all come from the same manufacturer.
And, even if you manage to keep different sets, some of which are not bad, the bad ones are going to be used every now and then. That's enough to skew the results in the long run.
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More difficult to do discretely. Even if you work in a position where you have access to the drawing machine and the balls, it's a lot more likely that some coworker notices you swapping balls with doctored balls.
Exploits like these are more likely to happen at the manufacturing side. (Just like with slot machines and voting machines, but I repeat myself.)
... and this will show up on some simple statistical analysis.
There aren't enough drawings performed for a skew to be statistically significant. That, say, the number 8 is picked twice as often as the number 17 in 100 drawings is not in itself alarming. It would be more alarming if the distribution was too uniform.
Two things (Score:5, Interesting)
1) This is why the names of lottery winners are made public. There may be an exception or two, but the vast majority of states require the person's name to be made known.
2) In Pennsylvania, it is illegal for employees of the Lottery Commission, and their immediate families, to play any lottery games, even the small(er) daily drawings and scratch off tickets.
Sure, he could have given the big prize to someone else to collect, but then he'd either have to split it or risk the person keeping it all because he couldn't say anything.
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2) In Pennsylvania, it is illegal for employees of the Lottery Commission, and their immediate families, to play any lottery games, even the small(er) daily drawings and scratch off tickets.
That sounds like an unconstitutional law there. Prohibiting an employee is one thing, but prohibiting other people, especially adults, is quite another. Does that include parents or adult children? It wasn't their choice for the employee to take that job, and has no bearing on them.
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Many anti-discriminatory laws are statutory rights rather than raw constitutional ones (and those that are are usually derived from an explicit amendment rather than implied in general.)
So there is nothing stating some inherent right to partake in a lottery if you have a relative who works for it. Meanwhime there is probably plenty of evidence of scam behavior involving relatives, so the reasoning behind the law isn't pulled out of the blue.
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You don't have a right to a contract with a particular company
But this is different: as I understand it, the lottery is run by state governments, or at least under the auspices of a state government. It's not just some private for-profit company like McDonald's running a Monopoly game promotion, or a casino. Governments should not have the right to refuse service to just about anyone.
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You have a legal right to engage in lawful activities, that's close enougfhtht for me.
You also have a legal right to choose to NOT engage in lawful activities. In this case, employees of the lottery commission choose NOT to play the lottery, and in exchange, they get a paycheck from their employer. The immediate family also presumably benefits from this compensation and also waives their "legal right" to play the lottery.
It's simple: if you want to play the lottery, don't work for the lottery commission. There are very similar rules in most areas of legalized gambling; I know that Vegas a
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What's "immediate family'? Are adult children included? How did they waive their right to play? They're not benefiting from the compensation.
It's simple: if you want to play the lottery, don't work for the lottery commission.
This is fine logic for the employee. For other adults, not so much. If my nearly elderly mother got a job with the lottery compensation tomorrow, why would that preclude me from buying a lottery ticket? I had nothing to do with that choice of hers. And the lottery isn't a private
Re: Two things (Score:2)
That was tough to find out. Google eventually turned up NH's rules, which were more specific. It only applies, for them, if you're in the same household. Other States may vary, but that's what NH does.
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And that's fine; that's no different from being a family member of a McDonald's employee and winning their monopoly promotion or whatever. McD's will simply refuse to pay out. They have that right.
That's not what's being discussed here. The prior poster asserted that it was **illegal** for family members to play. That means you go to jail! That's unconstitutional IMO. (Or, the poster was incorrect about it being illegal.)
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I have a cousin who is a manager of some sort in the Kansas lottery system. Her mom told me that she and her husband are not allowed to play lottery games due to their relationship to her.
It makes sense. If they win a big lottery, how can you guarantee that the employee didn't have a conflict of interest where they rigged a game, her parents win a lottery, and they share the money with her either now, or later if she gets any inheritance?
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You don't, but that's not the problem. What happens if her husband decides to buy a ticket anyway? Are they going to throw him in jail? That's my problem here.
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You've got it backwards.
It's: You are prohibited from playing the lottery if you have a family member who works for them.
And this is a pretty long-running type of condition that's used in all sorts of situations. I'm sure it's been tested in courts. Most family members (and persons living in the same househod -- i.e., roommates) of employees of a radio station or any affiliated or partnered company aren't able to take part in radio promotions or contests either.
When you don't have a prohibition like this, i
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I don't buy it, sorry.
What is McDonald's or a radio station going to do if a family member ignores this and plays anyway? Simple: they do nothing unless they win. Then if they do win, the company simply rejects them, and moves to the runner-up. The radio station or McDonald's do NOT have the power to throw someone in jail for ignoring their rule. These are not laws, they're rules.
According to the prior poster, this thing about the lottery is a *law*; he specifically said it was *illegal* for family memb
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He couldn't threaten to report the other guy, but he could threaten to commit crimes against him.
The other guy could do the same in return, but would he really want to go down that path, when there is $16M to share.
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He regrets it (Score:2)
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Probably because if he doesn't state it, then it reflects badly upon his parole hearings. They're real big on making sure you regret your actions, so it's best to fake it if you don't.
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Are lotteries conducted by computer now? (Score:5, Interesting)
I thought this is why they have the video of people pulling the ping pong balls out of hoppers. I know at least Powerball (which is a MUSL lottery, same as where this guy worked), operates that way. It could still be scammed, but it requires physical access to tamper with the balls.
If a computer is picking the numbers it seems like a conflict of interest since the list of known printed tickets could also be interfaced with the computer.
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I of course can't prove this, but this isn't really a concern to me as a potential lottery player.
Honestly if the balls are biased to some outcome, great. All of the numbers are available online back to the 90's -- write a python script that tells you the 'good' numbers and bet them like crazy.
I'd love to find a roulette game which with a slight bias or a craps table with some crooked dice. That's only going to hurt the game operator as you can bet either way in all of these games.
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I worked in the Iowa gambling industry for a bit.
Where I worked, the slots were all digital bingo. At one point they managed to convince a judge or regulator or someone that digital bingo that picked numbers with a computer was legit. And then they convinced someone that putting a bit of a facade in front of the game of bingo was legit. So every time you pull the lever on a slot machine in Iowa, it plays a quick game of bingo and if you win that, the three slots align on what your bingo-winnings resulted
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Commentary on the gambling industry aside, that doesn't seem that shady, at least from a fair game perspective, just like an end around for a lawmaker who said 'bingo is fine' but was deathly afraid of slot machines. It sounds about the same as how they play craps (with perfect 1-in-6 odds per deck) with cards instead of dice in California because some lawmaker freaked out about dice but cards are OK.
So long as your bingo-slot-machine plays a fair game of bingo (fair as can be achieved with a computer'
Got sloppy (Score:1)
Simple solution. Hire somebody to cash the ticket. Both parties get proof that they were conspiring to defraud the lotto, so if one screws the other, they have leverage to tank the whole thing and go to jail. This works provided both are about equally prepared to go to jail - so pick another fat 54-year-old. How old is creimer?
light penaties (Score:1)
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"If you're going to steal, steal big." -My Mom
Tell your mom I want my penis back
In a way i don't blame him (Score:2)