I have never heard this extension of Murphy's Law before, but if you have a reference point I can start from I would enjoy tracing it back to understand how it developed.

I love eventuality, and rephrasing this law into "All that can happen will happen. It sounds better to me as its not as negative as using the word "wrong" .

Anything that can go right is a matter of luck. Anything that can go wrong is a matter of fate. This is how I interpret Murphy's law. However I will not debate this. Take it on faith.

Murphy's law comes from the fact that some technician didn't know what he's doing and the engineer Murphy, said "If there is a way to do it wrong, he'll find it". The law was then immortalized from then on.

As to the outcome that Rand Johnson is referring is the Law of Large Numbers. In other words, if you take that there is a particular probability that something can fail, then it will eventually fail when doing a series of experiments, although there is no given time frame when that problem will occur. Take this in reverse, if there is a probability that something will can fail, then there is a probability that something will go right. Hence, you can apply the same logic and expect something right to occur under the same experiments.

The general idea is that the event of failure is usually of low probability and so the expected result is success. Hence, Murphy's Law, "if it can go wrong it will."

Although, do not be fooled into the Gambler's fallacy in this statement. Just because you have flipped a fair coin on heads 500,000 times in a row, does not mean that your next flip has any better probability of getting a tail than before. The probability of flipping a tail is still 50% as before. But eventually if the coin is fair, you will flip a tail.

Murphy's law is not about the universe, but about human perception of the universe, an encapsulation of fatalistic cynicism and selective perception of probability.  It's opposite would be a statement of cautious optimism.  "If anything can go right, it will go right, but only if you keep on trying."

AAAAAnnnnnd back on topic. I sure hope that patch comes out today or tomorrow! I mean, come on, they've had a whole weekend for Q&A and then Monday on top of it!! Like who needs more time to test quality than that?!?

225.3 MB patch in progress!

Now!!

See!? I told you they had plenty of time to Q&A this puppy! Really looking forward to checking this one out.