Pathetic!

Peter Mucha has an article at Philly.com about Mega Millions being worth 'only' $10,000:

The pre-Thanksgiving drawing in Mega Millions proved to be a real turkey: the highest prize awarded was $10,000, and only a single person won it.
No one matched all the numbers, 10, 11, 29, 47 and 56, with a Mega Ball of 4, so Friday's jackpot will be worth sixty million.
No one matched the first five either, so forget a million or two million dollar winners.
Actually, such stingy results are far from a fluke for Mega Millions. It also happened last Friday. A $10,000 top prize. Just a single winner. And $10,000 was tops five other times since April. The winners even paid an extra buck for the Megaplier, the prize multiplier option. Without the Megaplier, the top prize for any of these dates would have been $5,000, not close to enough for a new car. It's less than the lowest 50/50 prize at any Eagles game this season.
And Mega Millions is played by millions of people in forty-four states and the District of Columbia. In New Jersey, a fairly lottery-happy state, no Mega Millions player has won more than $1,000.
Something is screwy about Mega Millions' prize structure. Naturally, the enormous jackpots are extremely tough to win. Totally understandable. Winning a fortune, after all, is the dream of most Mega Millions players.
The next prize level, though, is also often missed, because the odds, frankly, are horrible.
In Mega Millions, the chances of winning a million are one in about eighteen million.
Compare that to Powerball: about one in five million per $2 ticket, one in ten million per dollar. That helps explain why Powerball regularly produces millionaires and Mega Millions doesn't.
In the last six Mega Millions drawings since the last jackpot winner only one person has won more than $25,000.
Powerball's last six drawings produced sixteen winners of one or two million dollars. Not once was the top winner from the third tier. Not that Powerball's generous with third-tier prizes, either. The base prize is $10,000, which the Power Play can multiply as high as $50,000. You might suspect the third prizes are lousy because every extra penny is funneled into big jackpots. After all, the bigger they get, the more lottery fever whips into a frenzy.
Not entirely. A lot of money is funneled to the bottom of the prize chart, too.
More than one-third of the $2.5 million won Tuesday went into one-dollar prizes without the Megaplier, or two-dollar prizes with it.
But are those prizes, or refunds? Many players probably give it right back by buying more tickets.
One in every 14.7 tickets wins a prize, Mega Millions pitches. Technically true, but only about one in ten thousand dollar tickets will win more than five dollars. If the most you ever won in Mega Millions was five dollars, now you know why.

Rico says that ten grand would be nice right about now, but they're right; he'd rather it had two commas in it...