These people seem to have the appropriate intentions - to stay the hell out of the media's glare, and funky neighbors paths.  God bless them, and may they and their family enjoy every bit of this Jackpot!  Smart people it looks like.

    You can remain anonymous in NJ. Wonder why they didn't go that route?

As far as I know the QP machines don't care about duplicates, but maybe if all of the available sets are used they have no choice but have some numbers sold twice. I can't imagine the MM Lottery suddenly stopping QP sales due to "all available sets taken." They'd also have to check the #s you pick yourself and say "sorry, can't use these - already taken". Nobod would like that! I don't know how many total tickets were out for that drawing. More likely is just that even a very fast central computer could not spit out random sets fast enough while checking a vast central data file what with all of the machines going at once and numbers pouring in from all over. It might be feasible on a smaller local game, but there is really no reason why to forbid duplicates. Nobody's saying, oh drat, it was only 183 million!

If I won and I stayed in the house and away from everyone that would become boring and depressing. I could do that now without winning 1 cent. Some kind of social life, activities and fun (within reason) are necessary. It's just a matter of common sense, knowing who your real friends are and what places or situations to stay away from.

But QP's aren't generated by a "central server".  They are generated on the green machine that you buy them from.

Since the entire purpose of QP's is to choose the combinations randomly, they definitely "don't care" about duplicates. Like everything else about the lottery duplicates are a simple function of probability, and you start getting duplicates an extremely long time before you come close to using each combination once.  Once 0.01% of the combinations have been sold, if all subsequent combinations were picked randomly each of them would have a 0.01% chance of matching one of the previously picked combinations. 0.01% is 1/10,000th,which sound pretty small, but 1/10,000th of the tickets sold in even a small MM drawing is substantial number. 1/10,000th of the possible combinations is 17,571 tickets, and even a small MM drawing sells that many in less than 10 minutes (as an average over a 4 day sales period). Sell the first 17,571 tickets and we should expect that 1 of every 10,000 tickets sold after that will match one sold in the first 10 minutes. Sell 53,000 more tickets and  there should be 3 that match one from the first 10 minutes. Then you've sold 4/10,000th of the combinations and you would expect to have 4 repeats for each 10,000 tickets. Just one hour after sales started you could expect a dozen repeated combinations. By the time sales stop there will be at least 13 million tickets sold, and about 0.5%, or 65,000, of the combinations are likely to have been repeated.

That's what we can expect when the jackpot is under $20 million. Once 50% of the combinations have been played we would expect that every other ticket sold would match a previous combination. For the huge sales that went with the huge jackpot about 70% of combinations would have been played, so of the last 100 tickets sold we should expect that 70 of them were duplicates of a combination that had already been played. The chances of having two winners is the same as the percentage of combinations that have been sold twice, so there was about a 20% chance of having two winners.

That's all based on numbers being selected randomly, but  not everybody selects their numbers randomly. Combinations with birthday numbers or other numbers that a lot of people consider significant are even more likely to be repeated, possibly many times.