[sliverstorm]

Somewhere in the range that your laptop will almost certainly never see even a single event, but a very large datacenter or colo will have multiple events a month.

There is a lot of disagreement on bitflips from ionizing radiation. They are unequivocally real, and unequivocally very rare. Even when they do happen, a large portion of the chip is dark a lot of the time, and a lot of the live data in the chip is simply thrown away and never used. (Think prefetching) Some bits, if flipped, will break something but will not corrupt the disk and the machine will be able to recover.

Nobody really knows for certain exactly how big of a problem they are and how often they happen- it's all statistics, and it depends on things like where on the globe your computer is, what your building is made of, and what phase of the solar cycle we are in. It even depends on workload. Anybody who claims to know for certain...

[morgosmaci]

Try multiple times a second. This guy made a hobby of taking advantage of cosmic radiation bit flips to cause dns lookup problems and capturing data.

http://dinaburg.org/bitsquatting.html

[sliverstorm]

Multiple times a second, if your pool of hardware is "all the internet connected hardware in the world"! Neat experiment.

Also, FWIW that experiment will include people subject to bit errors in DRAM, not just in the CPU- and I would even guess that bit errors are more common in DRAM than SRAM given their electrical characteristics (a tiny floating capacitor vs. two inverters driving eachother)

[ch4ch4]

Bit flips aren't solely caused by radiation- it could also be caused by clock skew or a failing crystal oscillator on an overheating router or something...