The ticket companies may not be able to fully exploit price discrimination, but the scalper is taking on the risk that he won't be able to sell all the tickets he buys. As an ad-hoc broker, he carries that inventory risk so that the organizers don't have to. It's really not much different from hotels selling reservation blocks to discount sites at very low prices and the discount sites eat the cost if they can't fill them up.
If I were in the concert business, I'd be fighting to make "scalping" legal in every way I could.
As printers, we do CT images at 300dpi or higher, but we don't print at 300dpi.
150lpi AM screening does fine for images, but try rasterizing your fonts at 300dpi and run them through a 150lpi AM screen. It will be visibly poor quality.
Even 300dpi rasterized fonts into a stochastic FM system are going to look fairly poor by print standards.
In reality, we print text at much higher raster resolutions, more like 1200dpi or 2400dpi in the final post-screening plate render at most shops.
If you handle 1-bit TIFFs, you'll see this as well, none of them are going to be 300dpi, because that's just not enough resolution for text.
In a lot of places, you aren't even in front of a judge if you want to contest the ticket.
They make you show up, contest the ticket, have it rubber stamped anyway, and then appeal before you can even get in front of a real judge. It's one of the things the NMA is fighting against right now, to try to restore the right to have a normal trial for these speed and red light camera tickets.
Of course things like "due process" cut down on the profitability of these automatic tickets, which is why they try to keep you from getting a fair trial. If enough people fight these tickets, they will go away. Remove the profit and they won't keep doing it.
Yeah, here in Virginia and the area around here, we don't get much in the way of natural disasters.
A little flooding if you are stupid enough to build in a flood area, the occasional tornado that usually doesn't get very far before the mountains and trees break it up. etc.
Nuclear plants don't need much fuel. Moving it around is a negligible cost. Nuclear fuel isn't very radioactive either. You can hold uranium fuel rods in your hand safely.
No one is going to sort through millions of pointless memos about employee picnics and birthday party announcements on the off chance that there's something potentially valuable to someone somewhere.
When a person buys a space heater or oven, it's their responsibility to know that it uses a lot of electricity.
Your argument boils down to "Consumers shouldn't be expected to understand that an oven uses a lot of electricity! The ones that leave it on all the time shouldn't have to pay out of the nose!"
Of course, in a metered world, people do know roughly how much electricity things use. And they don't leave their oven on all the time. And electric companies don't need to send out nasty letters to people who leave their ovens on all the time.
I don't think it invalidates the analogy though. A lot of the power grid is base load. You can't just shut down a coal or nuclear power plant during off peak hours.
The fixed costs of providing electricity almost completely overwhelm the amount of flexibility in terms of peaking power plants and the negligible storage capability.
I don't know if you were trolling... but I'll take you at face value.
Electricity can't be stored either. They have to generate the amount to match demand. Every circuit and generator has an amperage capacity, just like every circuit has a bandwidth limit.
The closest they have to the ability to store electricity is hydroelectric dams that can pump water uphill and then use the kinetic energy later, but it's grossly inefficient.
Yes, it's possible to run up a large amount in ways other than file sharing, but the passive, 24 hour, unattended nature of file sharing makes it far easier to run up a huge amount on.
If Internet service were properly metered like electricity is, then people who use a lot would simply pay more.
Right now it's as if factories and houses were paying the same $300/month for electrical service, and the people in the houses were subsidizing the factories.
On the Internet though, your neighbor can easily run a "factory" by simply seeding a bunch of torrents like an asshole, using all the bandwidth.
The CPI has been gamed and tricked out so much that you can't believe it.
For example they have this idea about cheaper substitutes. Basically as the price of something nice goes up, you'll use a cheaper substitute, so they change their baseline to include the cheaper substitute instead.
The classic example here is "hamburgers for steak". Which the BLS has responded to:
Their rebuttal, if you read it carefully, actually admits that they do substitute less desirable goods within categories, just not technically hamburger and steak because those are in different categories. But they will substitute cheaper cuts of steak for nicer ones if it suits their tinkering.
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The scalpers are helping them though.
The ticket companies may not be able to fully exploit price discrimination, but the scalper is taking on the risk that he won't be able to sell all the tickets he buys. As an ad-hoc broker, he carries that inventory risk so that the organizers don't have to. It's really not much different from hotels selling reservation blocks to discount sites at very low prices and the discount sites eat the cost if they can't fill them up.
If I were in the concert business, I'd be fighting to make "scalping" legal in every way I could.
7 bits is plenty.
If your name is some fucked up mess of symbols, it's not going to kill you to come up with something 7 bit clean for computers to know you by.
"Internet Explorer 7 (Vista or higher, not XP) or later"
This is a sticky point. Everyone still uses XP because Vista and 7 suck.
Not everyone lives in a city sucking from the government's teat.
Says the man with a sig linking to a scammy late-night informercial style site.
As printers, we do CT images at 300dpi or higher, but we don't print at 300dpi.
150lpi AM screening does fine for images, but try rasterizing your fonts at 300dpi and run them through a 150lpi AM screen. It will be visibly poor quality.
Even 300dpi rasterized fonts into a stochastic FM system are going to look fairly poor by print standards.
In reality, we print text at much higher raster resolutions, more like 1200dpi or 2400dpi in the final post-screening plate render at most shops.
If you handle 1-bit TIFFs, you'll see this as well, none of them are going to be 300dpi, because that's just not enough resolution for text.
In a lot of places, you aren't even in front of a judge if you want to contest the ticket.
They make you show up, contest the ticket, have it rubber stamped anyway, and then appeal before you can even get in front of a real judge. It's one of the things the NMA is fighting against right now, to try to restore the right to have a normal trial for these speed and red light camera tickets.
Of course things like "due process" cut down on the profitability of these automatic tickets, which is why they try to keep you from getting a fair trial. If enough people fight these tickets, they will go away. Remove the profit and they won't keep doing it.
Make driving laws about safety and engineering, not revenue creation.
Join the NMA.
Yeah, here in Virginia and the area around here, we don't get much in the way of natural disasters.
A little flooding if you are stupid enough to build in a flood area, the occasional tornado that usually doesn't get very far before the mountains and trees break it up. etc.
Nuclear plants don't need much fuel. Moving it around is a negligible cost. Nuclear fuel isn't very radioactive either. You can hold uranium fuel rods in your hand safely.
In fact here's an image of someone doing just that:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fuel_Pellet.jpg
And then a lot of the code had to be thrown away when everyone migrated to the 80286 anyway, since it all had stupid quirks that assumed 4.77 mhz.
Metering means that the ISPs have no excuse or business providing anything other than a "stupid pipe".
As long as we keep letting them sell "unlimited" amounts of a limited resource, they'll be able to justify whatever they want.
And that's the way it should be. The people who eat out a lot shouldn't be subsidizing their cookery school neighbor.
If you are making photocopies of a sheet with your password on it, you have way bigger security issues to worry about.
I didn't say it was secure, just that no one will bother.
No one is going to sort through millions of pointless memos about employee picnics and birthday party announcements on the off chance that there's something potentially valuable to someone somewhere.
T1s are a tariffed service. They are pretty highly regulated in terms of price and capability.
I expect exactly that.
When a person buys a space heater or oven, it's their responsibility to know that it uses a lot of electricity.
Your argument boils down to "Consumers shouldn't be expected to understand that an oven uses a lot of electricity! The ones that leave it on all the time shouldn't have to pay out of the nose!"
Of course, in a metered world, people do know roughly how much electricity things use. And they don't leave their oven on all the time. And electric companies don't need to send out nasty letters to people who leave their ovens on all the time.
Well, that is true to some extent.
I don't think it invalidates the analogy though. A lot of the power grid is base load. You can't just shut down a coal or nuclear power plant during off peak hours.
The fixed costs of providing electricity almost completely overwhelm the amount of flexibility in terms of peaking power plants and the negligible storage capability.
Experiments. No one does this.
"The Electricity Storage Association ... established to foster development and commercialization of energy storage technologies."
To foster development and commercialization. Because there's no current commercial solutions for grid-scale energy storage other than hydro pumping.
Is it that hard to admit you were wrong?
I don't know if you were trolling... but I'll take you at face value.
Electricity can't be stored either. They have to generate the amount to match demand. Every circuit and generator has an amperage capacity, just like every circuit has a bandwidth limit.
The closest they have to the ability to store electricity is hydroelectric dams that can pump water uphill and then use the kinetic energy later, but it's grossly inefficient.
Netflix streaming is surprisingly efficient.
Yes, it's possible to run up a large amount in ways other than file sharing, but the passive, 24 hour, unattended nature of file sharing makes it far easier to run up a huge amount on.
If Internet service were properly metered like electricity is, then people who use a lot would simply pay more.
Right now it's as if factories and houses were paying the same $300/month for electrical service, and the people in the houses were subsidizing the factories.
On the Internet though, your neighbor can easily run a "factory" by simply seeding a bunch of torrents like an asshole, using all the bandwidth.
You might look into KnowledgeTree. It's open source.
The CPI has been gamed and tricked out so much that you can't believe it.
For example they have this idea about cheaper substitutes. Basically as the price of something nice goes up, you'll use a cheaper substitute, so they change their baseline to include the cheaper substitute instead.
The classic example here is "hamburgers for steak". Which the BLS has responded to:
http://www.bls.gov/cpi/cpiqa.htm#Question_3
Their rebuttal, if you read it carefully, actually admits that they do substitute less desirable goods within categories, just not technically hamburger and steak because those are in different categories. But they will substitute cheaper cuts of steak for nicer ones if it suits their tinkering.