Actually, the linked thread details the riddle and the route to its solution fairly nicely. There are many layers to the riddle, requiring the collection of 8 clues (pieces of the cipher) from other puzzles inside the text.
Here is one of the more accessible puzzles:
*18. (page 110120) The start of the tenth favorite word used by Bender
The toon that went south while commanded by Ender
The number of lights that Picard said were on
And the class of the planet where Kirk shouted "Khaaan!"
The rings for the men minus rings for the elves
And the product mod ten of a fivesome of twelves
The end of a code NES gamers know
And the base used to model how quickly things grow
When they're XOR'd together the checksum is "E"
Which will tell you you've got the penultimate key
I'd say that qualifies as nerdy enough for slashdot. Not to mention the fact that you have to solve multiple riddles just to figure out where the puzzle is. It sounds like it was pretty fun.
Even funnier, soon enough you'll be running Crysis on your cell phone (or whatever we call it then). Remember when it was tough to get decent framerate on Doom with high settings? You can run that on a cellphone these days. 15 years from "state of the art" to "runs on my cellphone." Wow. In 15 years you might have a 1TB database running on your personal communicator that fits in your pocket. (in keeping with the "15 years out" prediction theme of the day.
Reading and posting on a social networking site is not "human contact". Maybe we will someday have such a terrific VR system on the Internet that we can emulate genuine human contact and provide most of the physical/psychology health benefits of interacting people other people, but Facebook aint it.
You're right! There's a business opportunity..... no, wait.... Google says there's something called WoW that people do. Apparently, they WoW around the clock and even get married in WoW. Dang, too late again.....
Actually, I was ignorant of his existence. Thanks for the link. He sounds like a pretty cool guy. By his bio it seems that he had his fingers on several great opportunities that he failed to grasp, yet still managed to make quite a nice life for himself. I could say the same about myself.
That's one of the things that I don't understand about the "social warfare" crowd. I come from modest means and have literally missed dozens of opportunities to get rich. Some because I just didn't want to go that route (I had a buddy go into internet porn in the 90's. He's rich now.), and most because I just flat didn't take advantage of what was in front of me (usually because I didn't think I could overcome all of the obstacles I was able to imagine). And I still managed to do fairly well for myself and my family.
Life is full of opportunity - it's just hard to grasp when you are in the moment. If we were all judged by the ratio of our actual performance to our maximum potential, we'd probably do equally poorly, whatever our social status.
What's missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. Discount the fawning techno-burble about virtual communities. Computers and networks isolate us from one another.
So he was able to see that human contact was the thing that was missing from the internet - and then blew it. Because of his lack of vision, he's still eating Ramen Noodles. Meanwhile Zuckerberg and Tom Anderson and many others made billions on Facebook and Myspace etc. solving exactly those problems.
Actually, that's a nice lesson for the Slashdot crowd. Remember that idea you were just panning as stupid and unworkable because of xyz flaw that only you could spot? Yep, that's opportunity knocking.
What the Internet hucksters won't tell you is that the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don't know what to ignore and what's worth reading.
And along comes Slashdot et al with moderation and meta-moderation schemes to allow the crowd to edit the stream. Problem solved (sort of). Hard to imagine that it was impossible to see lack of editing as anything other than an insurmountable obstacle. But the article was written by journalists with editors, so maybe that explains their limited vision.
Do you think that it just might have something to do with the fact that scalpers rush to buy out those tickets ASAP, using schemes such as one described in TFA?
In a word, no. There do exist high demand events that will always sell out immediately (such as the NBA Finals, Super Bowl, World Cup Finals, etc.). These events have no need, nor any real opportunity, for squatting by scalpers in order to drive up demand. Demand for good seats at these events is essentially unlimited (in numbers). Let's say there are 10,000 premium seats available for the World Cup finals. There are over a billion people watching the event. If even 10% would like to attend in person, that's an over-demand situation in the extreme. So no, the difficulty in any one individual purchasing a ticket to a super-high demand event does not have something to do with scalpers rushing out to buy those tickets ASAP. In fact, every person who manages to obtain a ticket to the Super Bowl has to at least entertain the notion of selling the tickets and pocketing the cash. Such is the law of supply and demand.
Demand-based pricing wouldn't change that ('make things better for everyone?' Are you nuts?) except for the richest. But instead of ability to attend being based on timing and luck, essentially, it biases attendance towards wealth. This would make it worse for many. Further, it would reduce the diversity of those attending. That would be bad, both culturally, and for the artists/teams/etc., if you think about it. It is not a good idea.
I think you are missing the other aspects of market forces. If the prices rise beyond what most people can pay, then that means that there still is untapped demand out there. The reasonable solution is to add more seats and reap the rewards. Surprisingly, this is exactly what happens. I saw the Red Hot Chili Peppers back in 1990 in a small venue with about 300 people. They rocked! Good luck doing that 5 years later. They moved to venues with 20,000+ seats. Even bigger acts play multiple shows in 100,000 seat football stadiums.
I don't know how much the Red Hot Chili Peppers made for the show in 1990, but I'll bet it was a lot less than they made when I saw them a decade later. The show in 1990 was a lot better though. I guess the price they received didn't correlate with the quality of the product as much as it did with demand.
Monopolies are not illegal in and of themselves. However, once you have a monopoly you are subject to subject to strict oversight to ensure that you don't abuse your monopoly position. Hope I didn't deflate your sense of moral outrage.
The only monopoly in the ticket game is Ticketmasters. The scalper may try to corner the market on a given event, which is a very advantageous position in any market, but the ticket buying consumer is not slave to the event - he can buy other entertainment elsewhere. Maybe not as good (to him), but not a monopoly. Good luck buying tickets to a live event without Ticketmasters getting a cut though.
You sound like you are interested in the topic, so I'll offer this resource:
The Market Maker is a great documentary about an academic who was working on poverty in Africa and decided to do something about it. Dr. Eleni Gabre-Madhin found that famine in her native Ethiopia was not due to a lack of supply of food, but to a problem with distribution. So she created a commodities market. And the results are stunning. She's helping to eradicate hunger, increasing the wealth of farmers and elevating the entire society.
All while making a profit.
As a middle man.
Watch the documentary and see if you still can't understand why a middle man can add value.
This is exactly voting with your dollars. Plenty of people are willing to pay more than face value for a ticket, so there are scalpers. Simple. Same reason there are drug dealers and prostitutes - because there are people voting with their dollars to have them. At the same time, there are no "get a kick in the balls for $1000" emporiums, because there is no demand for this service at this price. And please, nobody post a link proving me wrong on that one.
Y'know, I'm sorry to say this, but I'll vastly prefer a system that forces me to show up with the people I bought tickets for, where I can't buy gift tickets, and I have to show ID at the door to a system where I can't afford the ticket. I would submit this is not a process greatly different process from getting on an airplane. Tell me, would you pay $300 more per airline ticket if it meant you could buy your tickets on eBay and bypass security?
Funny that you chose that example, because this is how airlines price their tickets. People sitting next to each other on the same flight pay vastly different amounts for their seats - maybe even an order of magnitude different. You can even pay extra to skip ahead in the security lines. There are also "scalpers" in the airline industry - they are called consolidators.
I'll pass on any system that increases the power of the Ticketmasters near-monopoly. They already add way too much to the cost of a ticket relative to the value added.
The only ultimate effect of adding a scalper to the picture is that customers end up paying more for exact same thing.
Well, that and the fact that you can buy great seats at any time to any event. Good luck getting front row, center court to the NBA finals at the box office.
- before scalpers got in and scooped up massive numbers of tickets and artificially inflated the price, regular fans were able to get tickets from the box office at a reasonable price for a longer period of time.
I don't know how old you are to define "before", but back in '81 Springsteen sold out 3 shows in 15 minutes. This is at the box office. We went down there and arrived shortly after the box office opened to find everyone leaving. Oops. I was laughing at the idiots who camped out for three days on the way to the Colosseum, but not so much on the way home. I think maybe the "I could get tickets easy" view might have as much to do with the demand for the act as anything else.
Excuse me, but a piece of my tax money went to funding the creation of this stadium in our city. The point to building that stadium was to attract large acts and attractions to the city, making it a more enjoyable place to live. Now you're going to tell me that when those acts come to town, only the upper third of the city is going to be able to afford that concert. I guess it's great for them, but it's a raw deal for the rest of us.
I hate to point this out when you had such a great rant going, but the answer to this is to quit subsidizing stadiums. Simple, problem solved.
I wish my local representatives would get this message. We've voted down funding a new stadium time and time again.... so they finally just went ahead and approved funding without us. Brilliant. I wonder how big those kickbacks are.
Venues compete on price, location and other stuff. This brings prices down. When scalpers step in, the venue has already been locked in. There is no more competition.
Not really. If the venue offers 25k seats for a concert, there are still 25k seats available if the scalpers buy every single one of them. If the venue really wanted to discourage scalpers, they'd say "wow, we just sold out our concert. Let's add another show!". Rinse, repeat until the scalpers quit buying tickets. Now the band got paid, and the audience can still buy seats at the cheap price. Maybe even below retail if the scalpers misjudged demand.
As for why it shouldn't be illegal to charge less? it's a fictional problem. You don't have people bidding down the prices of tickets before an event.
I hate to disagree, but I have personally done this many times. I sat at half court, 5th row for the ACC tournament final one year and paid half of face value. This in a year when upper deck seats were going for $500 and up. How did I do it? Brinkmanship. As tip-off approached, I talked with a few of the bigger scalpers and offered them $20 bucks for a pair of seats. They all laughed at me. After the crowd disappeared and they realized they had no more customers, they cut a deal. Better to get a couple of bucks for beer money than take the tickets home. Tickets are the ultimate in perishable goods. They are worth precisely $0.00 after the concert.
Actually, what this shows is that the pricing system for tickets is broken. These people are providing an arbitrage between two prices that are out of balance (the asking price and the offering price). This is precisely how currency, commodity, stock, etc. markets work. If the ask/offer prices are very divergent, it means that the market is not working efficiently. A properly functioning market will squeeze this gap to a very small number when information is freely available to all players.
If concert promoters want to remove the opportunity for ticket brokers, then they should either raise their prices or add more supply. Even so, ticket brokers should be playing the role of commodity investors, providing predictability and liquidity to the market, the same function they serve investing in wheat futures. As such, their role would actually be useful to all parties. Unfortunately, anti-scalping laws prevent this market from fully maturing and as such limit their effectiveness.
Ticket Masters makes several bucks on each ticket purchase and they have most venues in the US locked up in exclusive deals. I'm sure these ticket brokers would love the chance to step in and take Ticket Masters out of the equation. With an online auction house you'd be able to easily accommodate the demand and you could simply negotiate the wholesale price of the tickets with the promoter. Done properly, you wouldn't even use your own money. You'd allow investors to buy shares in the Dec 12 Brittney Spears concert, and they would basically be setting the ticket price by trading shares in the concert. If they bet wrong, they'd lose their money, but the promoter would have a nice guaranteed revenue stream.
This is the classic "you get what you measure" trap. There are always unintended consequences when you incentivise by the numbers. I used to provide a lot of the measures used for incentives in a large sales organization. Since it was a commission based business, the consequences of bad incentive plans were very easy to see.
We instituted a bonus for each contract signed. Sounds simple, but what happened is that the sales associates realized that this was an opportunity and began breaking contracts into smaller and smaller pieces. So where we might have had one large contract before, now we had 10 at the minimum profit allowable. And since there is overhead to each contract, we lost a boatload of money on the deal, not including the money for incentives.
And it doesn't even have to be about money (directly). We built a report that showed activity in the database by employee in 5 minute increments. From this you could see when they were working and when they were goofing off. About 2 weeks after introducing the report, activity on the server shot through the roof and brought our systems to a crawl. It turns out that someone figured out that if you just hold down "F5" (refresh), you'll get lots of activity all day. So they'd put something on the keyboard while they went to the restroom or for coffee. Meanwhile, their computer is issuing dozens of page requests per second. Multiply this by a large user base and Boom!, we managed to DOS ourselves! Genius!
No, no... if you are going to paraphrase Cleese, you have to wait for someone to do the original quote first.* Then you can diverge from Python orthodoxy in the subsequent reply.
It is as if you skipped the "Triple Dare" and went straight for the jugular with a "Triple Dog Dare".
*For the uninitiated, and in the world of Slashdot there should be none, the original quote is from Anne Elk (John Cleese)
"This theory which belongs to me is as follows. Ahem. Ahem. This is how it goes. Ahem. The next thing that I am about to say is my theory. Ahem. Ready?
The Theory by A. Elk brackets Miss brackets.
My theory is along the following lines. All brontosauruses are thin at one end, much MUCH thicker in the middle, and then thin again at the far end. That is the theory that I have and which is mine, and what it is too."
Also left out of this model is modern scalability tools like connection pooling. N-tiered apps these days use a single app level user login, and each instace of the app is only using a single connection to pipe all of the various requests from all of the users to the database. You have to build your own access controls into your app/database, but you can actually manage your huge user base this way, and your apps can actually scale without setting up and tearing down thousands of connections to the SQL server every second.
Huh? This stupid survey is recording the strength of the cell phone's radio signal (called radiation in the article) by copying down the "Specific Absorption Rate" from the FCC. It is a stupid spin to claim that it is a "radiation study" in the first place, but to claim that there is simple engineering available to make cell phone radios beam their signal to the tower while avoiding vital organs is just silly. Unless you are talking about moving the antenna away from your body, I guess.
The SAR they talk about can only depend on:
1) strength of signal
2) wavelength of signal
3) position of signal
There really are no other variables for an omnidirectional antenna, which a cellphone needs in order to work properly. The wavelength is going to be set by the spectrum of the carrier, the signal strength is limited by the FCC.... so what are you measuring? Basically all that is left is where you hold the antenna, right? Jump over to the actual article at the Environmental Working Group and see if you find them credible or a bit more on the wacko side.
A cursory read of the site made them seem somewhere in the middle to me - like environmental wingnuts who are sort of trying to understand all this complicated science stuff, but don't really have a deep understanding of any of it.
Ultimately, the Academy of Medicine will most likely prevail. I'm not sure this is for the better.
I am sure. Anyone who believes in homeopathy is by definition unqualified to give medical advice, regardless of their level of training. Belief in homeopathy reveals that even if you received a complete course of scientific training, you didn't understand it. It is as if you have an automotive engineer who believes in the "car that runs on water" myth. It is something so basic and obvious that failure to grasp it is immediately discrediting.
Slashdot Mirror
Here is one of the more accessible puzzles:
*18. (page 110120) The start of the tenth favorite word used by Bender
The toon that went south while commanded by Ender
The number of lights that Picard said were on
And the class of the planet where Kirk shouted "Khaaan!"
The rings for the men minus rings for the elves
And the product mod ten of a fivesome of twelves
The end of a code NES gamers know
And the base used to model how quickly things grow
When they're XOR'd together the checksum is "E"
Which will tell you you've got the penultimate key
I'd say that qualifies as nerdy enough for slashdot. Not to mention the fact that you have to solve multiple riddles just to figure out where the puzzle is. It sounds like it was pretty fun.
Even funnier, soon enough you'll be running Crysis on your cell phone (or whatever we call it then). Remember when it was tough to get decent framerate on Doom with high settings? You can run that on a cellphone these days. 15 years from "state of the art" to "runs on my cellphone." Wow. In 15 years you might have a 1TB database running on your personal communicator that fits in your pocket. (in keeping with the "15 years out" prediction theme of the day.
Reading and posting on a social networking site is not "human contact". Maybe we will someday have such a terrific VR system on the Internet that we can emulate genuine human contact and provide most of the physical/psychology health benefits of interacting people other people, but Facebook aint it.
You're right! There's a business opportunity..... no, wait.... Google says there's something called WoW that people do. Apparently, they WoW around the clock and even get married in WoW. Dang, too late again.....
Actually, I was ignorant of his existence. Thanks for the link. He sounds like a pretty cool guy. By his bio it seems that he had his fingers on several great opportunities that he failed to grasp, yet still managed to make quite a nice life for himself. I could say the same about myself.
That's one of the things that I don't understand about the "social warfare" crowd. I come from modest means and have literally missed dozens of opportunities to get rich. Some because I just didn't want to go that route (I had a buddy go into internet porn in the 90's. He's rich now.), and most because I just flat didn't take advantage of what was in front of me (usually because I didn't think I could overcome all of the obstacles I was able to imagine). And I still managed to do fairly well for myself and my family.
Life is full of opportunity - it's just hard to grasp when you are in the moment. If we were all judged by the ratio of our actual performance to our maximum potential, we'd probably do equally poorly, whatever our social status.
What's missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. Discount the fawning techno-burble about virtual communities. Computers and networks isolate us from one another.
So he was able to see that human contact was the thing that was missing from the internet - and then blew it. Because of his lack of vision, he's still eating Ramen Noodles. Meanwhile Zuckerberg and Tom Anderson and many others made billions on Facebook and Myspace etc. solving exactly those problems.
Actually, that's a nice lesson for the Slashdot crowd. Remember that idea you were just panning as stupid and unworkable because of xyz flaw that only you could spot? Yep, that's opportunity knocking.
What the Internet hucksters won't tell you is that the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don't know what to ignore and what's worth reading.
And along comes Slashdot et al with moderation and meta-moderation schemes to allow the crowd to edit the stream. Problem solved (sort of). Hard to imagine that it was impossible to see lack of editing as anything other than an insurmountable obstacle. But the article was written by journalists with editors, so maybe that explains their limited vision.
It depends. Most true socialists and anarchists I've known are, in fact, people with little to lose.
Too true. Perhaps I should replace "car" with "favorite Tommy Chong original, hand-blown, glass bong".
Do you think that it just might have something to do with the fact that scalpers rush to buy out those tickets ASAP, using schemes such as one described in TFA?
In a word, no. There do exist high demand events that will always sell out immediately (such as the NBA Finals, Super Bowl, World Cup Finals, etc.). These events have no need, nor any real opportunity, for squatting by scalpers in order to drive up demand. Demand for good seats at these events is essentially unlimited (in numbers). Let's say there are 10,000 premium seats available for the World Cup finals. There are over a billion people watching the event. If even 10% would like to attend in person, that's an over-demand situation in the extreme. So no, the difficulty in any one individual purchasing a ticket to a super-high demand event does not have something to do with scalpers rushing out to buy those tickets ASAP. In fact, every person who manages to obtain a ticket to the Super Bowl has to at least entertain the notion of selling the tickets and pocketing the cash. Such is the law of supply and demand.
Demand-based pricing wouldn't change that ('make things better for everyone?' Are you nuts?) except for the richest. But instead of ability to attend being based on timing and luck, essentially, it biases attendance towards wealth. This would make it worse for many. Further, it would reduce the diversity of those attending. That would be bad, both culturally, and for the artists/teams/etc., if you think about it. It is not a good idea.
I think you are missing the other aspects of market forces. If the prices rise beyond what most people can pay, then that means that there still is untapped demand out there. The reasonable solution is to add more seats and reap the rewards. Surprisingly, this is exactly what happens. I saw the Red Hot Chili Peppers back in 1990 in a small venue with about 300 people. They rocked! Good luck doing that 5 years later. They moved to venues with 20,000+ seats. Even bigger acts play multiple shows in 100,000 seat football stadiums.
I don't know how much the Red Hot Chili Peppers made for the show in 1990, but I'll bet it was a lot less than they made when I saw them a decade later. The show in 1990 was a lot better though. I guess the price they received didn't correlate with the quality of the product as much as it did with demand.
Monopolies are not illegal in and of themselves. However, once you have a monopoly you are subject to subject to strict oversight to ensure that you don't abuse your monopoly position. Hope I didn't deflate your sense of moral outrage.
The only monopoly in the ticket game is Ticketmasters. The scalper may try to corner the market on a given event, which is a very advantageous position in any market, but the ticket buying consumer is not slave to the event - he can buy other entertainment elsewhere. Maybe not as good (to him), but not a monopoly. Good luck buying tickets to a live event without Ticketmasters getting a cut though.
The Market Maker is a great documentary about an academic who was working on poverty in Africa and decided to do something about it. Dr. Eleni Gabre-Madhin found that famine in her native Ethiopia was not due to a lack of supply of food, but to a problem with distribution. So she created a commodities market. And the results are stunning. She's helping to eradicate hunger, increasing the wealth of farmers and elevating the entire society.
All while making a profit.
As a middle man.
Watch the documentary and see if you still can't understand why a middle man can add value.
This is exactly voting with your dollars. Plenty of people are willing to pay more than face value for a ticket, so there are scalpers. Simple. Same reason there are drug dealers and prostitutes - because there are people voting with their dollars to have them. At the same time, there are no "get a kick in the balls for $1000" emporiums, because there is no demand for this service at this price. And please, nobody post a link proving me wrong on that one.
Y'know, I'm sorry to say this, but I'll vastly prefer a system that forces me to show up with the people I bought tickets for, where I can't buy gift tickets, and I have to show ID at the door to a system where I can't afford the ticket. I would submit this is not a process greatly different process from getting on an airplane. Tell me, would you pay $300 more per airline ticket if it meant you could buy your tickets on eBay and bypass security?
Funny that you chose that example, because this is how airlines price their tickets. People sitting next to each other on the same flight pay vastly different amounts for their seats - maybe even an order of magnitude different. You can even pay extra to skip ahead in the security lines. There are also "scalpers" in the airline industry - they are called consolidators.
I'll pass on any system that increases the power of the Ticketmasters near-monopoly. They already add way too much to the cost of a ticket relative to the value added.
The only ultimate effect of adding a scalper to the picture is that customers end up paying more for exact same thing.
Well, that and the fact that you can buy great seats at any time to any event. Good luck getting front row, center court to the NBA finals at the box office.
- before scalpers got in and scooped up massive numbers of tickets and artificially inflated the price, regular fans were able to get tickets from the box office at a reasonable price for a longer period of time.
I don't know how old you are to define "before", but back in '81 Springsteen sold out 3 shows in 15 minutes. This is at the box office. We went down there and arrived shortly after the box office opened to find everyone leaving. Oops. I was laughing at the idiots who camped out for three days on the way to the Colosseum, but not so much on the way home. I think maybe the "I could get tickets easy" view might have as much to do with the demand for the act as anything else.
Simply put, socialist libertarians believe that all private property is an imaginary, artificial construct of a human society.
I find that people who believe that personal property is an imaginary construct feel quite differently when you try to drive off in their car.
Excuse me, but a piece of my tax money went to funding the creation of this stadium in our city. The point to building that stadium was to attract large acts and attractions to the city, making it a more enjoyable place to live. Now you're going to tell me that when those acts come to town, only the upper third of the city is going to be able to afford that concert. I guess it's great for them, but it's a raw deal for the rest of us.
I hate to point this out when you had such a great rant going, but the answer to this is to quit subsidizing stadiums. Simple, problem solved.
I wish my local representatives would get this message. We've voted down funding a new stadium time and time again.... so they finally just went ahead and approved funding without us. Brilliant. I wonder how big those kickbacks are.
Scalpers create the scarcity.
Venues compete on price, location and other stuff. This brings prices down. When scalpers step in, the venue has already been locked in. There is no more competition.
Not really. If the venue offers 25k seats for a concert, there are still 25k seats available if the scalpers buy every single one of them. If the venue really wanted to discourage scalpers, they'd say "wow, we just sold out our concert. Let's add another show!". Rinse, repeat until the scalpers quit buying tickets. Now the band got paid, and the audience can still buy seats at the cheap price. Maybe even below retail if the scalpers misjudged demand.
As for why it shouldn't be illegal to charge less? it's a fictional problem. You don't have people bidding down the prices of tickets before an event.
I hate to disagree, but I have personally done this many times. I sat at half court, 5th row for the ACC tournament final one year and paid half of face value. This in a year when upper deck seats were going for $500 and up. How did I do it? Brinkmanship. As tip-off approached, I talked with a few of the bigger scalpers and offered them $20 bucks for a pair of seats. They all laughed at me. After the crowd disappeared and they realized they had no more customers, they cut a deal. Better to get a couple of bucks for beer money than take the tickets home. Tickets are the ultimate in perishable goods. They are worth precisely $0.00 after the concert.
Actually, what this shows is that the pricing system for tickets is broken. These people are providing an arbitrage between two prices that are out of balance (the asking price and the offering price). This is precisely how currency, commodity, stock, etc. markets work. If the ask/offer prices are very divergent, it means that the market is not working efficiently. A properly functioning market will squeeze this gap to a very small number when information is freely available to all players.
If concert promoters want to remove the opportunity for ticket brokers, then they should either raise their prices or add more supply. Even so, ticket brokers should be playing the role of commodity investors, providing predictability and liquidity to the market, the same function they serve investing in wheat futures. As such, their role would actually be useful to all parties. Unfortunately, anti-scalping laws prevent this market from fully maturing and as such limit their effectiveness.
Ticket Masters makes several bucks on each ticket purchase and they have most venues in the US locked up in exclusive deals. I'm sure these ticket brokers would love the chance to step in and take Ticket Masters out of the equation. With an online auction house you'd be able to easily accommodate the demand and you could simply negotiate the wholesale price of the tickets with the promoter. Done properly, you wouldn't even use your own money. You'd allow investors to buy shares in the Dec 12 Brittney Spears concert, and they would basically be setting the ticket price by trading shares in the concert. If they bet wrong, they'd lose their money, but the promoter would have a nice guaranteed revenue stream.
This is the classic "you get what you measure" trap. There are always unintended consequences when you incentivise by the numbers. I used to provide a lot of the measures used for incentives in a large sales organization. Since it was a commission based business, the consequences of bad incentive plans were very easy to see.
We instituted a bonus for each contract signed. Sounds simple, but what happened is that the sales associates realized that this was an opportunity and began breaking contracts into smaller and smaller pieces. So where we might have had one large contract before, now we had 10 at the minimum profit allowable. And since there is overhead to each contract, we lost a boatload of money on the deal, not including the money for incentives.
And it doesn't even have to be about money (directly). We built a report that showed activity in the database by employee in 5 minute increments. From this you could see when they were working and when they were goofing off. About 2 weeks after introducing the report, activity on the server shot through the roof and brought our systems to a crawl. It turns out that someone figured out that if you just hold down "F5" (refresh), you'll get lots of activity all day. So they'd put something on the keyboard while they went to the restroom or for coffee. Meanwhile, their computer is issuing dozens of page requests per second. Multiply this by a large user base and Boom!, we managed to DOS ourselves! Genius!
No, no... if you are going to paraphrase Cleese, you have to wait for someone to do the original quote first.* Then you can diverge from Python orthodoxy in the subsequent reply.
It is as if you skipped the "Triple Dare" and went straight for the jugular with a "Triple Dog Dare".
*For the uninitiated, and in the world of Slashdot there should be none, the original quote is from Anne Elk (John Cleese)
"This theory which belongs to me is as follows. Ahem. Ahem. This is how it goes. Ahem. The next thing that I am about to say is my theory. Ahem. Ready?
The Theory by A. Elk brackets Miss brackets.
My theory is along the following lines. All brontosauruses are thin at one end, much MUCH thicker in the middle, and then thin again at the far end. That is the theory that I have and which is mine, and what it is too."
Also left out of this model is modern scalability tools like connection pooling. N-tiered apps these days use a single app level user login, and each instace of the app is only using a single connection to pipe all of the various requests from all of the users to the database. You have to build your own access controls into your app/database, but you can actually manage your huge user base this way, and your apps can actually scale without setting up and tearing down thousands of connections to the SQL server every second.
The SAR they talk about can only depend on:
1) strength of signal
2) wavelength of signal
3) position of signal
There really are no other variables for an omnidirectional antenna, which a cellphone needs in order to work properly. The wavelength is going to be set by the spectrum of the carrier, the signal strength is limited by the FCC.... so what are you measuring? Basically all that is left is where you hold the antenna, right? Jump over to the actual article at the Environmental Working Group and see if you find them credible or a bit more on the wacko side. A cursory read of the site made them seem somewhere in the middle to me - like environmental wingnuts who are sort of trying to understand all this complicated science stuff, but don't really have a deep understanding of any of it.
Ultimately, the Academy of Medicine will most likely prevail. I'm not sure this is for the better.
I am sure. Anyone who believes in homeopathy is by definition unqualified to give medical advice, regardless of their level of training. Belief in homeopathy reveals that even if you received a complete course of scientific training, you didn't understand it. It is as if you have an automotive engineer who believes in the "car that runs on water" myth. It is something so basic and obvious that failure to grasp it is immediately discrediting.