Talk to people around you (barber, barista, waiter, friends and family, etc) about the technology that they use. (smartphone, facebook, etc) The conversation almost always turns to complaining about how they wish things would work. Those are your problems to solve.
It is not surprising that people turn to exaggeration in order to stand out amongst the hundreds of other basically identical posts. For example all the $1 price and keyword spam in the forsale section.
Edit: someone posted results for .exe file inside the .zip, which are a bit different (it seems like some antiviruses don't try to unpack it?), but then deleted the comment. Here's the link for .exe: https://www.virustotal.com/file/2a9c7a16cdb3c3f2285afaf61072...
Given what its doing and how it's doing it then those virus alerts listed are understandable and if anything I'd have to say kudo to panda AV for being the most honest about it. Probably breaking the PE and the CRC checksum aspects would get it flagged as it has in some and the html/exe flagging is also explained as well having read thru how it works.
Still impressive stuff and also given the use of undocumented opcodes and x86 foo it does raise a new question:
Given some VM's will fail on some of the instructions instead of running on bare metal, is it possible to have a virus that will only trigger on bare metal or VM machines thru use of undocumented op codes and the like.
Non the less a wonderful definition in hacking in its truest sence and educational on undocumented OP codes and how for some things you cant beat pure assembly for fun and jollys.
It's perplexing that they charge such a large premium when the industry must be saving many millions of dollars a year in printing costs, box office attendants, and sales.
One thing in this article that I found extremely interesting was that the infamous charge to print your own tickets -- essentially charging the customer for saving Ticketmaster and the box offices money -- is apparently driven largely by the venues. It claims that Hubbard has been successful in getting a third of their partners to drop the fee, which suggests that two-thirds of venues are holding out, and more responsible for some of the egregious fees than Ticketmaster themselves are.
I definitely came away with the impression that Hubbard may be the right guy for the job. It seems clear he understands exactly what consumers hate about Ticketmaster, and appears to be trying to address it as best he can.
I find it even stranger that they don't simply raise the price of the ticket and hide the cost of the fee that way. If a ticket is $25 and then it has a $5 fee I would be upset, but I wouldn't notice if it was just a $30 ticket.
It's because the promoter pays the band based on the face price of the ticket, not on the total price with fees.
At an incredibly high level, there are two historical economic forces at play:
1) The Irving Deal, which states that the goal of the band is to get 90% of all earnings of any event, including concessions, popcorn, tickets, etc. Obviously a very tough proposition in the event promotion business when some of your events make you money, but most break even and some you lose quite a bit on.
2) The Fred Deal, which is what transformed TicketMaster from being a company that cost promoters money (you pay us $.50 for every ticket we sell for you) to one that made them money (we'll charge the customer an extra $10 and give you $8 of it, but you need to sign a multiyear contract and we sell ALL your tickets).
If you're keenly interested in this, you should read the very excellent and recently published book Ticket Masters goes through all of the history and mechanics in great detail. Immediately upon finishing you should come work for me at Ticketfly in San Francisco where we're solving these sorts of problems on a daily basis. ;)
Everybody hates Ticketmaster's fees, but they are simply capitalism at work. The successful capitalist prices his goods and services not by his costs, but by what customers are willing to pay based on perceived value. (As any seller of software around here should inherently understand.)
Remember that you can, for the majority of venues, bypass Ticketmaster completely by simply going to the box office and buying the tickets in person. Don't want to? Then you're getting what you pay for in the convenience fee. $8 to not travel across the town or state, but instead do your ticket buying while sitting comfy at home, starts to look like a decently reasonable deal.
And that print-at-home fee? Market segmentation writ small. Obviously, print-at-home is more convenient for most customers than waiting for mail delivery. So the successful capitalist can charge more for print-at-home, capturing the revenue from whichever customers are willing to pay it. What costs the industry might incur or save simply don't enter into that question. It's revenue maximizing as all capitalists should strive to do.
Yes, Ticketmaster can do these things because it's a monopoly for any particular event. There is no alternative able to drive down those fees by competing. But this status does not originate with Ticketmaster. Whatever artist you want to see already inherently has a monopoly. Bruce Springsteen already has a monopoly on Bruce Springsteen concerts, because he is Bruce Springsteen and nobody else is. Springsteen and his managers just choose to delegate some of that monopoly power to Ticketmaster.
So yes, everybody hates Ticketmaster, but its practices are really just capitalism and not so different than what companies and startups around here do or would like to.
Uh, no, they haven't "convinced the public" - it's not as if there's any other way to purchase the tickets to events without engaging TM and their extortionate fees. Trying to pretend like TM is a paragon of the free market winning again is just wrong.
Is there a way to express the depth of the cursor in the drawing? If I draw a circle on the left side of the canvas, I cant figure out how to draw a line through its center.
You can have a look at http://code.google.com/p/closure-library/. What I did downloaded the files and peeked through all of them. Closure has not been very popular with the community, but is currently running all google applications such as Gmail.
The mars rover project is a source of inspiration for hackers everywhere. JPL should be applauded for the successful design and deployment of a "product" in some of the harshest imaginable conditions and then have it exceed expectations more than 10 times over. A testament to what can be accomplished with a billion dollars.
