Interesting Links for 18-11-2025

[andrewducker]

1. There has to be a better way to make titanium

(tags:materials )

2. Reselling tickets above face value set to be banned by UK government

(tags:concerts tickets regulation UK )

3. Legendary game designer, programmer, Space Invaders champion, and LGBTQ trailblazer Rebecca Heineman has died

(tags:history obituary games lgbt )

Comments

[armiphlage]

Big ticket companies will now raise the face price of tickets to $100000, with a "special discount" to anyone who can answer a skill-testing question like "what is 2+2". So bots will still be able to buy all the tickets in advance, and raise the price to resell them to real people.

[andrewducker]

One would hope that that approach would not stand up in court.

[melchar]

The article about titanium was extremely fun to read and answered some questions I had idly pondered about.

[bens_dad]

The ticket companies don't have the seats or the final say in the price. The artists and the venues don't have an interest in the current racket, and have been complaining about current ticket company prices.

The ticket-sellers only selling point is web-sites that can handle huge bursts of traffic. Is there a reason that cannot be duplicated at scale and low cost if the ticket-sellers ask for a larger cut than the artists/venues ar willing to pay ?

[bens_dad]

I too enjoyed reading this article.

[armiphlage]

In North America, many venues have exclusivity contracts with Ticketmaster / Live Nation; if an event is at their facility, your only source of tickets is via the monopoly.

Live Nation was prohibited by court order in 2009 from retaliating against any independent venues that attempted to deal with a competitor (or sell their own tickets). That court order was only for ten years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Live_Nation_Entertainment

[armiphlage]

Likewise!

[hairyears]

Likewise, and it answers a question I've wondered about for twenty years:

"Whatever happened to the FFC Cambridge process?"


TL:DR FFC was overyped. The process, when defined as narrowly as possible, is comparatively cheap: but the inputs are expensive and the output is expensive to work into cast components.

[andrewducker]

I'm delighted to give you closure.