[shizwizzle]

The problem with a cheap Lotto is it levels the playing field TOO much, everybody and their mother who has any interest at all even considering going to the event will put their name in the hat, why not? Now, people who make their living for themselves or are representing a multi-million dollar company have to compete with hobbyists or really anybody who just wants to hang out

I'd prefer a solution that scales the cost so as to make tickets available for every level of 'desire':

-first 1000 tickets cost $500 to get people in who may have never been able to otherwise -the next 4000 cost $1500 -the next 2500 cost $3000 -the next 2000 cost $4000 -and the final 500 cost $6000 or more so there are ALWAYS some tickets at the upper end available if you REALLY have to go.

[harshaw]

Or perhaps more conferences?

Geez back in the Microsoft heyday there were many different conferences. Sure, the PDC had 20K attendees if you wanted to go to that but there were other smaller conferences as well.

Hell, I'd settle for an east coast conference so I don't need to hang out with the skinny-jeans hipsters :)

[mikeash]

More or bigger. Allowing for 20,000 attendees would be huge for WWDC. Currently there are only 5-6,000 tickets available. I imagine it would probably still sell out at 20,000, but it would be a lot less crazy, at least.

[Someone]

And a lot less useful. For the "talk to Apple's engineers" part, the current head count already is stretching it, if not overstretching it.

[mikeash]

I must hang out in the unpopular labs. My experience has been that the engineers currently have a lot of down time and it's really easy to get their attention if you want it.