The fact that most people only watch a few channels doesn't really mean that a la carte would be cheaper overall.

Imagine that there are two channels. It takes a hundred bucks to keep the channel airing for a month. We have two viewers, A and B. A likes channel 1, and B likes channel 2, and they dislike the other channel. Right now, they each pay $100 to watch both channels, although they only look at one. Each channel gets paid $50 per bill.

So imagine that we switched to A la carte. Now A only subscribes to 1, and B only subscribes to 2. They channels still need the same amount of money to stay on the air, so what is the new price? subscribing to channel 1 is $100, and subscribing to channel 2 is $100 too. both channels get the same amount of money, both people pay the same bill... and they now get half the programming. Success?

So let's say that now ESPN charges $20 per subscriber. They do so, because they believe that the value they provide to the average subscriber is about $20. Let's say I don't like ESPN, Well, ESPN didn't get any less valuable, it's just that I will not pay the $20, and said $20 are going to be passed on as rate hikes to the people that want to watch the channel.

So while some people that really just watch very few, cheap channels, might get some savings, if your 17 channels include ESPN, Disney Channel, CNN, AMC and HBO, guess what? You will probably be paying a whole lot more than before, as unbundling makes every single channel more expensive, and you just happened to like 'anchor' channels that can really ask for a premium.

You must have a very different experience with buyouts than I do. I've seen a few over the years. If there are no relocations, some people stay as long as required to get the customary retention bonus, and they they all disappear en masse.

Companies have a culture. Some cultures are pretty good, others are terrible. An acquisition tends to obliterate the purchased company's culture, while bringing in part of the culture of the buyer, except that the team that remains doesn't really buy in that parent culture in the slightest.

So maybe companies aren't something to cry about, but nice relationships and a culture that is destroyed, all for what in the end is seen is a failure of an acquisition, is something that can make people sad, and for good reason.

The first google maps almost put the entire competition out of business, mostly due to their brutal UI advantage. Big map windows, instead of tiny squares. Scrolling and zooming that made sense. It was as disruptive to a market as anything else Google has ever released.

And then there's the Mixels. 5 bucks MSRP, using a subset of blocks that make them very easy to combine with each other. You even get suggestions on how to combine them from the website.

High densities in Europe are reached by going quite a bit higher than the 4 stories you are allowed to go in most of San Francisco. Most of Madrid, for instance, goes to 10-15. 5 story areas are extremely expensive old buildings where any condo goes for well over a million dollars.

The 90s called, they want their arguments back.

Today, the PC market isn't really about pushing hardware. Remember Crysis? It sold nothing, because very few people believed they even had the rig to play it. Nobody releases for really high end hardware anymore: What you get with expensive hardware is insane resolutions. Who are the big players in PC games? The people making MOBAs, MMOs, and indies. Some rely on constant updates, which do not fare well in the console world: Valve tried to keep selling TF2 on the 360, but there was no way in hell they'd be allowed to update the game for free monthly, if not weekly. There's plenty of articles about it, look it up.

So what the PC market gives is both enhanced capabilities for constant engagement, and being able to sell your game for pennies. You'd be mad to target something like Paper's Please as a console-only game. League of Legends or Dota on consoles? yeah right. And none of those games need anything that even resembles a $1500 machine to run.

If we have to compare PC gaming to something, it's mobile games, but with far better control options, and less fear of install sizes.

That doesn't make any sense for things where training is needed though. 1% of laymen being better than civil engineers at building extremely large bridges? 1% of laymen being better at fixing cars than a mechanic? How about 1% of laymen being better at basketball than NBA players? It makes absolutely no sense, because we are talking about things where the training time is extremely valuable, and guessing at random will not help you, because there are too many possible answers.

Even in yes/no questions, if 1% beats the professionals, it's because the questions are so hard, that the results might as well be random.

The most you could say is that we are bad at putting the most talented people at a certain field in the right position to use their advantage. For instance, I doubt that the Americans that have the best potential to be soccer stars happen to pick soccer, if just because it's not a very popular sport here compared to most of the world. However, in something like Basketball, where it's very easy to identify talent, as being very tall is a major advantage, it's very likely that we are pretty close to the best there is in the population: For instance, 17% of people in the US that are 7 feet play, or have played, in the NBA!

So yeah, that bell curve... go read again.

Except this isn't how it works at all.

The wisdom of crowds works doesn't have anything to do with having experts. After all, the experts have no way of influencing the crowd. It is a well defined phenomenon that works when people's biases are pretty random, so mistakes cancel each other out. It's a lower quality estimation mechanism than a market, where people that are sure of their answer can be 'louder' than those that don't know said answer, and it lacks the feedback mechanisms of a market, but still, it is helpful to predict things based on widely available information. Ask the crowd information few of them have any idea about, and their result will suck.

So what does the average beating CIA personnel? That the CIA's biases are large enough to need quite a bit of quality control.

Now, having a 1% of the respondents be far better than the CIA experts probably means nothing. If I invite 3000 people over to guess how 10 coin flips will turn out, chances are one or two of them will guess all of them correctly, but that would not make them seers capable of seeing the future. how many people were worse than 30% worse than those same CIA experts?

Oh dear.

Water flows, due to being liquid. Copper, on the other hand, is a solid at any temperature you're going to have at home.

You circulate the water between the heat-producing surface and a heat-dissipating radiator.

The opponent is forced to pick 50% rock, but he has no limitations other than that. If you went 100% paper, you'd not beat me playing 50% rock by more than a tiny sliver of a percent it takes me to realize you are going 50% paper.

And the problem has nothing to do with the someone not just picking rock, but doing so in a very predictable manner. Otherwise, we'd not be talking about someone picking rock 50% of the time, but playing against someone that plays randomly, but tells you what he is picking half the time, never lying. That's a very, very boring brainteaser.

The first naive approach that doesn't assume idiocy on the other side's part is to assume he'll try to guess our play. If we play in a non deterministic fashion, his best options is probably random, but instead of .33/.33/.33, we get .50/.25/.25. Against an opponent doing that, you could go .25/.50/.25, and win quite a bit.

If he is forced to get at least 50% rock after a certain number of plays, then we can change our probabilities depending on how far from the standard distribution our opponent is: For instance, if we were playing to 10 throws, and he never picked rock in the first 5, we'd get him in the last 5, because his moves are forced. To avoid this, someone that has to reach that 50% will probably also change their probabilities after every throw, just to avoid such a 'free' run. One might even consider starting with an over 50% rock probability, because under that set of rules, having overplayed rock lets us play more optimally later, while underplaying rock leads to major losses.

Either way, a more detailed problem specification is required.

This is more easily handled in Mercurial's queues system. You can keep a bunch of patches in a queue like that, and those patches will just be magically applied. It's pretty useful for a whole lot of situations.

The main practical difference, past the API, is their approach to branching: A git branch is a mercurial bookmark. There are no concept like mercurial's branch in git. There's also how git has this crazy staging area that is the cause of 90% of bad commits to our git repos. Commits that are missing a file, or have an extra file, are the bane of SVN and Git repos. In hg, the expected behavior is commit everything that is not in a patch. More discipline required, less chances of shooting yourself in the foot.

As far as the interface goes, other than the well known stuff, there's the fact that default behaviors seem to be all built around pulls, not pushes, so if your typical corporate environment, where pulls are often nonsense, people get very confused when 'natural' behaviors tell them that the files that changed from a merge are the files from the upstream, that they did not edit, and things like that. To minimize it, I keep telling people to avoid git pull like the plague, and instead use git fetch, followed by git rebase as the baseline case.

Either way, both are pretty useful, and beat SVN in almost all use cases. I just think that it's easier to teach people hg than telling people to learn a bunch about git internals before they can contribute properly.

It might motivate you, but not to actually be better: Many things that make you better will be tracked to the team, not to you, and a good team still has to have a poor performer. So stack ranking motivates people to make sure some people are behind you, and to make sure that your manager actually likes you, instead of making your product better. Creating conflict for the good of the application is not great idea in a stack ranking organization, because it'll make the manager work harder, and thus not endear it to him.

I remember the last time I was in a stack ranking org. Our team was way too good: A few developers were quite a bit better at their jobs than the manager even understood. Who was getting the good review? A guy that was pretty darned average, code-wise, but that played D&D with the manager. I at least managed to avoid being called the 'bad one', but it was pretty clear that there was very little future in that kind of organization unless you managed to surround yourself by relatively bad developers.

Decisions on running a company are often a whole lot like investing in stocks: You only know if a decision is good or not way after you make it, and the reason why the decision was sound probably had very little to do with the reasoning you had at the time. This makes it extremely easy for people to think they are geniuses, when in reality, all they are is very lucky. Having picked stocks well for a few years, or having led a corporation that became huge, does not mean that your future decisions in that realm will continue to be any good.

But it doesn't matter: Imagine an unbreakable crypto: If you enter the right password, you are in. If you do not have it, infinite computer resources won't help you. Well, that environment is still an extremely dangerous environment for non-reversible transactions that cannot be manipulated by an authority, because most attacks on computer security work regardless of how good a cypher you use.

If you are attacking anything large, you just attack the keys. With no central authority, there is no way to recover keys, or ask for keys to be changed. Therefore, key management itself will be weakened due to how catastrophic it is to lose the keys. The harder you make it to lose all your bitcoins, the easier you make it to attack your keys.

So putting all the trust in the platform's security is like saying that a house is safe because you installed the best door money can buy. But there's still windows, and walls, and a roof, and a basement... Make them all perfectly secure, and you can't get into the house itself.