So is this theoretical programmer at home, playing poker, because he doesn't like the current wages? Because if he is at a different programming job, and he switches jobs because wages went up in a different employer, there's still an opening, just in a different company.

I for one do not think there are many people refusing to get a programming job because of low wages, but your local market might be very different from mine,

Full MIT numbers are not necessarily representative, because the majors people pick in MIT are not really all that close to those found at tech companies.

It's like looking at STEM as a whole vs Software companies. There are plenty of women entering STEM field, they just tend to focus on the S or the M (pun not intended, really), instead of on the T and the E. And even in Engineering, you'll mostly find them working on biotechnology. You'll find plenty of them in companies working on genetics, but not on your typical web company.

If you want to look for discrimination, look at which specialties within computing end up having more women. Everywhere I've worked, DBAs and testers had a much higher representation of women than programming, and it's not as if most people choose to become testers instead of program, since we are still paying those jobs less, although a tester today could end up writing quite a bit of code.

People that you meet in a group that has a certain shared interest aren't necessarily going to behave the same way with people that are not part of the same group.

When it comes down to it, almost everyone ends up behaving in a regular, down to earth way, around some people. We take our barriers down, and we consider people around us equals. But when people are surrounded by those they consider 'other', or just directly inferior, behavior can change dramatically. This is a major reason some people have a much easier way through life than others: Having the capability of making other people relate to you quickly is a major skill that makes sure you only get to face the best part of people. It's the reason some minorities have it rough: The same person that is very nice to you might be pretty terrible to them. You can even see this in groups that are trying to help minorities: If they believe you are one of the oppressors, for whatever reason, you will see how they can quickly have the exact same behaviors that they accuse others of having.

This is very easy to notice if you have friends that provide extremely different first impressions than you do. It's amazing the different treatment that a geeky introvert male that has English as a second language and a white, all-american party girl get. Both get harassment, but from different people, who tend to be perfectly good people around the other one.

So if some people were nice to you, and met you at a Mensa meeting, you just can't assume that they are the same kind of people around non-Mensa members, or when they think they are being watched by their peers.

I posted an article describing the "why" a month ago. Totally not surprised that the current reform efforts exhibited the same arc.

That general model is exactly why this initiative collapsed as well. Several aspects of this reform - such as "attributable owner" rules, i.e., implementing laws that require patent applications to reveal the real party of interest in the case, as a measure addressing shell companies - were supported by large interests that benefited from them, and opposed by large interests that didn't. The result is stalemate, just as we've seen countless previous times in the patent "reform" discussion.

The only measures that make it through the "reform" system are mild improvements that don't affect some entities differently than others. And even those can be difficult - e.g., the first-to-file change in the America Invents Act is great for well-funded enterprises, but more problematic for small businesses. In that case, large enterprises simply steamrollered the opposition with lobbying cash.

The upshot is that the "reform" sytem is, itself, deeply dysfunctional. An additional tragedy is that efforts that would objectively improve the patent system for everyone, such as giving examiners more time to perform their examination and implementing more accountability for technically incorrect arguments, get lost in the struggle.

Finding bugs is not a matter of speculation, but that doesn't mean you can prove that something that already happened was caused by said bug. It's especially fun in cases like the one you describe, a stack overflow. Is it possible that a system was in an undefined state at the time of a crash? Yes. But can we prove it?

In the case of a bug that is hard to reproduce, and where we do not have a good, indisputable account of what happened before, it's easy to cause a recall, but not so easy to prove fault on a specific incident.

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.