I think real names do help, but only some. I think you can divide the population into three groups:

1. The people who will be civil, at least most of the time, regardless of anonymity.

2. The people who will be civil if they have to attach a name they care about (which may be a pseudonym).

3. The people who just don't care. Most, if not all, of these are asses in real life, too. We all know some.

I think the majority of people fall into group 1. Group 2 is a minority. Group 3 is a tiny minority... but on the Internet the relevant population of even a moderate-size site is enormous, so a tiny minority can do enormous damage.

I think they're building these robots to solve the problem of how to make these robots. A pixel in a game of Life is easy to maintain -- it has an x,y coordinate and immediately knows all its neighbor's positions. A robot has to identify all its neighbors and then localize itself using infrared and communication time lags. That's a challenge. The only way to meet that challenge is to build the robots and figure out how to make them work.

Well, at least it wasn't a... eukaryotic strain of flu virus?

Well, it's possible that there are some unknown laws of physics that are relevant as well.

I listened to a talk by Google HR a while ago about this. They found that within Google women were being promoted at a much lower rate than men. Looking closer, they realized that among men and women who self-nominated for promotion (the Google promotion process is one of self-nomination rather than manager nomination), the promotion rates were statistically indistinguishable, but that women self-nominated at a lower rate than men. HR's solution was to direct managers to specifically seek out women they felt were ready for promotion and encourage them to self-nominate. They did not issue any instructions to the promotion committees to favor the promotion of women, and instead reaffirmed the commitment to purely merit-based promotion (or as close to it as could be achieved).

But as it turned out there was no need to tell the committees to favor women, because merely getting managers to encourage women to self-nominate immediately equalized the promotion rates. Of course, there are still far fewer women promoted because there are far fewer women.

I've heard some criticize Google HR's actions on the grounds that it shows favoritism toward women. I don't think that's true. I think it shows recognition of and adaptation to gender differences. Whether the differences are ultimately biological or cultural in origin, they clearly exist, and not adjusting for them is a bias in favor of men. If a system evolved in a context where one predominates, then the system will have evolved to best fit the culture and characteristics of that group. De-biasing such a system requires making intelligent adjustments to account for the differences with other groups. I think Google's solution to their promotion imbalance was spectacular -- minimal intervention, precisely on target and without lowering the standard at all.

It also relates to the 50% of product, since studies have shown that team diversity improves performance and creativity.

Maybe, maybe not. I don't know anything about Cook's motives, but several studies have shown that teams with greater diversity are more productive and more creative. There is actual, bottom-line, revenue-generating value in diversity. To the extent that Cook is seeking that benefit, stockholders should applaud.

Meh. Our genes code for sequences of proteins. From those proteins emerge the complex actions that form cells and cellular processes, including all of the cellular differentiation necessary to form a complex organism, and the arrangement of those differentiated cells, including the structure and arrangement of our brains. That structure determines how our brains process input, but all of the information needed to form that structure is in the genes (plus the environment in which the genes evolved to operate... but the information about what is provided by the environment is implicit in the genes, too).

You're right that molecular biologist aren't looking at genes in terms of how they affect higher-level cognitive functions, but that's only because we lack huge amounts of knowledge required to explain the connection. We don't really even understand protein folding, much less how genes code for differentiated cellular structures, then organ structures, then organ arrangement. From the other end, we don't understand how the nature and arrangement of neurons makes general intelligence possible. Once we understand all of the links in that chain, we will be discussing how our genes code for intelligence, because they absolutely do.

I think we will not be able to program general intelligence until we understand how it works. I believe we will eventually do it, but there is basically no example, ever, of humans being able to create a non-trivial technology without first having a good explanation of the relevant processes. It's common that we create technologies without understanding lower levels underpinning the processes, but we have to understand enough, at the relevant level.

I see no reason why intelligence should be any different.

When you're getting capital at below the rate of inflation you'd be stupid not to take the money so long as you have something useful to do with it.

DRM is already fully supported in ARM processors. See TrustZone, which provides a separate "secure virtual CPU" with on-chip RAM not accessible to the "normal" CPU and the ability to get the MMU to mark pages as "secure", which makes them inaccessible to the normal CPU. Peripherals can also have secure and non-secure modes, and their secure modes are accessible only to TrustZone. A separate OS and set of apps run in TrustZone. One DRM application of this is to have secure-mode code that decrypts encrypted video streams and writes them directly to a region of display memory which is marked as secure, so the normal OS can never see the decrypted data. Another common application is secure storage for cryptographic keys, ensuring that even if an attacker can acquire root on your device, he can't extract your authentication keys (though he can probably use them as long as he controls the device, since the non-secure OS is necessarily the gatekeeper).

Nearly all mainstream Android devices have TrustZone, and nearly all have video DRM implemented in it. A large subset also use it for protection of cryptographic keys (Go to Settings -> Security and scroll down to "Credential Storage -> Storage type". If it says "hardware-backed" your device has TrustZone software for key storage.

So, no, nVidia isn't doing this for DRM. That problem is already solved, though it's stupid because all of the content is on the Internet anyway.

My thoughts exactly. I'd love to do the 8,000m peaks but unfortunately I don't do well above ~12,000ft so I have to keep to smaller mountains (just got done with Mt Washington and a few surrounding mountains last week).

So?