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.

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.

That would be the pro football fans.

Seriously, there are any number of other, smaller, leagues, and it would be easy to start more, but the fans keep flocking to the NFL. Why? Well, this is a case of a sort of natural monopoly. If there are multiple competing pro football leagues, then none of them can lay claim to having all of the best athletes, coaches, etc., so there is no real football championship. So the fans are always going to pick one league to be "the" league, and everything else will more or less disappear.

It's not the FCC's rule, its the NFL's rule. The NFL is exercising its rights as a copyright holder to prevent games from airing locally unless the stadium is sold out. The NFL believes this encourages local fans to attend, boosting revenues, and argues that if fans can watch it on free TV rather than going to the stadium, many of them will, so the NFL will be forced to pull the games from free TV and move them exclusively to cable, probably pay-per-view, to make up the lost revenues.

I have no position on whether the NFL is right, but this is them exercising their rights as a business to sell their produce in the way they choose (well, they're using the government granted and enforced copyright in order to control their product, which muddies that argument quite a bit).

That comes and goes. Google constantly fights it. Google makes changes which remove that crud, then the virtual companies figure out how to work around the changes. Rinse, repeat. The smaller search engines don't have as much trouble because there's not as much effort put into figuring out how to work around their protections.

Yes, they were. And the reason they weren't is because those newer-generation reactors were never built. We had the first gen reactors built in the early 50s that were horrible, and the second generation (like Fukishima) in the 60s and early 70s which were much better than the first-gen, but still had some potentially nasty failure modes and required active management to be safe. And that's where we stopped. The third and fourth-gen reactors were never built. So, yes, we hear about all these new generations of designs which were supposed to be cleaner, cheaper and safer, and they would have been... if we built them.

Is it really? Industrial-scale link farming requires thousands of sites. At $50 each, that's going to start chewing into your profit margins.

You're using hyperbole to make a point, I get that, but the pedant in me insists on responding to your literal statement: No, ROT-13 doesn't look a lot like AES256, even at a glance they look very different. ROT-13, or even more sophisticated fixed substitution ciphers, are trivial to recognize and break, in real time, with only the most cursory knowledge of the structure of the plaintext.