(the inability to get laid being not the least of those limitations)

That's a key point. I've known a lot of hugely gifted yet socially inept coders, who took their fear of personal interactions and reinterpreted it as disdain for the hoi polloi, and decided that the skills within their comfort zone were all they ever needed. And their employers saw them coming a mile away, and let them carve out their tiny moated kingdoms, for crap wages and zero upward mobility. The "genius nerd in his nerd cave" career track is a comfortable one. But it is so limiting.

Want to work in a decent, non-dead-end job, with the opportunity to advance your career and make a meaningful difference to the world? Learn to interact with people. Learn empathy, learn communications skills, learn to temper your urge towards condescension and dismissal. If you're a coder, it's 50% of your job, assuming you're doing your job right.

Except that, assuming that you are the average software developer (so FFS don't anecdote me, bro), Apple:
* Pays better than you
* Offers better benefits than you
* Is better known than you
* Has a larger and more effective recruitment program than you

Apple is not hurting for applicants. They're probably hurting for "qualified applicants", but that's a tautology: The definition of a "qualified applicant" is an applicant that you're willing to hire, given the talent pool available to you. All of us want our geniuses to be a little bit geniuser.

The result is, the context in which Apple/Google/Microsoft/Facebook/etc. hire is *very* different from the context in which Bweezbo.me hires. They have all the qualified applicants they want, and are limited by headcount. And that's exactly the situation where they can decide to stop indulging the unconscious (but well-demonstrated) bias of their hiring managers.

The indictment claims that the ring called their organization the "Underground Railroad."

Srsly, guys, try harder.

So if there were an AI system which genuinely had the intellect and communication capabilities of a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy (conversing in English), you would not consider it intelligent?

No, most phones don't have locks on them. They wouldn't be much use, as phones are intended neither to hold valuable objects, nor to be secured to a particular location.

That's a significant problem, I agree. You could program the same IMEI onto all the mainboard chips and make them inoperable unless the IMEIs all match, but the screen and touchscreen are still expensive and useful to salvage. It's not a panacea. But it would precipitously drop the street price of a stolen iPhone, and that would make theft less lucrative. Every bit counts.

The fuse bits would be on the radio chip, the IC that actually does the cellular stuff, so patching and soldering would be useless. Fuse bits are set in a manner similar to flash memory -- via commands to the chip. The only significant difference is that once set, they can't be changed.

Microcontrollers already use fuse bits. Your average less-than-a-dollar PIC microcontroller includes several fuse bits to do things like make it impossible to reprogram. It's well-known technology, and just as cost-effective as the current system. It just doesn't allow for IMEI modification, and it's starting to look like allowing IMEI modification is a win for the manufacturers.

Storing the IMEI in PROM instead of EEPROM would have no effect on production costs. Fuse bits are, if anything, cheaper than their rewritable equivalent (though IMEIs are what, 64 bits, so honestly it wouldn't make a cent of difference).

It would be trivial for manufacturers to make the IMEI absolutely unchangeable using fuse bits. The fact that they have not suggests that they see widespread phone theft as an overall benefit for them, which makes sense -- it drives sales of new phones among those able to afford them.

Enforcement of those laws would help, but enforcement of such things is always expensive and imperfect. Simpler and more effective to mandate that manufacturers make IMEIs absolutely unchangeable.

They're not basing the reputation system on reports of cheating, though. As you pointed out, it's difficult, and hopelessly subjective, to tell the difference between a really good player and a cheater, so expert oversight is necessary to interpret those flags. (The good news is, automated analytics are getting remarkably good at telling the difference. It's an arms race, of course, but not as lopsided as it once was.) Rather, this system is for tagging griefers.

If that were the case, then yes, you could argue that the use of aluminum is dangerous. A decrease in the use of aluminium would result in a decrease in deaths.

Bauxite is strip-mined, though, which is pretty safe as far as the miners are concerned.

Wonderful! If, as you say, the greatest programmers are entirely self-made, purely because some god-given vocatio made them start BASICing up roguelikes, then applying incentives to teachers won't matter one way or another.

But if, on the other hand, this stuff isn't genetic but rather a matter of environment and upbringing, of a word of encouragement at the right time, of giving a seed of talent a place to grow.... well, but no. No, all you need is a computer and to be the chosen one.

You don't know a single competent programmer who just started programming just because they wanted to. They started programming because they had the opportunity to, and the support. And if manipulating teachers is effective in countering their (probably unconscious, but nevertheless well-researched and documented) bias towards offering opportunity and support towards mostly boys, then it's the right thing to do.