No they can't, the law also states a deadline by which they have to answer and he made sure the deadline is ahead of the exam.

Which AFAIK they also can't do.

He found a valid loophole in the law, the combination of different unrelated government actions. Firstly they created a transparency law (good!) which applies to certain government institutions. Also, they centralized the exams - when I wrote my Abitur many years ago, questions were made locally, by the school you took it, mostly by the teacher who had given the course, so it was based on the material that had actually been taught. There are advantages and disadvantages to that. For whatever reasons, some time between my Abitur and now they centralized everything, which brought the exam questions into one of the government institutions covered by the transparency law. Whoops.

Yes, this is actually a good standard, mod the AC up.

If you can't re-write your policy change or other "equality" demand in a way that doesn't mention gender at all, then it's not actually an equality demand.

On the contrary, I'm working with OpenCV right now in a project, I've read up on a couple very recent papers regarding foreground/background segmentation, and the results are quite astonishing if you compare them to a decade ago. And in some edge cases (especially low visibility, low contrast, slow movement), the computer can beat the human eye.

But in the vast majority of cases, especially when the machine was not prepared for this precise task, there's still way too much crazy shit happening to entrust human lives to it, and machines still make many mistakes that humans look at for a split second and say wtf?

Yes, but not having the door locked makes even more sense form that perspective. Plus there's been at least one case (that I know of) where a passenger (who was also a commercial pilot) landed a plane after something happened to the pilot/s.

Because you can't see that poster from Japan. Both the writing and the reading happens in the USA, due to physical restrictions.

The Internet is not bound by these restrictions.

Here's the realistic options that Google has:

1.) file an appeal
2.) comply with the court decision
3.) stop doing business in Japan, effective immediately

For some rea$$$on, I'm pretty sure that contrary to the usual USA-supremecists big talk here, #3 will not even be seriously considered within the Google HQ.

Because of a bad analogy. A poster put up in California is not visible from Japan.

When you pull your head out of your ass, you can see the rest of the world more clearly. Try it.

Thankfully, Google is not a 3 year old throwing a temper tantrum, like you'd like them to be.

including? What are the other options? Simply ignoring a court decision? Of course, they're a big american company with a big american attitude including the "our laws are the laws of the world" approach (we can sue everyone everywhere for everything that's illegal in the USA, but we don't accept other countries laws as valid to us, even when we're doing our business there).

I'm split on the court decision, adding more information to something is generally the better approach over removing information, but other than some fanatics I don't think free speech trumps absolutely every other right and consideration on the planet, and when someone knowingly spreads false factual information about you, the line has been crossed.

TFA (and many articles on the subject - disclaimer: I live in Germany and read local news sources, too) forgets to mention something important which is very likely the reason that he gets job offers:

He didn't just send a "here's my cute idea" letter. He actually studied the law in question, his letter is said to be full of legalese mentioning all the important paragraphs. The letter is so that the agency responsible for handling them is now looking if they can find an actual, valid reason to refuse his request, because they couldn't on purely formal reasons (which they usually use when refusing a request they don't like).

That's a funny answer, but an illegal one. He took great care to make sure that the deadline set by law for their answer is ahead of the exam date.

You see, that's the problem right there: Stereotypes.

Some people negotiate harder than other people. Maybe statistically speaking, men fall more often into group 1 and women more often into group 2. You're trying to tell me that's the only factor? I'm quite sure introverts fall more often into group 2 while extroverts fall more often into group 1. Maybe redheads fall more often into group 1, or people born in August. Maybe tall people. Probably younger people fall more often into group 2. People shortly after a divorce, people with pets, people growing up with older siblings...

It's so crazy that we focus on the sex thing when there are one thousand differences between person A and person B, most of which were not theirs choice, many of which are equally genetic.

Because an experienced human pilot can take two looks at a highway and see if it's possible to land there. He understands one hundred details in two seconds because the human brain is, despite all its failings and shortcomings, and incredible pattern-matching engine and really, really good at finding the important details in noisy input. We're still trying to make computers as good as the worst humans when it comes to things like vision and shape recognition.

That, actually, is a totally stupid crazy rule. You're basically telling your pilots that no matter how often they prove themselves to be innocent, you constantly suspect them of being potential terrorists / suicidal mass-murderers.

Better do away with that stupid reinforced door and lock. It was added to solve one problem, yes, but as we've seen it creates other problems that you then need more band-aids for to solve, which will create yet other problems...

Computers sometimes fail. So do humans. The best way to not be at the mercy of either is to have both. There's at least one incident on record where malfunctioning sensors told a plane computer that it was 4000 feet higher than it actually was, and it would've happily crashed into the ground during descent if the pilot hadn't looked out the window to say "wtf, that's the ground right there".

At HAL 2001, yes that was 14 years ago, there was a speech with the title "why my space ship will not run Linux" and that's as true today as it was back then: Our current software, from firmware and operating system to applications, is total crap, incredibly shoddy, and half of it is being held together by spit and duct tape. Fact is that while we make progress (and not a little, actually it's quite amazing), we still don't know how to write really good software. We know a bit about how to teach humans to write pretty good software, even though most companies use 10% of that knowledge in real production (mostly because next-quarter focussed managers don't understand the incredibly good ROI on high software quality).
But a lot of that knowledge is about software development processes.

But do we know how to make a non-trivial computer program that is guaranteed to behave correctly? How much software with an EAL5, EAL6 or EAL7 certification do you know? Wait, you can check here. Not very many.