My son was seven when a paediatrician diagnosed him on the autism scale – but really, we had known for years. There was his limited vocabulary – a handful of words by the time he was three, and a habit of mixing up letters or relying on stock sentences. He found it hard to get on with other children at his nursery, and later, when he went to a much bigger school, it was obvious the experience was terrifyingly loud, hectic and incomprehensible to him. Meanwhile, if there was something he was interested in, whether it was Peppa Pig or Superman, he would fixate on it to the detriment of absolutely anything else. We knew where all the signs were pointing.

As I detailed back in November in Sharp: A Cautionary Tale, the former electronics giant Sharp (OTCPK:SHCAY; OTCPK:SHCAF) has seen better days. Over the past several years, Sharp's financial statements have been like a disaster zone of its own making. Predictably, Sharp's most recent and final full year performance statement was also disastrous. The strength of the yen1 and weakness of the global economy will continue to make sure of that. However, on March 30th, 2016, after state-sponsored Japan Display Inc. (OTC:JPDYY) of the Innovation Network Group failed to make a competing offering, Hon Hai/Foxconn Technology Group (OTC:HNHAF; OTC:HNHAY; OTC:FXCOF) finalized a much talked-about deal to acquire a 66% stake in Sharp - priced at 3.5 billion2, about 2.75 billion less than its original offer but 1.22 billion higher than Sharp's market cap at the time of the purchase.

Nasdaq Inc. is trying to identify would-be white-collar criminals by using artificial intelligence systems originally built to track terrorists and sex traffickers. The exchange is testing systems that analyze data about trading activity against what traders say on their corporate chat and email accounts, in an effort to spot potential insider trading, market manipulation and other crimes faster and more accurately than current surveillance systems can. Parsing the chatter of traders in the time before, during and after transactions -- and matching those findings with trading data -- provides "holistic surveillance," said Bill Nosal, vice president of business development for market technology at Nasdaq NDAQ, -0.56% . "This can show what was happening in the trader's head," Nosal said. The work comes as New York Attorney General Preet Bharara and other state and federal officials step up efforts to prosecute financial crimes.

Okay, so Minecraft was already kinda-sorta the second-bestselling game of all time if you don't count Wii Sports, which was a pack-in, and I'm loathe to count stuff you can't buy standalone. But yes, on the basis of conventional video game sales leaderboards, with over 100 million copies (106,859,714 to be precise) across PC, mobile and console in the pocket, Minecraft is now officially second only to that all-time, all-platforms, indefatigable puzzling juggernaut, Tetris. Tetris has something like half a billion on the books if the entrepreneurial math here is right. So there's probably no way Minecraft is going to beat that, probably ever. But consider the next-bestselling game (excluding Wii Sports) is Grand Theft Auto V, with an impressive but presumably now creeping 65 million copies.

When he's not building electric cars or helping to create the idea for a high-speed transit system, Elon Musk really wants citizens of Earth to go to Mars. During a wide-ranging interview at The Code Conference, the CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX discussed everything from life to Mars to the possibility that life is just an elaborate computer simulation. Let's break down the three most interesting things Musk shared during his Code talk: Musk predicts the first humans will travel to Mars eight years from now, arriving on the red planet by 2025. Musk founded SpaceX in 2002, with a goal of "enabling people to live on other planets," according to a description on the space tech company's website. In April, SpaceX announced the first unmanned mission to Mars would launch in two years using the company's Falcon Heavy rocket. Musk has even given thought to how laws would work on Mars once it's colonized.

What do you envision being the next major breakthrough for PC form factor? We're working on lots of things that are mind-blowing. To me, we have to figure out how to get to J.A.R.V.I.S. [Iron Man's trusty AI, not Intel's vaporware earpiece]. The ability to manipulate things wherever you are, look at things wherever you are, talk to things in a more natural way. And it will be in so many domains, it won't just be PCs. It'll be phones, tablets and also new types of things we haven't conceived of yet. I'm a fan and believer in the notion of ambient computing... Today you have "destination computing," where you go and sit down with something like an all-in-one.

The creators of "The Sims" are opening up gender customization options for the first time in the history of the popular life simulation video game. "The Sims" publisher Electronic Arts and developer Maxis says a free update available Thursday for "The Sims 4" will remove gender boundaries and allow players to create Sims with any type of physique, walk style or voice. "The Sims 4" and earlier installments in the 16-year-old series previously restricted specific clothing, hair styles and other aesthetic options to either male or female characters. EA and Maxis say over 700 pieces of content previously available to only male or female Sims will now be accessible regardless of their gender in "The Sims 4" and its expansion packs. The gaming medium rarely depicts or allows players to create transgender characters.

The recent killing of the Taliban Chieftain, Mullah Akhtar Mansour, by a drone inside the Pakistan province of Baluchistan, is a striking reminder that we have entered a futuristic world where war is waged by flying killer robots and that we have witnessed a massive leap forward in the history of human conflict. Given that war accelerates history and the Islamic world is incapable of producing the cell phones on which its Islamists plot to kill us, the mullah's death by drone reminds us of immutable laws governing the fall of civilizations. Declining civilizations will always face superior firepower from ascending civilizations because sovereignty is only temporarily uncontested. The U.S. agency that conducts drone warfare worldwide, the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), was constituted in 2002 and has grown ten-fold since its inception. Staffed by both the CIA and military, it now operates in super-secret locations across the globe. For the first ten years of its existence, JSOC conducted operations which were largely under reported and therefore garnered very little public scrutiny.

Waltham, Massachusetts-based emotions analytics company Affectiva has raised 14 million in a round led by Fenox Venture Capital. The company intends to use the funding to continue to develop their Emotion AI platform and expand their operations globally. In addition to the funding, the company announced a leadership change, with former CEO and president Nicholas Langeveld becoming chairman of the board and cofounder Dr. Rana el Kaliouby stepping into the CEO role. "I am thrilled to have Fenox Venture Capital invest in Affectiva. We are at an inflection point regarding how emotion data and insights are used in various industries," Langeveld said in a statement.

Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) is hosting its annual Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) on June 13-17 in San Francisco, and RBC expects Siri to hog the limelight this year, along with extensive OS upgrades and potential macbook pro refresh. Siri SDK & More: "Expect AAPL to showcase Siri SDK for 3rdparty developers to expand use cases for Siri and lay groundwork for a wifi-enabled personal assistant (Like Amazon Echo)." "We expect a more robust integration of various OS's across AAPL's ecosystem, with Siri taking the center stage in terms of integration," Amit Daryanani wrote in a note. For example, MacOS is expected to get Siri integration to further drive usage of Apple's voice assistant. Daryanani expects some discussion on integrating VocaIIQ (Apple's acquisition in late 2015) and laying the groundwork to launch a more comprehensive artificial intelligence-powered personal assistant device.