mercurio

Please fix the title change. 'Trivial' and 'elementary' have specific meaning in mathematics and are not interchangeable. Roughly speaking, 'trivial' means easy or obvious, while 'elementary' means a proof that does not use complex analysis or higher techniques. This proof is elementary but definitely not trivial.

It might be that the Siri functionality is tied to the A5 chip. The A5 design is a lot larger than other dual core ARM A9 designs (even after accounting for the larger GPU) and thus has lots of spare silicon to use for specialized circuits. It is possible that Apple added a custom DSP to aid speech recognition.

I don't think Siri is in beta. I think only the 'voice dictation for arbitrary text input' feature is in beta.

Except that Windows vs Mac was something like 95% to 5% in favor of Windows, while the smartphone market is likely to end up more like 60% to 30% in favor of Android. The situation is different qualitatively.

The data consistently shows that iPhone share is growing, just not as fast as Android.

iPhones get a much bigger subsidy from the carriers. This can be deduced from the ASP that Apple, HTC, RIM etc report. iPhone ASP has always been $600+, while HTC, RIM have ASPs around $300-400 (Samsung smartphone ASP is even lower). This can also be seen by looking at contract prices outside the US. For example, in the UK all phones can be had free on contract, but the monthly amount you pay for an iPhone is much larger than for a top of the line Android (see the O2 or Vodafone UK sites).

The reason this is not reflected in the contract-less prices is because US carriers have a very strong incentive to inflate them to force you to choose contracts.

I must disagree with the Organic Chemistry bit. I took advanced organic chem as an elective in college and I absolutely loved it. Yes there are a lot of different reactions, and there is some memorization involved, but there is a very beautiful theory unifying so many diverse reactions and the focus was always on understanding the reasoning why and how those particular reactions occur (reaction mechanisms). Once you knew the basic facts, then solving problems involved a lot of deductive reasoning (in positing new mechanisms) and creativity (in building new compounds using known reactions).

The FAQ has nothing to do with it. Nobody is contesting that cell tower location information is being used. The differing claim is this: the O'Reilly researchers claim that the co-ordinates logged are those of the device itself and these co-ordinates are possibly calculated using cell tower triangulation, while this blog post claims that the co-ordinates logged are those of the cell towers themselves rather than the device.

I just used the original headline from the blog. You're correct that it makes sense in context, but that is why the "recording your moves" part is in quotes. It's a direct quote from the O'Reilly headline.

Anyway the larger issue is that it is not clear exactly what information is being logged. We know some location info is vulnerable, but exactly what and how much? The O'Reilly researchers really should have done a better job. The least they should have done was to run some controlled experiments with a freshly wiped phone.

I'm not the author. But I believe the O'Reilly researchers claim that the co-ordinates logged are of the device itself. It is not clear at all that this is true and the author of this post presents some evidence that would suggest otherwise.