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.
Actually, in your link above, iPhone 4 prices start from $859. $719 is the price of the 3GS.
I don't know how it is in Australia, but the contract price discrepancy between Android phones and iPhones is well known in England. For example, O2 sells the Galaxy S2 for free with a 24 month £42 plan, while the 16GB iPhone 4 is free on a 24 month £67 plan.
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.
[Microsoft is] dictating rigid specs for 7 Series devices (a specific CPU and speed, screen aspect ratio and resolution, memory, and even button configuration), and doing away with carrier or partner UI customizations such as Sense or TouchWiz. That's right -- there will be a single Windows Phone identity regardless of carrier or device brand.
So all Windows phones will look the same and work the same. I'm skeptical that hardware manufacturers will be enthusiastic about Microsoft turning their products into commodities again. Unlike the situation with PCs, this time they have a viable alternative in Android.
Copyrights are monopoly rights that the state assigns to individuals for the public good. The public good here is not just creation of works (both original and derivative) but also their consumption. Copyright law has always been concerned with finding a healthy balance between the two. This is why fair use is protected and also why copyrights are required to expire.
Now the reason the internet is such a big deal when it comes to copyright, is that it makes distribution, and hence consumption, much much easier than in the past. In fact, it also makes creating derivative works a whole lot easier. So there is a strong argument to be made that the good gained by weakening copyright laws would outweigh any harm. In fact, this is the argument Google is making with their book scanning project and related settlement.
The fundamental issue is that because the model of the world on which our current copyright laws were based has changed so radically, we should consider rewriting the laws to obtain a better copyright balance.
I can't believe a comment that essentially consists of irrelevant objections to the article is sitting at the top. Please don't upvote emotional rants masquerading as arguments.
The bottom line - an American economist supporting Hugo Chávez
The author's political views do not automatically make his arguments valid.
Yes indeed Germans have up to 12 weeks in paid vacation. The question is who is paying for this? You can look at the taxes Germans pay and understand the German government is subsidizing it.
First, while the German government might subsidize a lot of things, I doubt that it pays employers for the vacation time taken by employees (except in special cases like childbirth). Even if this were true, since the subsidies would come out of taxes, it would be economically the same as a person choosing to take a pay cut for working less hours.
I agree here in US healthcare payment via insurance is not the best solution. From other side in Germany (I know Germany best) the government is subsidizing it. Guess who is paying this?
I don't recall the author claiming anywhere that healthcare is magically paid for in Europe. His point was that per capita it costs half has much and provides better outcomes.
"...the French could not afford their welfare state..." Again - who is paying the bills. Somebody has to pay the bills.
I don't get this rhetorical technique of asking who is paying the bills. Not only is it a bad argument, it is poor rhetoric.
Increased leisure time? So what is the point?
May I point out that almost all art, science and human culture originally came out of leisure time.
Carbon emissions - this was invented by Europeans academics to get more grants for research
Carbon emissions are real. They are byproducts of combustion. It is their trading that was invented. Consuming less energy reduces real world emissions, and increases the tradable commodity.
The issue really is weakening of free speech rather than holocaust denial. Distorting facts should never be a justification to suppress speech. This is exactly the justification the Catholic church used for a long time, and they even have a word for it: heresy. Free speech really is our only tool to get out of situations where a bad idea or 'fact' is widely accepted and supported by those in power.
The irony here is that if Germans hadn't lost their freedom of expression under the Nazis, the holocaust might not have happened at the scale it did.
Wait... don't the two solutions have the same time complexity?
The bitwise XOR approach should depend on the maximum size of the numbers (say k) along with the length of the array (say n) as O(nk), and just using radix sort on the array will take time O(nk) too.
If you assume that bitwise XOR is constant time, that implies that the numbers in the array are bounded by a constant, and therefore Radix sort can sort the array in O(c.n) = O(n). In either case, they have the same running time.
A couple of days ago, Fred Wilson made a relevant post about his near escape from the auction rate bond market. Its an interesting read, with more detail on how these bonds usually function and how the recent malfunction developed. From what I understood, these bonds don't lose all their liquidity overnight. After they lose their "primary" liquidity (by failing an auction), there is a secondary market that kicks in because of the high interest rates that the bonds are contractually required to offer once they fail an auction.
Fred says he got a call from his broker saying "your bonds have not yet failed an auction but you should know that the risk of it happening has gone up". I imagine that a lot of startups must have got a similar call, but perhaps the founders were too focused elsewhere to pay attention. Or maybe the smart ones did listen and were able to avoid this sorry mess.
I read the wiki article and it turns out the horn uses precisely that dimensional difference in a very clever way. The radius varies as 1/x along the x-axis, so the volume grows as 1/x^2 while the surface area grows as 1/x. This means the growth rate of volume goes to zero much faster than that of the surface area. As a result the volume integral converges, while the surface area diverges.