...with your ebook reader.

Not because a browser is included means it's a good idea to do so.

Has someone been watching those iPad Healthcare case study videos?

Um, no. Someone has been producing actual healthcare products.

The PHR space is going to explode I believe as people start to shop around for affordable healthcare. This is one area I see where a small amount of technology can help the lives of millions of people. No more $100 xrays at every dentist you visit. Expensive diagnostics follow you around as long as they're valid. Less lost records and information 'silos' between doctors and labs.

This is one product I really hope Microsoft succeeds in.

You mean just like Firefox defaulting to Google on millions of installs? Or how about Adobe Acrobat reader defaulting to installing Chrome ( which defaults to Google Search ) on 10s of millions of installs?

Product tie-ins are a fact of life in the software industry.

When I install or upgrade IE a popup asks me to choose my default search engine. It's true Bing is the default under "Express Settings", but you are given the choice.

Everyone knows most users don't switch from defaults. Everyone, including Google who paid Mozilla to set them as the default search engine for years now. And I don't believe there's anything wrong with that either.

I'm a little confused. Why would you need a Word document to exploit a remote vulnerability?

Least for IVRs, on average people find male voices more intimidating than female voices. We also find female voices more nurturing than male voices on average.

Other posters have already point this out. Suggestions ( facilitated by nurturing speaker ) then women are used. Commands ( facilitated by intimidation, i.e. subtle threat of punishment ) then males are more often used.

Systems where you may need to intimidate the listener a bit will tend to use male voices. I kid you not, but in the future pay attention to how many collections operators or conflict desks sound 'black'. Also think of how often you spoke to a collections/conflict department and got a deep voiced male. Now compare that to how often you called the general operator and got a deep voiced male.

I was just about to make this exact point.

Access to money or resources in general changes the problem. Poorer schools often have terrible teacher to student ratios, constant budget cuts ( everyone hates taxes right? ), and lots of social and environmental ( not talking about the weather here ) problems to deal with. Teachers become a lot more things than just 'educators'. In fact, having a computer assist in the education while the teacher plays counselor/discipline enforcer/confidant/role mole/etc, etc. is a lucky break for these poor overworked saps.

What we need is smarter Education software. Software that knows the material needed for ever level. Software that adapts to the students special needs. Software that alerts the teacher when the student seems to have a problem ( eg. dyslexia, attention span issues ). Software that may help keep inexperienced Educators themselves at a particular teaching pace or to a particular teaching standard.

First, the article makes no sense since Siri doesn't do translation. I guess translation doesn't "exist" yet since Apple doesn't have a product.

Google, Nuance and Microsoft have been pushing Speech Recognition for a few years now. These companies put millions into NLP R&D ever year and are on the forefront of technology. Apple had been ignoring this space and so these companies have had great Speech Recognition and other NLP products for a while and Apple doesn't.

Google and Microsoft are about to release the next wave of speech products ( e.g. in Android 4 and WP 8 ). These companies have NLP technology Apple hasn't even begin to tackle. Like NLP in all major world languages and across many markets ( eg. Checkout EngKoo for example )

IOS was falling behind and Apple scrambled to purchase a Speech recognition mobile app, quickly licensed Nuance and Wolfram Alpha knowledgebase technology, and added those APIs in the operating system. They had to remove Siri from their market place.

Marketing mentions DARPA, but just about all Speech R&D is funded in someway by DARPA. DARPA's been carrying that torch for a while now. Even the popular open source Pocket Sphinx was made possible by partial DARPA funding.

In short this Siri marketing push is the largest scale astroturf marketing campaign I've ever seen.

news that matters

It's the best deal around I think.

Unlimited custom playlist for $5/month. And you also got 5 MP3 downloads too.

I hope apps like http://mrnumber.com/ get built directly into all mobile OSes.

Honestly, I won't even bother complaining about it, just take the entire issue out of their hands.

Give us a static strongly typed alternative/extension without the literally hundreds of known design flaws.

How about a Javascript that's more Java-like?

You don't need a college degree to get a job, although we as a society have done a very good job of convincing young people otherwise.

I hope we've convinced young people that education opens your eyes to new possibilities. College is more about widening your experiences and depth of knowledge. It's not going to benefit every single person. But it will improve a significant portion of those who graduate.

In other words, think of it from the community's point of view, rather than the single student. One lone student may or may not see the benefits of college, but the entire community is pretty much guaranteed to see benefits if a significant amount of it's population is educated.

Because they partnered with Microsoft in this endeavor.

When did Apple partner with Microsoft? What did I miss?

Here is the Web of Mobile Patent Lawsuits. How on earth is Microsoft and Apple partners?

oh...

Apple....?