Stating something is undoubtedly true would be anti-science, especially according to the falsifiability definition. But it should be noted that this wasn't (and in my opinion shouldn't) be meant to divorce science from truth: in fact, Popper (who popularized falsifiability) stated that "there are criteria of progress toward the truth".

I've had pretty good luck using Siri with the music cranked up in the car. I haven't done much testing, but I suspect that my habit of speaking at the microphone on the bottom of the phone or holding it up to my face helps, that way it can do its usual noise cancellation thing with the secondary mic. Unfortunately, my results with siri aren't as good as other's overall, due to my poor enunciation (I have a slight lisp) :/

Seems you are correct that there is no logic behind it, but that it's just a very commonly used and well-tolerated error: grammar girl's analysis.

I've been starting a textbook project myself recently (it's a lot more work than I first anticipated to flesh out the material and formatting, even with latex, and I haven't even started with the graphic design) so this is quite interesting to me. I saw that ibooks author will export to pdf, my biggest question is: will this be compatible with print-on-demand services? Surely some folks are still going to want dead tree versions, and some topics don't need lots of media interaction. Apple would do very well to consider hosting their own print-on-demand services for this (hmm, sort of like they did with the cards iphone app...)

Another thing I would love to see is some sort of "preview this book" like Amazon's. If Apple is to be believed, this is going to open up book publishing quite a bit, which also means lots of competing books with the standard web-2.0 and appstore quality distribution.

I'm very sorry to hear your situation. I certainly hope the best for your family. I don't really have any advice, but your story reminded me of something I heard on NPR a while back that might at least be of interest:
http://www.npr.org/2011/09/12/140336146/for-the-dying-a-chance-to-rewrite-life

Well I certainly can't speak to the linguistics aspect, but I didn't recognize date and population size numbers to be totally made up; there is some research (peer reviewed at least -- this isn't my area) putting initial expansion ~65K to 100K years ago [1,2] and some supporting a tight population bottleneck down to a few thousand individuals (*effective population size) at that point as well [2, 3].

1. http://www.pnas.org/content/103/25/9381.full
2. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047248498902196
3. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v475/n7357/full/nature10231.html?WT.ec_id=NATURE-20110728

I think I'd have had a lot better luck if I trusted a robotic spouse rather than my recent non-robotic one.

In addition, the list of alarms has the general "list of stuff" UI on the iphone. Having a consistent UI for certain types of tasks (adding something to a list) aids in learning to use the UI; once someone learns to add an item to one list they'll transfer that knowledge to new situations (won't they?!). Though I'll admit that "Add" may be better than "+" in these cases (though you again run into localization issues, but since it's a general UI item Apple could probably handle that system wide).

It's a tricky trade off: UI concepts should be consistent and generalizable, but also as descriptive as possible. These are at odds at times.

I think this interview may be interesting, given the reference to Angry Birds in particular:

Peter Vesterbacka, Maker of Angry Birds Talks about the Birds, Apple, Android, Nokia, and Palm/HP

Note: that article is something like two months old now, things may have changed since then for them.

Agreed. The biggest usability change for me so far, aside from the overgenerous whitespace, are the folded preview-comments. I noticed that Re: subjects are missing the original subject (probably a plus, since it's redundant information), and (Score: X) information seems to be missing from them unless they are top-level posts. That's a shame, since I routinely use that as a filter for whether a post is likely to be interesting enough to fold out and read.

(Devil's advocate post, ymmv)

While I agree that the result is almost certainly incorrect, IMO his arguments appear to be analytical enough to be considered a proof (perhaps a "sketch," and again, he's likely made a mistake). Even though the arguments are quite rambling, he insists on using too much of his own terminology, and he cites almost no previous literature (though he attempts to justify this near the end.)

Also, he does offer a runtime analysis: O(mn^4) in Section 6. As for the space/time tradeoff mentioned by others, I'm no complexity theorist but as I understand it no poly-time algorithm can use exponential space (how can you access exponential memory locations in polynomial time?)

Finally, the inclusion of real-machine performance isn't that surprising given that he has software: I myself have been asked for this by reviewers even after giving a big-O analysis of the algorithms (in cases where I had produced real software).

This'll never work. How are people going to annoyingly talk on their phones while ordering?

I've thought about this exactly, that apple does a great job of making their devices seem physical instead of virtual. (Please excuse the handwavy language.)

One can call it personal preference, but in reality I think a lot of people's preferences lean that way because it's ingrained in their heads. When they move an object with their finger, certain basal parts of the brain expect that object to react in a smooth, predictable manner, and this is decoupled from the expectation of the information they want to see scrawled on the object (the webpage). This was important even back in keyboard and mouse days (old linux window managers would give an option to just show an empty rectangle when you dragged a window so that the movement and placement was smooth), but now we're literally pushing things around like they're representations of the physical world.

And it's a hell of a lot nicer to use a device that agrees with built-in models of reality. I dunno if apple has patented that very idea or what, but it's all over iOS and conspicuously absent in Android. Fluid screen rotation, resistance to overscroll and springback, acceleration and deceleration of page flipping and scrolling... and simple framerate (though the Droid 2 is admittedly getting a lot closer in that last regard).

I have a tablet, but I'm planning on selling it at the end of the month.

The reasons are primarily 'need fulfilled by another device' and 'price.'

Although the tablet is great at certain things (even in the realm of content creation/editing) and is definitely an interesting social turn in computing (I mean that in the "using computers with other people" sense, not the "checking facebook" sense), I have a laptop and a smartphone, and three mobile devices is just too much.

Well, I can more effectively use the cash on other gadgets. It was a fun experiment, and I'm glad I did it. I'm not sure how I would change it to make me try again in the future, though.

I've found that my iPad makes an excellent sushi plate.