They review flagged videos. Every action is a one-off. This result is expected and not at all surprising. Trying to build an argument around hypocrisy here is just misleading.

I keep earplugs at my desk as well as headphones. I have my own office but conversations bounce around the halls here pretty badly. It's typical for there to be two or three conversations happening within listening distance.. The earplugs block out 100% of that quiet chatter which is awesome for avoiding distractions.

If you're trying to make a case against socialized medicine, keep in mind that most countries do provide financial incentives to do better. Eg they get a bonus for convincing someone to stop smoking. In the US, the medical industry would seem to benefit (make money) from smokers.

Only the more modern GPU support it. And of those, there are still different levels of support. Even if it's supported, you would probably get much better perf on an nvidia card by using cuda for example. So in today's world, you can't just use an onpencl-powered encoder, it depends on what hardware you have.

Not really true. Siri can search. But siri can also do other things. I can't exactly type "remind me to pick up my paycheque when I get to work on friday" into google. Wolframalpha can also answer some pretty interesting queries that google can't touch. I suspect that with future versions, we'll see more and more useful stuff sneak into siri. Maybe partnerships with more companies, eg comcast: "siri, record tonight's episode of dancing with the stars". It's kinda gimmicky right now but if it works really well for your voice, it can be really nice at times, like when you're driving.

Is that actually what it responds with? I don't have siri so I can't verify that. But the query works fine through wolfram.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=What+is+the+status+of+flight+647+on+United+Airways%3F

My personal expectation would be that the question would be routed to wolfram which would respond with the primary answer: "en route to San Francisco, California (KSFO) from Washington, District of Columbia (KIAD)."

If it doesn't work, I'd think of this as an edge case as one of their service providers does in fact have the answer.

I find the wolframalpha stuff far more interesting. A lot of people don't understand wolfram and don't think to ask computational questions. People assume a question like "what was the distance between the moon and mars yesterday" would require a ton of work to figure out. But siri would happily direct that one to wolfram and get an answer. It also has a lot of good integration. It's pretty good for what could still perhaps be considered a v1 implementation. I'd love it if siri had some more persistent data-driven/repeat-query aspects. Like "remind me to schedule a BBQ when there's a sunny weekend coming up". (yes, I live in seattle.).

Sorry, I meant most every smart phone currently on the shelves for purchase employs full-disk encryption. In most cases, manufactures implement it to allow corporate exchange email access. If the device supports exchange, it typically has full-disk encryption (early iphones were an ugly exception..). One of the exchange activesync requirements is that the device supports a secure remote-wipe. iphone 3GS and newer have full hardware encryption. Android 3.0+ devices use hardware encryption, and all WP7 devices use it. I'm sure blackberry does as well but I don't know their history very well. So the result is that these devices all support the remote wipe feature. That means if you enter the pin wrong a number of times or remotely trigger the wipe, the encryption key is deleted. That way, it doesn't take hours to securely delete all the data from the disk. The only thing that needs to be deleted is the encryption key. The flash always has some encryption key set. That's why setting up the remote-wipe or PIN-based wipe doesn't require you to spend an hour reformatting and encrypting your entire flash storage.

Yup, that's what I meant.

To elaborate, on the PC side, that 'dedicated hardware' would be a TPM chip. You find those in most business-class notebooks now. If you have one, you can use bitlocker with just a numerical pin. The TPM chip will hold the full encryption key and only provide it to the OS when the correct key is provided. Too many failed attempts would wipe the key. And, as you suggest, you can have the full key saved securely somewhere else as a backup. You might need it if you forget your key, enter it in a bunch of times, or need to recover the data from the disk using a different machine.

You may have missed the point that all data on most phones is already fully encrypted. Hardware encryption/decryption doesn't use that much power. It's also not slow. Another example: intel's 320 line of SSDs. They're still the very low 0.1-0.2 watt SSDs (compared to around 1-2 watt for a standard laptop hard disk) with awesome SSD perf.. they have full-disk hardware encryption built in as well. Basic encryption is only expensive when done in software.