It's funny that the number of iPhones those analysts claim Apple really sold, is exactly the same as the amount of iPhones they blind-ass-guessed would sell before the sales figures came out. It's almost like they were trying to defend their original estimates and therefore their reputations as analysts.

There are cross-platform benchmarks comparing performance across different phone OSes; it would be in Apple's best interests to cheat on those.

I'm not sure that your argument makes any sense.

"You cheated. You copied the answer key."

"I did the whole test, though!"

Nobody cares about the benchmarks quantitatively, but when you're putting down something like $700 on a computing device getting something that's "the fastest" is a big driver of decisions. I'm sure that guaranteeing a bunch of "Samsung Galaxy blah takes performance crown from Apple iPhone whatevs" stories in the tech press on the basis of a 0.5% difference in the Zootybench score is exactly why Samsung does this crap.

What difference does that make?

The performance quoted simply is not available to apps that are not on a whitelist of benchmark applications. It literally does not represent any part of the phone's non-benchmarking performance.

Yes, I'm sure it's all lies where it conflicts with $priorbeliefs.

It's a time shift. Just a really, really long one.

So, if I edit it into a nonsensible, illegible mish-mash where neither story nor music exist any more, it'd be OK? Shouldn't US commercials solve that then?

Income tax in the US is voluntary in the sense that income tax in the UK is involuntary: you file your tax returns and square up with the government, while our taxes are calculated and settled for us. That doesn't mean that the underlying obligation to pay the taxes you are responsible for is obviated, just that you volunteer to do the work.

How does copyright work in a relativistic universe, anyway? In whose reference frame do we count the passage of time? Does the clock start when the original is created, or when I enter the light cone of the creation of the original?

They made the right call at the time, given that the alternative to was to archive every tape and stack up a nontrivial fraction of the BBC's budget in a vault in preparation for applications that didn't exist.

Most media go through a period where the recording format is too valuable not to reuse (magnetic tape) or too fragile to store (nitrocellulose film, early print). Some day maybe we'll invent a way to record brain patterns, but I'm inclined to expect it'll be in a medium like defect-free carbon-hassium nanocrystals that cost $500,000 each. I don't doubt that some re-recording in whatever technology we come up with.

NASA recorded over the Moon Landing masters, at a time when they were better-funded than they have ever been. The BBC is in good company.

If they wanted to live they should have stayed on the moon.

We are living in the future.

An elegant calculator, for a more civilised age.