The idea that people should have to come up with less-reliable, improvised tests because the hardware manufacturers are going to crawl over each other to cheat any consistent, scientific one is kind of depressing. You kind of know that all these phone companies are first-rate bullshit artists, with Samsung running at the fore, but the idea even that their engineers are going out of their way to fake their product to the top of the specs pile is just sad.

The discrepancy is deliberate. For a long, long time drive capacity was quoted in the same units that the computer used for storage: binary SI prefixes, not decimal ones. The change to "1 megabyte = 1 million bytes" didn't set in until the 2000s.

Kudos to Apple for making their specs and their OS use consistent units, but it's still a marketing bullshit decision.

You want something that's consistent and reliable from device to device and run to run; that consistency dooms any attempt to cloak the behaviour of the app to failure.

That's just the business end. If you actually read the article, you'd know that the whole buoy-shaped contraption at the top of the page is the robot; it uses a camera to identify jellyfish and plots its own path to efficiently patrol through the swarm. It's an impressive computer vision and AI achievement.

http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-37374-9_38

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?