This. A thousand times this.

If I was a Motorola customer or shareholder, I'd be calling for Jha's head. I'm neither, and there are plenty of other manufacturers putting out great Android wares to choose from, so I'm just pointing and laughing.

Goodbye Motorola, we hardly missed ye.

How does she do updates, for example, without a desktop or laptop running iTunes?

I dunno, but the Nexus One has received two major Android updates since its release just over a year ago. That's as many as any iPhone has ever received. And, they've both been at least as significant as any iOS update.

It's not clear to me why iOS's slower update cycle is anything to brag about.

The Nexus one barely got 1 years of updates then OFFICIAL compatibility was dropped but you could get updates by rooting. Apple has been providing updates for 3 years for each of the iPhones before they become End of life, then users are left with Jailbreaking to get more features.

1. Gingerbread just rolled out to Nexus Ones in the last couple of weeks.
2. That's the second major update the Nexus One has received in a little over a year since it was released. That's already as many as any iPhone has ever received.
3. No end to official Nexus One updates has been announced.
4. The iOS 4.3 update just released doe not support iPhone 3G (according to TFA), which is less than three years old.

Correction: competitors must perform voice recognition or OCR to process the clues. The clues are displayed and read, and the contestants are free to ignore either form, if they wish. Similarly, Watson could have had a camera trained on the monitor and performed OCR on the clue. But, given that OCR has been done brilliantly by computers for years now, would adding that into the mix have made much difference at all?

Regarding ringing in, the contestants also get a signal indicating when they can do it, but it's visual. It would have been easy enough to add another camera trained on the light, but why bother?

The engineers involved were trying to solve the interesting problems. Delivering input to each contestant in the most convenient form doesn't seem like much of a concession.

One interesting thing to note is that Watson was tied (on Monday) or behind (today) after the Jeopardy round and pulled ahead (way ahead yesterday) in the Double Jeopardy round, where the questions are harder. That's not what you'd expect if its competitors knew all the answers and it was winning on ring-in speed alone.

In any case, Watson was playing Jeopardy, and ringing in is a part of Jeopardy. Rutter and especially Jennings certainly benefited from that part of the game during their long winning runs. Watson also had unique disadvantages compared to his opponents (like being unable to hear their responses).

The IBM Research blog has had a few good articles about Watson over the past few days, including one about wagering:

http://ibmresearchnews.blogspot.com/2011/02/watsons-wagering-strategies.html

I didn't think that Final Jeopardy would have been especially easy for Watson. The majority of the clue was indirectly related to the correct response, and the connection hinged on a single word (inspired). I suspect Jennings' behavior was based more on simple arithmetic than on any assumptions about Watson's response.

Everything it can to blunt iOS? Then would you care to explain Google Maps for iPhone, Google Voice for iPhone, Google Latitude for iPhone, Google Goggles for iPhone...?

If Google wanted to try to kill HTML5 video, it would have been easier and more effective just to drop support for H.264, full stop. Instead, they spent $133 million to buy On2, then went to all the effort of continuing to improve the VP8 encoder, creating the WebM open source project, and building support for it (critically, among hardware developers). And the result of all that is that Apple and Microsoft can now foil Google's dastardly plans simply by including WebM in their products. HTML video would be saved and WebM would be the baseline. Hurrah!

Source please? As was pointed out above, Andy Rubin recently demoed Honeycomb on a tablet and said at that time that it would run on both tablets and phones. You really think he would have said that if Google's about-to-be-released Nexus S wouldn't run it?

You really want to take random-guy-from-some-Korean-manufacturer-you've-never-heard-of's word over Andy Rubin's?

And wasn't it an equally "reliable" source within an OEM that told us about minimum hardware requirements for Gingerbread? What ever happened with that again?

Oh yeah, it was total bull.

Q1 2008? 2009? 2010?

It's hard to know which unsubstantiated rumour you're referring to.

Hundreds of businesses, governments, and organizations have now testified that they rely on the data produced by the long form census. It is useful and important information.

The intrusion of the census is minimal. It's a minor inconvenience at worst.

If the government wanted to eliminate the threat of imprisonment, they could have done that. They didn't. They opted, instead, to corrupt the data.

Your spin bears no resemblance to reality.

Yes, the long form census was eliminated, but it was replaced with a voluntary National Household Survey that will ask the same questions, but will be distributed to more households and yield less useful results, all at a greater cost to taxpayers. No gravy train has been overturned. Your alleged "entitled statisticians" can breathe easy, their "perpetual employment" is not at risk.

The data that we rely on to intelligently run a country is, however.

If they don't want to see Java fracture, they should stop wasting everyone's time with JavaME -- it's been a decade now and no one has ever done anything useful with it -- and embrace whatever's in Android as the official mobile Java solution.

The writing's on the wall.

How about *because* it's working so well for Google?

I presume Microsoft would like to charge something for their operating system?