There are two major problems with this argument. First is that it does not cover the diversity gained from forcing developers to try another approach. We have seen interesting ideas come along as a result of having to re-think a design.
Thing is though, there are so many software patents that developers usually will not know the approach they have taken was already patented. Developers don't spend their lives searching patent databases for solutions to their problems - if they did they'd be spending more time searching patent databases than writing code. So instead they just invent. They will re-think designs anyway as part of their normal software development process.
Give a dozen talented developers a complex problem, and it would not be surprising to see them come up with a dozen different solutions. If it's a problem that's been solved before then it wouldn't be surprising to find that most if not all of their solutions were covered by pre-existing patents.
I really don't think you get it. This is not about the "lulz", and it's not about making money. They haven't entered into this blindly, and they know it's unlikely to turn a profit on any reasonable timescale, even "playing the long game".
Ironically, given your sig line, I think the best piece of text to read to try to understand why they are undertaking this venture is (with one line removed) the following:
Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them.
About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They invent. They imagine. They heal. They explore. They create. They inspire. They push the human race forward.
Maybe they have to be crazy.
How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art? Or sit in silence and hear a song that’s never been written? Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?
While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.
Let's face it, Perl is an abysmal language by itself. (Yes, the regex engine is good, but that's about it IMHO.) Add in CPAN though, and you've got a massive wealth of libraries to use. The pain becomes worthwhile.
Surely the advantage of optical cables though is that although the speed of a signal through the cable may be slower, you can carry many more simultaneous signals through a single cable by just using different frequencies of light?
I can read maps. I've used maps for navigating whilst driving, and also walking and orienteering. One very useful technique I was taught when map reading was to rotate the map to match my direction of movement. Doing so makes the map much easier to comprehend.
Having a GPS showing a 3D POV map (or a 2D view where up is your direction of travel) is common sense. The translation of a 2D map into a 3D POV map is essentially a prerequisite step in properly understanding the map. Removing the need to perform that step means significantly less processing required to interpret the map, making it less of a distraction.
For my part, I greatly appreciate having a POV map on my GPS. It means that when I'm driving fast down twisty-turny country lanes I can glimpse at the GPS for a tiny fraction of a second and instantly know which way the road is going. I can react and prepare accordingly, and won't get caught out by unexpected sharp bends.
As for your assertion that people that cannot read maps have no spatial awareness, I don't think that's really true. Sure, they might not have a particularly well developed sense of spatial awareness, but it really just means that they haven't learnt how to read a map.
I must admit I haven't read Hunger Games, but what you're saying reminds me very strongly of my experience reading The DaVinci Code. That was in my opinion a truly dreadful book, but back in 2004 it was the "must read" book of the year.
You're right - people like these things because they're "cool", and if you've read the book then "you're in the club". Marketing plays a big part, hyping up a book to generate sales, getting book clubs to push it. It's nothing more than fashion.
In the case of Brown's crud, I think the reason why it was marketable, and why it became popular is that the plot is quite intriguing. (The writing is disastrously bad, and Brown's "style" of cutting action at completely arbitrary points to swap to a different plot-line just for the sake of generating artificial suspense I found incredibly irritating.) Had the plot been dull, then it wouldn't have stood a chance.
A big part of the success of such books is that most of the people that read them only read fashionable books. They've not read anything that's genuinely good, so they can't tell how bad they are. Since they don't know any better and have enjoyed the plot, they'll rave about the book, which perpetuates the myth that it's a "good" book. It's highly unlikely that they will expand their reading to any decent authors; at best they will read other books by the same author, keeping them away from genuinely good reading material.
Apple didn't pull Carbon in Lion. The Carbon API is still there. Carbon-based apps still work just fine.
What they pulled was Rosetta, the PowerPC emulator. This means that you cannot run PowerPC-only Carbon apps on Lion. Intel-compatible Carbon apps still work fine.
Sorry to be a pedant, but back when Apple launched the iPhone, they did say that it ran Mac OS X, and made a big point of it. It was sometime later that they decided to say it ran iPhone OS (and much later still iOS).
Referring to the iPhone's OS as OSX was always confusing, as is the naming of the UI layer (Cocoa vs Cocoa Touch), especially since they are incompatible APIs. It was definitely a good thing when they stopped saying the iPhone ran OSX.
Yes, mod parent up - the UK's Bill Gates (Sinclair) versus a young Steve Jobs (Curry/Hauser - discuss?) in 'silicon fen' and don't forget the Acorn story is the seed of the ARM story.
Pun intended.
Heh - I was a big Acorn fan, and always felt that they were a bit like the UK's version of Apple. Part of that was the underdog thing - by the time I was aware of what was going on Sinclair was dominant in the UK home market, the IBM PC was around and Apple was starting it's long decline. I wasn't aware of Apple's prior dominance with the Apple ][, since that machine was an also-ran in the UK.
Acorn, like Apple, produced higher cost, higher quality products, whilst Sinclair, like Microsoft, aimed for the mass market. During the 80s those parallels were pretty strong - right up until Sinclair got things badly wrong with the QL and his drive to make electric cars, spending a fortune to produce the Sinclair C5, two pretty spectacular failures. Whilst Acorn outlasted Sinclair by a decade, Sinclair sold many more computers than Acorn ever did.
I don't really see such a strong correlation of personalities though. There's parallels between Gates and Sinclair (the nerdiness), but also between Jobs and Sinclair too (the control freakery, and visionary thing). There's some parallels between Hauser/Curry and Jobs/Woz - with the partners fulfilling similar roles within their organisations on their founding, but the ages around the opposite way. There's also some similarities between those guys and Gates...
Lyonnaise de Garantie in my opinion must, empirically, be a bunch of crooks.
I don't see any other way of explaining their actions here. Were they not crooks, they should feel no need at all to stop potential customers from asking the question "are Lyonnaise de Garantie a bunch of crooks?", since their potential customers should be quickly come up with the answer "no".
The fact they were so desperate to suppress this question carries the clear implication that they believe the most likely answer that potential customers will come up with is "yes". By taking this action they themselves seem to me to be saying "we're crooks".
Their use of lawyers is in my opinion an attempt at bullying to get their own way - the actions of a bunch of crooks.
Besides which, they're an insurance company. As such in my experience they are by definition crooks - exploiting and overcharging the weak, vulnerable, and needy.
I'm not even remotely embarrassed that we have a Queen in the UK, and given the reality of the political system here (which was copied in whole or in part all around the world, including in the USA) I don't see why I should be embarrassed. The point is that under our democratic system she is not a ruling monarch at all, but merely a geo-political figurehead with a ceremonial role and no political power, hence the quotes that L4t3r4lu5 placed around "ruling".
Indeed, it would be folly to remove the Queen of her title. The Queen, and the rest of the royal family, are responsible for attracting many millions of tourists to the UK, all of whom spend money here. They are the major attraction for most tourists, even though most tourists will never actually lay eyes on them. If you removed them we'd get significantly less tourism (why else would people want to come to this dull and rainy place) and the economy would likely tank.
Bush and his lapdog Blair did not try to justify GW2 on the basis that the conditions of the ceasefire that stopped GW1 had been breached. At no stage were arguments explicitly being made that the war was to be a continuation of the earlier Gulf war. To attempt to use that as retrospective justification is poor.
Bush and Blair built a knowingly fraudulent case for war based on "intelligence" they knew to be unreliable, flimsy, and possibly faulty. Their case was that Iraq had WMDs and was a threat to the security of the world and needed to be removed. The weapons inspectors and nuclear inspectors were loudly proclaiming that there was no evidence at all that Iraq had any WMDs, but they were getting shouted down by Bush and his cronies and their evidence ignored. Those with more than half a brain could plainly see at the time that the war was not justified. Millions of people protested in the US, in the UK, and across Europe, against this proposed war.
Whether or not Iraq is better off for the removal of Saddam and his sons is irrelevant to this argument. That is not a justification for war.
The thing that prevents Intel from approaching ARM levels of power consumption is transistor count. Transistors consume power. If your chip demands more active transistors to operate it will use more power.
ARM processor cores simply require far fewer transistors than an Intel core. The phenomenally complex Intel instruction set necessitates this, and cannot be avoided without removing backward compatibility. In order to reduce the active transistor counts complex designs can be used to aggressively disable parts of the core that are not in use - although this technique for power reduction is also used by ARM too.
Intel's only remaining option of making their chips power competitive with ARM is to use smaller manufacturing processes, since smaller transistors require less power. ARM-based competitors to Intel chips are often two, if not three, generations of manufacturing process behind. Obviously this is not a situation that Intel can count on remaining the same forever.
you're right - with voice recognition, as compared to a conversational user interface, it is important to have the ability for the recognition system to accept feedback in some way to improve recognition. the voice recognition system built into the iPhone 4S does put a dotted blue highlight underneath words or phrases where it was not confident of the recognition. tapping that will produce a pop-up with alternative options - presumably just like Google's. that even happens inside Siri too.
my point however was that whilst this kind of recognition correction is fine for dictation, it's very poor for conversation. so whilst recognition in Siri can be corrected, it will just plough ahead and act on it's first recognition result rather than waiting for confirmation/correction. it tends to manage well enough with that first recognition, and this approach doesn't interrupt conversational flow. the fact that it's recognition wasn't technically perfect rarely affects results.
your comparison of Grafitti vs. the handwriting recogniser Microsoft used (which was produced by ParaGraph - the same cursive handwriting recogniser that been in Newton OS) is an interesting one. ParaGraph's recogniser, in the form that it appeared on the Newton, would provide multiple alternative recognition options for everything it recognised, reached by double-tapping on a word, and it would learn from corrections. the Newton comparison gets more interesting when one considers that Newton included an inbuilt Intelligent Assistant which was, in many ways, very similar to Siri (and in some ways more advanced). one interacted with the intelligent assistant via text, usually inputted via handwriting recognition. but the written input was recognised before the user chose to submit it to the assistant - granting an opportunity to correct the recogniser before being processed by the assistant. it was not really conversational in the way that Siri is.
So your argument is that the US needs to get more innovative before it adjusts its patent system?
Has it not occurred to you that having such a fantastically stupidly rigid, overly broad, and inherently game-able patent system inhibits innovation?
Just about every new invention made in the US is already covered by patents. This makes it extremely difficult to bring new inventions to the market, especially for small new companies, since they can, and most likely will, be assaulted by lawyers wielding patents. The risks are greatly increased, and the potential rewards greatly decreased as a result of this. This is not an environment that encourages innovation - it's one that encourages playing it safe.
The incumbents with the power to change things (politicians, lawyers, lobbyists and corporations) don't really want the current system to fundamentally change since such change threatens their power-base.
Maintaining the status-quo, which inhibits innovation and over the long-term gradually decreases the competitiveness of the US, is of course short-term thinking. But for the most important incumbents wielding power, the politicians and the corporations, the short-term is the priority, since they need to win their next election, and post profits for the next quarter/year.
The very best voice recognition systems are only about 95% accurate. That recognition system is the grey matter that sits between your ears. We tend to think of our recognition as perfect, but it's really not. We use context to help our recognition. We generally know what subject is being spoken about, we know what words are likely to come next, and we use that information to compensate when we fail to properly recognise words. All this happens so quickly that we don't notice that we have failed to recognise a word properly.
If human beings worked like computers and demanded 100% accuracy of recognition, we'd be continually stopping each other to repeat things. Conversation would be next to impossible. Even when we're not sure we've heard what somebody has said, we rarely ask people to repeat themselves, and usually just rely on having gotten the gist of what was said to us.
As Siri is a conversational interface it does not pop down a list of possibilities, since that would interrupt the flow of the conversation, but it instead makes use of context to help improve it's recognition. This isn't as simple as a trade-off of (per-word) accuracy vs sophistication of ability - it's a sophistication of ability that's attempting to improve the accuracy of the interface. It is not a voice recognition system per-se, it's a conversational interface, and they're not the same thing.
Apple's A5 (and previous A4) CPUs weren't off-the-shelf Samsung products. They were Apple-originated designs. (Well, using cores from ARM and Imagination Technologies, integrated by Apple, possibly with some help from other outside companies some of which are now owned by Apple.)
The CPUs that Apple used for earlier iPhones on the other hand were Samsung products.
Thing is though, these chips aren't "meant to be used in the USA" at all, but rather in China, and South Korea is much closer to China than the USA is.
China is where A5 chips get put into iPads and iPhones, not the USA. So chips get manufactured in the USA and then shipped to China, and from there get shipped to consumers the world over, not just the USA.
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There are two major problems with this argument. First is that it does not cover the diversity gained from forcing developers to try another approach. We have seen interesting ideas come along as a result of having to re-think a design.
Thing is though, there are so many software patents that developers usually will not know the approach they have taken was already patented. Developers don't spend their lives searching patent databases for solutions to their problems - if they did they'd be spending more time searching patent databases than writing code. So instead they just invent. They will re-think designs anyway as part of their normal software development process.
Give a dozen talented developers a complex problem, and it would not be surprising to see them come up with a dozen different solutions. If it's a problem that's been solved before then it wouldn't be surprising to find that most if not all of their solutions were covered by pre-existing patents.
I really don't think you get it. This is not about the "lulz", and it's not about making money. They haven't entered into this blindly, and they know it's unlikely to turn a profit on any reasonable timescale, even "playing the long game".
Ironically, given your sig line, I think the best piece of text to read to try to understand why they are undertaking this venture is (with one line removed) the following:
Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them.
About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They invent. They imagine. They heal. They explore. They create. They inspire. They push the human race forward.
Maybe they have to be crazy.
How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art? Or sit in silence and hear a song that’s never been written? Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?
While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.
I could not agree more.
Let's face it, Perl is an abysmal language by itself. (Yes, the regex engine is good, but that's about it IMHO.) Add in CPAN though, and you've got a massive wealth of libraries to use. The pain becomes worthwhile.
Surely the advantage of optical cables though is that although the speed of a signal through the cable may be slower, you can carry many more simultaneous signals through a single cable by just using different frequencies of light?
I can read maps. I've used maps for navigating whilst driving, and also walking and orienteering. One very useful technique I was taught when map reading was to rotate the map to match my direction of movement. Doing so makes the map much easier to comprehend.
Having a GPS showing a 3D POV map (or a 2D view where up is your direction of travel) is common sense. The translation of a 2D map into a 3D POV map is essentially a prerequisite step in properly understanding the map. Removing the need to perform that step means significantly less processing required to interpret the map, making it less of a distraction.
For my part, I greatly appreciate having a POV map on my GPS. It means that when I'm driving fast down twisty-turny country lanes I can glimpse at the GPS for a tiny fraction of a second and instantly know which way the road is going. I can react and prepare accordingly, and won't get caught out by unexpected sharp bends.
As for your assertion that people that cannot read maps have no spatial awareness, I don't think that's really true. Sure, they might not have a particularly well developed sense of spatial awareness, but it really just means that they haven't learnt how to read a map.
I must admit I haven't read Hunger Games, but what you're saying reminds me very strongly of my experience reading The DaVinci Code. That was in my opinion a truly dreadful book, but back in 2004 it was the "must read" book of the year.
You're right - people like these things because they're "cool", and if you've read the book then "you're in the club". Marketing plays a big part, hyping up a book to generate sales, getting book clubs to push it. It's nothing more than fashion.
In the case of Brown's crud, I think the reason why it was marketable, and why it became popular is that the plot is quite intriguing. (The writing is disastrously bad, and Brown's "style" of cutting action at completely arbitrary points to swap to a different plot-line just for the sake of generating artificial suspense I found incredibly irritating.) Had the plot been dull, then it wouldn't have stood a chance.
A big part of the success of such books is that most of the people that read them only read fashionable books. They've not read anything that's genuinely good, so they can't tell how bad they are. Since they don't know any better and have enjoyed the plot, they'll rave about the book, which perpetuates the myth that it's a "good" book. It's highly unlikely that they will expand their reading to any decent authors; at best they will read other books by the same author, keeping them away from genuinely good reading material.
This meme that you cannot create on tablet computers has to die. It's really not helpful, and just shows a profound lack of imagination.
The best selling iPad app of all time is Pages. A word processor.
Lolz. "Jehova's Witnesses" and "more sane" right next to each other. Thanks for the laugh. I needed that. :-)
(I'm very thankful that my family escaped from that cult before I was born...)
It's funny you chose that title, as Huxley would very much disapprove of what is going on here.
Meh - Huxley stole the line from Shakespeare... I'm not quite so sure that he'd have disapproved. ;-)
What are you talking about?
Apple didn't pull Carbon in Lion. The Carbon API is still there. Carbon-based apps still work just fine.
What they pulled was Rosetta, the PowerPC emulator. This means that you cannot run PowerPC-only Carbon apps on Lion. Intel-compatible Carbon apps still work fine.
It's significantly less than 1% right now.
Firstly as has been pointed out elsewhere, the beta is only available in a restricted set of countries right now.
Secondly the beta doesn't currently support devices with MIPS CPUs, which counts out several low-cost Android tablets.
Sorry to be a pedant, but back when Apple launched the iPhone, they did say that it ran Mac OS X, and made a big point of it. It was sometime later that they decided to say it ran iPhone OS (and much later still iOS).
Referring to the iPhone's OS as OSX was always confusing, as is the naming of the UI layer (Cocoa vs Cocoa Touch), especially since they are incompatible APIs. It was definitely a good thing when they stopped saying the iPhone ran OSX.
Yes, mod parent up - the UK's Bill Gates (Sinclair) versus a young Steve Jobs (Curry/Hauser - discuss?) in 'silicon fen' and don't forget the Acorn story is the seed of the ARM story.
Pun intended.
Heh - I was a big Acorn fan, and always felt that they were a bit like the UK's version of Apple. Part of that was the underdog thing - by the time I was aware of what was going on Sinclair was dominant in the UK home market, the IBM PC was around and Apple was starting it's long decline. I wasn't aware of Apple's prior dominance with the Apple ][, since that machine was an also-ran in the UK.
Acorn, like Apple, produced higher cost, higher quality products, whilst Sinclair, like Microsoft, aimed for the mass market. During the 80s those parallels were pretty strong - right up until Sinclair got things badly wrong with the QL and his drive to make electric cars, spending a fortune to produce the Sinclair C5, two pretty spectacular failures. Whilst Acorn outlasted Sinclair by a decade, Sinclair sold many more computers than Acorn ever did.
I don't really see such a strong correlation of personalities though. There's parallels between Gates and Sinclair (the nerdiness), but also between Jobs and Sinclair too (the control freakery, and visionary thing). There's some parallels between Hauser/Curry and Jobs/Woz - with the partners fulfilling similar roles within their organisations on their founding, but the ages around the opposite way. There's also some similarities between those guys and Gates...
Your guarded talk is amusing.
Lyonnaise de Garantie in my opinion must, empirically, be a bunch of crooks.
I don't see any other way of explaining their actions here. Were they not crooks, they should feel no need at all to stop potential customers from asking the question "are Lyonnaise de Garantie a bunch of crooks?", since their potential customers should be quickly come up with the answer "no".
The fact they were so desperate to suppress this question carries the clear implication that they believe the most likely answer that potential customers will come up with is "yes". By taking this action they themselves seem to me to be saying "we're crooks".
Their use of lawyers is in my opinion an attempt at bullying to get their own way - the actions of a bunch of crooks.
Besides which, they're an insurance company. As such in my experience they are by definition crooks - exploiting and overcharging the weak, vulnerable, and needy.
I'm not even remotely embarrassed that we have a Queen in the UK, and given the reality of the political system here (which was copied in whole or in part all around the world, including in the USA) I don't see why I should be embarrassed. The point is that under our democratic system she is not a ruling monarch at all, but merely a geo-political figurehead with a ceremonial role and no political power, hence the quotes that L4t3r4lu5 placed around "ruling".
Indeed, it would be folly to remove the Queen of her title. The Queen, and the rest of the royal family, are responsible for attracting many millions of tourists to the UK, all of whom spend money here. They are the major attraction for most tourists, even though most tourists will never actually lay eyes on them. If you removed them we'd get significantly less tourism (why else would people want to come to this dull and rainy place) and the economy would likely tank.
Indeed. The Falklands are UK territories.
The Malivinas are what Argentina claims are theirs... of course that happens to be the same place.
IMHO the ongoing sectarian war in Iraq would have been a much better and stronger justification for going to war in Iraq.
That case was never even remotely attempted to be made by Bush or Blair. It was not presented as a justification, or a factor in the decision making.
Dude, really? Seriously?
Bush and his lapdog Blair did not try to justify GW2 on the basis that the conditions of the ceasefire that stopped GW1 had been breached. At no stage were arguments explicitly being made that the war was to be a continuation of the earlier Gulf war. To attempt to use that as retrospective justification is poor.
Bush and Blair built a knowingly fraudulent case for war based on "intelligence" they knew to be unreliable, flimsy, and possibly faulty. Their case was that Iraq had WMDs and was a threat to the security of the world and needed to be removed. The weapons inspectors and nuclear inspectors were loudly proclaiming that there was no evidence at all that Iraq had any WMDs, but they were getting shouted down by Bush and his cronies and their evidence ignored. Those with more than half a brain could plainly see at the time that the war was not justified. Millions of people protested in the US, in the UK, and across Europe, against this proposed war.
Whether or not Iraq is better off for the removal of Saddam and his sons is irrelevant to this argument. That is not a justification for war.
Sulu is American. He was born in San Francisco. See Star Trek IV.
The thing that prevents Intel from approaching ARM levels of power consumption is transistor count. Transistors consume power. If your chip demands more active transistors to operate it will use more power.
ARM processor cores simply require far fewer transistors than an Intel core. The phenomenally complex Intel instruction set necessitates this, and cannot be avoided without removing backward compatibility. In order to reduce the active transistor counts complex designs can be used to aggressively disable parts of the core that are not in use - although this technique for power reduction is also used by ARM too.
Intel's only remaining option of making their chips power competitive with ARM is to use smaller manufacturing processes, since smaller transistors require less power. ARM-based competitors to Intel chips are often two, if not three, generations of manufacturing process behind. Obviously this is not a situation that Intel can count on remaining the same forever.
sorry for the lateness of my response.
you're right - with voice recognition, as compared to a conversational user interface, it is important to have the ability for the recognition system to accept feedback in some way to improve recognition. the voice recognition system built into the iPhone 4S does put a dotted blue highlight underneath words or phrases where it was not confident of the recognition. tapping that will produce a pop-up with alternative options - presumably just like Google's. that even happens inside Siri too.
my point however was that whilst this kind of recognition correction is fine for dictation, it's very poor for conversation. so whilst recognition in Siri can be corrected, it will just plough ahead and act on it's first recognition result rather than waiting for confirmation/correction. it tends to manage well enough with that first recognition, and this approach doesn't interrupt conversational flow. the fact that it's recognition wasn't technically perfect rarely affects results.
your comparison of Grafitti vs. the handwriting recogniser Microsoft used (which was produced by ParaGraph - the same cursive handwriting recogniser that been in Newton OS) is an interesting one. ParaGraph's recogniser, in the form that it appeared on the Newton, would provide multiple alternative recognition options for everything it recognised, reached by double-tapping on a word, and it would learn from corrections. the Newton comparison gets more interesting when one considers that Newton included an inbuilt Intelligent Assistant which was, in many ways, very similar to Siri (and in some ways more advanced). one interacted with the intelligent assistant via text, usually inputted via handwriting recognition. but the written input was recognised before the user chose to submit it to the assistant - granting an opportunity to correct the recogniser before being processed by the assistant. it was not really conversational in the way that Siri is.
So your argument is that the US needs to get more innovative before it adjusts its patent system?
Has it not occurred to you that having such a fantastically stupidly rigid, overly broad, and inherently game-able patent system inhibits innovation?
Just about every new invention made in the US is already covered by patents. This makes it extremely difficult to bring new inventions to the market, especially for small new companies, since they can, and most likely will, be assaulted by lawyers wielding patents. The risks are greatly increased, and the potential rewards greatly decreased as a result of this. This is not an environment that encourages innovation - it's one that encourages playing it safe.
The incumbents with the power to change things (politicians, lawyers, lobbyists and corporations) don't really want the current system to fundamentally change since such change threatens their power-base.
Maintaining the status-quo, which inhibits innovation and over the long-term gradually decreases the competitiveness of the US, is of course short-term thinking. But for the most important incumbents wielding power, the politicians and the corporations, the short-term is the priority, since they need to win their next election, and post profits for the next quarter/year.
The very best voice recognition systems are only about 95% accurate. That recognition system is the grey matter that sits between your ears. We tend to think of our recognition as perfect, but it's really not. We use context to help our recognition. We generally know what subject is being spoken about, we know what words are likely to come next, and we use that information to compensate when we fail to properly recognise words. All this happens so quickly that we don't notice that we have failed to recognise a word properly.
If human beings worked like computers and demanded 100% accuracy of recognition, we'd be continually stopping each other to repeat things. Conversation would be next to impossible. Even when we're not sure we've heard what somebody has said, we rarely ask people to repeat themselves, and usually just rely on having gotten the gist of what was said to us.
As Siri is a conversational interface it does not pop down a list of possibilities, since that would interrupt the flow of the conversation, but it instead makes use of context to help improve it's recognition. This isn't as simple as a trade-off of (per-word) accuracy vs sophistication of ability - it's a sophistication of ability that's attempting to improve the accuracy of the interface. It is not a voice recognition system per-se, it's a conversational interface, and they're not the same thing.
Apple's A5 (and previous A4) CPUs weren't off-the-shelf Samsung products. They were Apple-originated designs. (Well, using cores from ARM and Imagination Technologies, integrated by Apple, possibly with some help from other outside companies some of which are now owned by Apple.)
The CPUs that Apple used for earlier iPhones on the other hand were Samsung products.
Thing is though, these chips aren't "meant to be used in the USA" at all, but rather in China, and South Korea is much closer to China than the USA is.
China is where A5 chips get put into iPads and iPhones, not the USA. So chips get manufactured in the USA and then shipped to China, and from there get shipped to consumers the world over, not just the USA.