The Internet?

Yup.

Siri supports searches from Google, Bing, Yahoo, Wolfram Alpha and Wikipedia. Siri also works with Google Maps and Yelp! search in the United States only.

Your BIL is a moron. If he doesn't trust the Internet he shouldn't trust Siri, regardless whether he can figure out how to ask the question.

Had he asked the question properly, he'd have gotten an answer, but he doesn't think well, so he didn't. That's the same reason he believes what he hears on Fox News. He doesn't even know what to ask.

Are you claiming the OP made this up? If so, why?

But, hey, thanks for the support.

The particular example being discussed was the "Iraqis throw babies out of incubators" story.
It was spread by the daughter of a diplomat.
This information is, as you might imagine, public.
This information was left out of mass media stories for a year before a reporter got it into the narrative.
I suggested that anyone who wanted to know who she was before that year was up could have found out in a minute or two on the internet.
Even worse, I suggested that anyone who was going to have an emotional or moral reaction to the story had an OBLIGATION to do that first.
The nearly universal response: you can't trust the internet - it could be just someone's opinion.

I suppose you could have, if you looked hard enough, found someone who had offered an incorrect opinion as to the height of Mt. McKinley. You think?

correctly. Often, this leads them to incorrect answers, or no answer at all.

BTW, I did find a site that had the wrong number for the altitude of the peak of Mt. McKinley. However, the consensus seems to be 20,320 feet. The internet does have some incorrect information on it, but if you ask the right question and use reliable sources, you can usually rely on the information you find.

...and not many reporters using USENet.

Even so, you'd think the fact that she was put forward by a PR firm would have made the Washington crowd more skeptical, instead of less, which is what appeared to have happened.

And they've been doing so with unbelievably hilarious results. But it's scary to think that in this day and age people don't question what they read. It's one thing to read facts - it's another entirely to question the source and content. And it's truly scary that a lot of college students can't figure this out.

It's good in many areas, and for basic information. However, when you get into history, politics, and information about individuals, it doesn't do so well. Nobody has any good reason, for example, to monkey with things like the height of mountains, so the information is usually reliable. However, for many subjects, people like to mess around with the entries.

The internet is relatively unreliable, but some sources on the internet are good sources of information. The trouble is that most people have no idea which ones those are, and believe anything they see.

I know I do.

I have no idea, nor do I have an iPhone, so I can't check. Maybe my brother-in-law is just a moron. That seems more likely. Checking, though, both names produce the result in the first couple of browser results. So, either would have worked, you're right. What Siri knows, though, is less certain. Speech recognition is a difficult thing. It's getting better, but isn't all that yet.

When I just asked "How high is Mount McKinley?" It actually returned way more information than I needed. I never actually use Siri though. I can see why your brother-in-law would be frustrated if his magic phone doesn't even understand him.

That would have been my question, too. I can't remember his exact words the first time he asked, though. As I said, it's not the device. It's the operator.

Thanks! Keep up the good work.

Siri is nothing new and rather than relying on it for information its better to look it up yourself. I like my new Droid phone and may never go back.

on mu iPhone and gotten the answer. Siri is silly.

Several years ago, at a CompUsa, I was waiting in the checkout line to buy a $200 hard drive. A store employee came over to try to talk me into signing up for a store credit card that would offer me 10%, 15%, or 20% off my purchase depending on the plan. After she asked my how much my purchase would cost, she earnestly started hitting the keys on her calculator: "Let's see, to save 10% off of $200, you would save ....." beep-boop-beep, "Uhm,,, 20 dollars!"

"No shit, huh, 20 dollars? I bet if I went with the 15% plan, i might save $30 and $40 if I went with the 20% plan. Not really interested, sorry."

She looked at me as though I had just grown two heads. Astonished at this display of mathematical wizardry: "Wow, are you a scientist?"

Sorry, this isn't even particularly on-topic for your OP. I'm just suffering from a bout of grumpy old-fartism this morning.

a reasonable degree of accuracy, for whatever reason. I couldn't tell you where the information that it was over 20,000 feet came from. Probably way back in grammar school or something. But, I did have a close approximation already in my head.

Your example is a good one, though, of the inability or unwillingness people seem to have to rely on their own brains for things. By always using a device to get the information, it never really gets into people's memories. That's why I don't like the use of calculators at the grammar school level. There's so much missed when a machine does all the calculations, and kids don't learn any of the calculation tricks we old geezers learned.

My story would have been better though, had she gotten the $20 wrong and not known why.

I agree with you completely on the use of calculators (or any computers) in primary education. Like your Mt. McKinley example, one should have a rough idea of what the answer should be before calculation, so one can distinguish a likely right answer from a wrong one. I also knew the answer should be in the low 20,000 ft range, higher than local (to me) Mt. Rainier (~14.5K') and shorter than Mt. Everest (~29K'). An answer of 5260' would obviously have been wrong and should be recognised as such.

I've seen people calculate averages that fall outside the sample range and not know why that answer has to be wrong. I suspect they have no real notion of what an average or a percentage is, just how to calculate it.

And that often gets lost when everything is calculated on a machine. Further, understanding how to remove zeros to do such a calculation and knowing generally what the order of magnitude of the answer should be is also something that has to be learned. To not know that calculating 10% of something is just a matter of moving a decimal point and to not be able to multiply a simple result by 2 or 1.5 is not to understand what is happening at all.

I suspect that the clerk you talked to does not understand even the concept of percentages, despite having an idea of how to calculated them on her calculator.

This is not new, though. When I was heading for Turkey in 1967, while in the USAF, I was in my home town on leave, and decided to go to the bank and change some $US for Turkish lira, so I'd have tip money, etc., when I arrived there. So, I went to the Bank of America in my small California town, knowing that it would take a day or two to get the actual currency. I told the teller that I wanted 500 Turkish Lira. The exchange rate was 9 lira to the dollar at the time, and it was a fixed rate. The teller told me that the currency would be there the next day, and asked me for $4500. It took a conversation with the bank manager to convince her that she wasn't supposed to multiply 500 by 9 to get the correct amount for the exchange. Nothing I said could convince the teller that she had the exchange backwards.

She simply did not understand the principle of the exchange at all.

and nothing I've seen since the release of the new iPhone has convinced me differently.