The Nuance of today has little to nothing in common with the post-acquisition Nuance. It's really name-only at this point. Some of their speech technology has been incorporated into the Nuance 9 engine. There are some profesional services employees and perhaps a few product engineers. Most of the speech engine developers quit and tried to join Yahoo (http://news.cnet.com/Yahoo-accused-of-poaching-speech-engine...).
Both are a problem. There is increasing evidence that eating meat causes many long term problems. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_meat#Health_risks) Additionally, see the news in the US in the past few days that supposedly ~50% of meat being currently sold in the US is contaminated (http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/dailydish/2011/04/gross-.htm...). And don't forget that raising animals for meat consumption is just terrible for the environment. I still eat meat, but I'm cutting way back and I feel really bad about it when I still do.
Perhaps you were just not getting enough protein in your vegan attempt? Or eating the right iron rich foods? One of my friends is a vegetarian, but he just eats pizza, pasta, and cheese and looks like a piece of giant dough. He's not doing it right and I wouldn't advocate anyone to follow his example. However, now is the best time to become a vegetarian or vegan. There are so many more non-animal protein sources available, it's unbelievable. It's not the 1960s anymore where you had to eat soy gruel.
Don't forget that Apple usually sells the previous generation iPhone 8GB for cheaper. You can now get a 3GS for $50 on ATT. I still use a 3GS, and it's still a great phone.
Ah. That was unclear from your post. I know a few people who have gotten the Samsung Intercept on Virgin Mobile and are fairly unhappy with it. It feels really slow and the built-in apps aren't that great, according to my friends (especially, calendar and contacts). It's still a $200 phone. Perhaps the LG Optimus is better? I also have an original DROID running 2.2 and am not very impressed with it.
They are tackling tasks like extremely difficult OCR and collaborative editing and proofreading.
I've used mturk at work to automate transcribing short recordings and have found that it works pretty well. The trick is to qualify your workers so that they pass some kind of test. You can also only accept workers that have a rating above some minimum. Then, critically, as suggested by others here, get each task done multiple times for cross-checking. And make sure that your instructions are clear.
Speech recognition has steadily improved over the past 10 years. You can see a few examples: Android system wide speech input, Siri iPhone app (which Apple bought), Dragon Naturally Speaking advertises upwards of 99% accuracy for general purpose dictation, and the latest speech recognition IVRs do pretty darn well; try calling Amtrak or United. If you try to dick around with it, have a strong accent, or are in a noisy environment, you won't get (as) good results. However, as a whole, it's greatly improved.
Using multiple accounts has been very unpleasant; I don't know if that has been fixed. As I said, we had to quit using Dropbox for the club. And many folks already used Dropbox for other things, so normally are logged into their own account.
