and red light cameras to catch the bastards who don't take that chance
And courts to try, convict and sentence those bastards. Why everyone forgets this step, I don't know. Yet for some reason, whenever we're talking about any other sort of crime, it matters -- people don't ever say that murder is so serious that the suspects shouldn't be tried.
Hey, here is a thought, if you don't want a ticket, don't run the damn light. Trouble stopping when the light changes? maybe you ought to have been driving the speed limit - and not chatting on your phone
You're looking at things in terms of who is at fault and what a particular driver should do.
That is a dumb way to think when setting policy. If (and that's actually a big if that branch-prediction tends to get wrong) the goal is to increase public safety and reduce collisions, then you acknowledge that some idiots out there are going to be entering intersections right after their light turns yellow (yes, that's bad), will be following other cars closely (yes, that's bad), and doing other dumb things (yes, that's bad), and that there are sometimes collisions as a result. Then you ask, "What do we do about this?"
Giving tickets to bad drivers as a deterrent force is a perfectly valid idea which can be implemented in parallel with other approaches, but for whatever reason, after using that approach for many decades, people didn't think it was good enough. So they came up with the totally stupid idea of government punishing suspected offenders without due process, and that creates a new problems for everyone (whether they obey traffic laws or not) and suddenly traffic safety isn't relatively important anymore, because we've regressed on simple law and order.
Those other approaches to run in parallel with ticketing, include things like increasing the yellow time, so that there will be fewer collisions when drivers screw up.
Any modern operating system uses swap space - and while there's usually a way to ask the OS never to swap a program out, it's seldom exposed to the user. It normally relies on the program itself requesting this, and not everything will. Though a program may be exited later, the area of swapfile it used to use is not necessarily freed from disk.
Yeah, there are lots of ways to screw up, but swap is one of the easiest things to get right. Since the user doesn't need to know a key, the machine can pick a totally random one (256 real bits, no guessable passphrase with less actual entropy) for it at every boot. Swap can be as solid as your best symmetric cipher, and that's pretty damn good. All the PK used on the internet will fail long before this level of tech does. Set things up right and swap may be the #1 safest place on your disks, the catch being that your lose it every time your reboot.;-)
No, I don't, because other people don't care, so they use shitty software. Webmail is the worst, because it'll never be very practical to handle client-side decryption or signing of webmail. (Yes, I've seen some heroic attempts with some ff plugins, but they're not as nearly as convenient as even a mid-1990s email client.) Outlook is bad too, but at least it has the excuse of trying to push a rival standard (an unquestionably inferior one, but nevertheless quite legitimate). Webmail, OTOH, is just a technological step backwards to.. before you had TCP/IP on your PC. I just don't know how else to put that. It's like dialing into someone else's computer and running mutt, which was fine in the 1980s, but we supposedly had a revolution since then. I guess not.
It's ok to admit things aren't going well; shit happens. I do think everyone who has posted here saying email encryption isn't valuable, though, needs their geek cards revoked. Those kids should go back to playing their xboxes and leave the tech discussion to people who are willing to take a few seconds to think about things.
Your email is uninteresting? Well, so is your newegg https checkout page! Why the fuck does anyone care about all the CA integrity problems that have come up lately, if encryption and authentication have no value? Give up https if you think pgp isn't important, because most everything you do with https isn't even half as personal as email.
Your communications don't need to be private? Neither does the list of URLs you've visited which happen to have "like" buttons on them. But somehow when Facebook decides to profile you, you have a a hissy fit. Yet if someone *cough*google*cough* were to profile you from your everyday emails, you would be creeped out -- just kidding, you'd bury your head in the sand and pretend it's not happening.
I know you're going for the joke, but from a serious aspect (here come the "whoosh" replies) that is lousy SE because the victim knows what you're doing. Unless you kill or incapacitate them, then after you leave they're going to call cops, cancel cards, etc. Good SE requires the victim not know they were attacked. You can't do that with a wrench.
I guess this is getting to be an automatic button with me. Every time someone brings up crypto, someone else brings up the wrench, and it's almost always wrong. (Damn you, Munroe!)
If you're root, then surely you can do anything including invoke any methods used for decryption
On your laptop, if someone steals it while it's turned off, they can do anything they want, including becoming root, and they still don't get to read any of the files in your home directory without the [LUKS|truecrypt|whatever_you're_using] decryption key. Having both root and physical access isn't enough unless they manage to get the system while it's already up.
"Invoking the methods used for decryption" is pointless unless you have they key to pass to those methods.
Sensitive data (or maybe just everything) on phones should be handled that way too.
Personally, I wouldn't put the burden for that on a "wallet" type application; it should be part of the OS itself, at the device level (or possibly filesystem level). AFAIK Android doesn't yet use encrypted devices or filesystems, so flaming the wallet itself might not be perfectly appropriate. But the flaming system as a whole? Sure, especially if it's going to be marketed as a payment system. And especially since we all know the kernel it uses is already very capable of doing this stuff, out-of-the-box.
It just goes to show how far these handheld PC OSes still need to come, before they catch up to reasonably modern expectations for a PC.
What ever happened to memory overlay capabilities?
It was obsoleted by personal computers getting virtual memory.
There were some good things about the "good old days" but overlays are not among them. Even back then, they sucked and were just a hack for fitting more code into your computer than you had address space.
The only regret I have for overlays being dead, is that part of my brain is permanently wasted on knowing about them. I don't know if knowledge has opportunity cost, but I've always suspected that it does.
No, we didn't. We all won. Even with the price increases, hard disks are available and the price per terabyte is ridiculously cheap. The only people who think they lost, are the whiney bitches who are comparing the prices to what they were a couple months ago. Try comparing the cost to what it was two years ago, and terabytes are slightly cheaper except they also use fewer SATA ports.
What we're seeing isn't expensiveness; it's volatility. If you can't handle that the prices sometimes vary between "dirt cheap" and "cheaper than dirt," then boo-fucking-hoo. DO NOT make me start sentences with "I remember when," you spoiled little whipper-snapper.
They might be thinking that the "user's machine" could be something like a DSL router, which may already be servicing user's DNS requests with dnsmasq or something like that. There are all sorts of opportunities to improve the functionality of these spots, without really needing to impact the software and protocols run by the actual endpoints. It's not so much the "last mile" that is most vulnerable, but rather, the "last mile except for the last 30 feet." In your LAN itself is compromised, then the intruder is already in the house and you are totally screwed no matter what you do.;-)
Huh. Actually, that's possibly the most legitimate suggestion. A shitty battery life is not something that all tablets should naturally have; only ones that are trying to copy Apple -- er I mean -- serve one particular corner niche. A lot of the design issues at stake are practical consequences, but this one seems to me to be an impractical consequence.
Of course, I say this as someone who totally doesn't "get" the tablet market. (Too big to fit in pocket, too small to type on or fill up field of view.) Maybe minimizing weight is super-critical.
It's a shame that companies like Samsung are trolling through Apple's patents and stealing the ideas from them, but once you publish how your innovation works, what can you do if the government fails to uphold the monopoly that you're supposed to get in exchange for that publishing?
If the courts don't uphold the monopoly, then I think Apple should take its ball and go home. They should keep their designs a trade secret instead of patenting them. That means that should Apple ever die, the secret for how they made their tablets rectangular will die with them, but that would be an important lesson to looters in the future.
We as a society must provide some kind of incentive to Apple for revealing the secret of their designs in the patent documents. Without this incentive, Apple has nothing other than hundreds of millions of dollars in hardware sales and iStore gateway fees.
When we get to talking about graph analysis and learning, suddenly who you are talking to becomes as interesting as what you are talking about.
No, it's interesting, but it's not as interesting. "Looks like he called his wife again," doesn't tell you a whole lot.
Imagine you're trying to decide which house to burgle. Some sends a message to someone else who is planning a party. You really want to know if they said, "I'll be there and am bringing a few growlers of homebrew quadbock. We are getting so 'faced! Can I crash at your place?" or "sorry, can't make it. I'm teaching the kids how to recycle ammo brass that night."
I don't care about the answer to that question as long as I'm allowed to purchase my garbage service from another provider.
Fair enough. What you'll probably find, though, is that even if you could do that, and went with a provider which didn't require composting, their bill would be higher and you would likely reject their bid. The whole point of the composting idea isn't really some kind of hippie save-the-planet thing; it's to reduce their costs by moving some of the separation work to you.
You might take that into account when you're comparing Foo City's rates to Bar Corp's rates, but there's a lot of evidence that people nearly unanimously won't. That's why moving expenses to the user has been so successful across a broad range of industries. Then on top of that, the expense-to-you is highly ambiguous with this particular example; I happen to know how to get some use out of compost, so the "expense" of separating compostables flirts with being negative (but I can't be sure, because it's all too close to zero to be measurable even intuitively). YMMV.
All that aside, I share your feelings about outlawing private competition, though probably not to the same degree. That is where we come back to the quid-pro-quo aspects of looking at these sort of things. I happen to live fairly near the border of my city and routinely visit m'lady's parents house which is right outside that border, which lets me regularly see the subtle differences between life under a city government and life under a county government. And here's the thing: that distinction exists and is available for people to choose between.
If you want to be able to hire your own garbage disposal contractor, then when you go house shopping, you should reject city governments' offer of increased performance at the expense of flexibility. You do get to say no to their garbage service, but it's a long-term decision that you make before you set up house -- before you commit to doing certain things "the city way." You've gotta Just Say No, and you've got to mean it: you prove to us city slickers that you're better than us and our collective garbage service, by living outside the incorporated area.;-)
I have one more point to make related to all this. Private garbage disposal should expect to be regulated. One of the ways that Bar Corp might think they can beat Foo City's rates is by not merely being more efficient than corrupt city officials, but by doing something sneaky to externalize their costs, because historically nearly all waste disposal does happen to involve externalizing (at least the city's plan is out in the open for everyone to see). Another way of phrasing "sneaky externalized cost" is "criminal subsidy." So now we're talking about "illegals" and "handouts" so I'm not even sure which side is which in what at first glance appeared to be clear left/right.
The fixed costs are the same no matter how much bandwith we use, and any bandwidth we don't use is lost forever.
Are you really sure about that? I got the impression that with the cable TV companies, their network's physical last mile is something like a shared ethernet (think back when you use ethernet hubs instead of switches, or even further back when you had 10base2 if you're old enough to have gone through that), in that when you're talking/listening, someone else has to wait their turn.
Of course, it sounds like your argument is to try to make them either change that, or at least upgrade its capacity. By charging per capita instead of in proportion to use, the light users who subsidize the heavy users will demand the sum of everyone's bills go down (so that their own bill goes down), thus being the incentive to upgrade the network.
I wonder if we could use this same strategy to advance Everything. Imagine if gasoline/petrol companies were to charge car drivers a fixed monthly fee for fuel, instead of per gallon. That would give us incentive to use our cars more, and give them incentive to obtain more fuel more cheaply. And since oil prospecting and drilling is much like residential cable/fiber laying in that it's nearly free and the only barrier to doing it is having the desire to do so, the strategy should work equally well.
But what if you reframe the question as "Should X be a condition for Y service?" then it gets harder to answer, and also much more interesting to think about.
"Should composting be mandatory?" Absolutely not.
"Should composting be a required condition for using municipal garbage service?" Maybe. And that's what the real discussion should be about.
A lot of seemingly left-vs-right authoritarian-vs-libertarian flamewars could probably be avoided by looking at things in a quid-pro-quo "not just abstract social contract but a tangible you-see-it-in-action every day contract" perspective.
Let's keep the discussion on phones as delivered to the average consumer.
Why? What a boring discussion that would be. But ok, here it is: users, carriers, and manufacturers have conflicting interests, and software which serves counter-user interests is almost always bundled with the hardware, which is why average consumers never end up with good phones.
There. Now that discussion is over, let's move the discussion on how to get a good phone, i.e. how to avoid being an average consumer.
CyanogenMod is one way to get a pretty decent one. Buying an out-of-production and doomed Maemo is another. Anyone know of any other options?
Hmm.. not exactly the same thing, but JFS already lets you store the journal (yeah, I know that's not what you really mean) on a different device that the rest of the filesystem. I've never tried it (mainly because I don't know how to decide how much space to give it) but I wonder how that'd work out: an SSD just for journaling your HDD data. That would have to reduce some seeking.
I'm a bit fuzzy on how a belief in evolution helps a doctor diagnose and fix a problem in the patient in front of them.
Ever heard of infection? You can't understand bacteria and viruses, let alone treat them effectively, if you don't know about evolution. Imagine these people giving out antibiotics.
You might be able to argue that people who are completely ignorant of basic biology can handle certain specialties (e.g. how much do you have to know to put a splint on a broken arm?) but AFAIK the people who hand out medical degrees still require some broad knowledge. They could probably still be trained as medical technicians of some kind, but they'd definitely be incompetent as doctors.
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And courts to try, convict and sentence those bastards. Why everyone forgets this step, I don't know. Yet for some reason, whenever we're talking about any other sort of crime, it matters -- people don't ever say that murder is so serious that the suspects shouldn't be tried.
You're looking at things in terms of who is at fault and what a particular driver should do.
That is a dumb way to think when setting policy. If (and that's actually a big if that branch-prediction tends to get wrong) the goal is to increase public safety and reduce collisions, then you acknowledge that some idiots out there are going to be entering intersections right after their light turns yellow (yes, that's bad), will be following other cars closely (yes, that's bad), and doing other dumb things (yes, that's bad), and that there are sometimes collisions as a result. Then you ask, "What do we do about this?"
Giving tickets to bad drivers as a deterrent force is a perfectly valid idea which can be implemented in parallel with other approaches, but for whatever reason, after using that approach for many decades, people didn't think it was good enough. So they came up with the totally stupid idea of government punishing suspected offenders without due process, and that creates a new problems for everyone (whether they obey traffic laws or not) and suddenly traffic safety isn't relatively important anymore, because we've regressed on simple law and order.
Those other approaches to run in parallel with ticketing, include things like increasing the yellow time, so that there will be fewer collisions when drivers screw up.
Yeah, there are lots of ways to screw up, but swap is one of the easiest things to get right. Since the user doesn't need to know a key, the machine can pick a totally random one (256 real bits, no guessable passphrase with less actual entropy) for it at every boot. Swap can be as solid as your best symmetric cipher, and that's pretty damn good. All the PK used on the internet will fail long before this level of tech does. Set things up right and swap may be the #1 safest place on your disks, the catch being that your lose it every time your reboot. ;-)
No, I don't, because other people don't care, so they use shitty software. Webmail is the worst, because it'll never be very practical to handle client-side decryption or signing of webmail. (Yes, I've seen some heroic attempts with some ff plugins, but they're not as nearly as convenient as even a mid-1990s email client.) Outlook is bad too, but at least it has the excuse of trying to push a rival standard (an unquestionably inferior one, but nevertheless quite legitimate). Webmail, OTOH, is just a technological step backwards to .. before you had TCP/IP on your PC. I just don't know how else to put that. It's like dialing into someone else's computer and running mutt, which was fine in the 1980s, but we supposedly had a revolution since then. I guess not.
It's ok to admit things aren't going well; shit happens. I do think everyone who has posted here saying email encryption isn't valuable, though, needs their geek cards revoked. Those kids should go back to playing their xboxes and leave the tech discussion to people who are willing to take a few seconds to think about things.
Your email is uninteresting? Well, so is your newegg https checkout page! Why the fuck does anyone care about all the CA integrity problems that have come up lately, if encryption and authentication have no value? Give up https if you think pgp isn't important, because most everything you do with https isn't even half as personal as email.
Your communications don't need to be private? Neither does the list of URLs you've visited which happen to have "like" buttons on them. But somehow when Facebook decides to profile you, you have a a hissy fit. Yet if someone *cough*google*cough* were to profile you from your everyday emails, you would be creeped out -- just kidding, you'd bury your head in the sand and pretend it's not happening.
What is "such things" and "that sort of thing?" All I can think of, is that it means anything you ever might ever want to email to someone.
You might as well say "People who know enough to use https, don't use the web."
I know you're going for the joke, but from a serious aspect (here come the "whoosh" replies) that is lousy SE because the victim knows what you're doing. Unless you kill or incapacitate them, then after you leave they're going to call cops, cancel cards, etc. Good SE requires the victim not know they were attacked. You can't do that with a wrench.
I guess this is getting to be an automatic button with me. Every time someone brings up crypto, someone else brings up the wrench, and it's almost always wrong. (Damn you, Munroe!)
On your laptop, if someone steals it while it's turned off, they can do anything they want, including becoming root, and they still don't get to read any of the files in your home directory without the [LUKS|truecrypt|whatever_you're_using] decryption key. Having both root and physical access isn't enough unless they manage to get the system while it's already up.
"Invoking the methods used for decryption" is pointless unless you have they key to pass to those methods.
Sensitive data (or maybe just everything) on phones should be handled that way too.
Personally, I wouldn't put the burden for that on a "wallet" type application; it should be part of the OS itself, at the device level (or possibly filesystem level). AFAIK Android doesn't yet use encrypted devices or filesystems, so flaming the wallet itself might not be perfectly appropriate. But the flaming system as a whole? Sure, especially if it's going to be marketed as a payment system. And especially since we all know the kernel it uses is already very capable of doing this stuff, out-of-the-box.
It just goes to show how far these handheld PC OSes still need to come, before they catch up to reasonably modern expectations for a PC.
It was obsoleted by personal computers getting virtual memory.
There were some good things about the "good old days" but overlays are not among them. Even back then, they sucked and were just a hack for fitting more code into your computer than you had address space.
The only regret I have for overlays being dead, is that part of my brain is permanently wasted on knowing about them. I don't know if knowledge has opportunity cost, but I've always suspected that it does.
When I loaded the new room, the old one get LRUed.
Same reason as perl: because people are vile, sick bastards.
No, we didn't. We all won. Even with the price increases, hard disks are available and the price per terabyte is ridiculously cheap. The only people who think they lost, are the whiney bitches who are comparing the prices to what they were a couple months ago. Try comparing the cost to what it was two years ago, and terabytes are slightly cheaper except they also use fewer SATA ports.
What we're seeing isn't expensiveness; it's volatility. If you can't handle that the prices sometimes vary between "dirt cheap" and "cheaper than dirt," then boo-fucking-hoo. DO NOT make me start sentences with "I remember when," you spoiled little whipper-snapper.
The opposing party is whichever one ends up winning.
This, incidentally, is why Libertarians can never win. Whenever they win, they become their own anti-particle and explode.
They might be thinking that the "user's machine" could be something like a DSL router, which may already be servicing user's DNS requests with dnsmasq or something like that. There are all sorts of opportunities to improve the functionality of these spots, without really needing to impact the software and protocols run by the actual endpoints. It's not so much the "last mile" that is most vulnerable, but rather, the "last mile except for the last 30 feet." In your LAN itself is compromised, then the intruder is already in the house and you are totally screwed no matter what you do. ;-)
He meant steganography but
so he used encoded shorthand for it.
Fortunately, you were able to expand the shorthand, so the meaning wasn't lost. Unfortunately, you guessed the code, so the meaning wasn't lost.
Whoa... does that mean apt-get, emerge, yum, etc are derivative works of .. um, everything?
Huh. Actually, that's possibly the most legitimate suggestion. A shitty battery life is not something that all tablets should naturally have; only ones that are trying to copy Apple -- er I mean -- serve one particular corner niche. A lot of the design issues at stake are practical consequences, but this one seems to me to be an impractical consequence.
Of course, I say this as someone who totally doesn't "get" the tablet market. (Too big to fit in pocket, too small to type on or fill up field of view.) Maybe minimizing weight is super-critical.
It's a shame that companies like Samsung are trolling through Apple's patents and stealing the ideas from them, but once you publish how your innovation works, what can you do if the government fails to uphold the monopoly that you're supposed to get in exchange for that publishing?
If the courts don't uphold the monopoly, then I think Apple should take its ball and go home. They should keep their designs a trade secret instead of patenting them. That means that should Apple ever die, the secret for how they made their tablets rectangular will die with them, but that would be an important lesson to looters in the future.
We as a society must provide some kind of incentive to Apple for revealing the secret of their designs in the patent documents. Without this incentive, Apple has nothing other than hundreds of millions of dollars in hardware sales and iStore gateway fees.
No, it's interesting, but it's not as interesting. "Looks like he called his wife again," doesn't tell you a whole lot.
Imagine you're trying to decide which house to burgle. Some sends a message to someone else who is planning a party. You really want to know if they said, "I'll be there and am bringing a few growlers of homebrew quadbock. We are getting so 'faced! Can I crash at your place?" or "sorry, can't make it. I'm teaching the kids how to recycle ammo brass that night."
The US would do the same thing the USSR did 50 years ago to a U2: shoot it down and complain.
Fair enough. What you'll probably find, though, is that even if you could do that, and went with a provider which didn't require composting, their bill would be higher and you would likely reject their bid. The whole point of the composting idea isn't really some kind of hippie save-the-planet thing; it's to reduce their costs by moving some of the separation work to you.
You might take that into account when you're comparing Foo City's rates to Bar Corp's rates, but there's a lot of evidence that people nearly unanimously won't. That's why moving expenses to the user has been so successful across a broad range of industries. Then on top of that, the expense-to-you is highly ambiguous with this particular example; I happen to know how to get some use out of compost, so the "expense" of separating compostables flirts with being negative (but I can't be sure, because it's all too close to zero to be measurable even intuitively). YMMV.
All that aside, I share your feelings about outlawing private competition, though probably not to the same degree. That is where we come back to the quid-pro-quo aspects of looking at these sort of things. I happen to live fairly near the border of my city and routinely visit m'lady's parents house which is right outside that border, which lets me regularly see the subtle differences between life under a city government and life under a county government. And here's the thing: that distinction exists and is available for people to choose between.
If you want to be able to hire your own garbage disposal contractor, then when you go house shopping, you should reject city governments' offer of increased performance at the expense of flexibility. You do get to say no to their garbage service, but it's a long-term decision that you make before you set up house -- before you commit to doing certain things "the city way." You've gotta Just Say No, and you've got to mean it: you prove to us city slickers that you're better than us and our collective garbage service, by living outside the incorporated area. ;-)
I have one more point to make related to all this. Private garbage disposal should expect to be regulated. One of the ways that Bar Corp might think they can beat Foo City's rates is by not merely being more efficient than corrupt city officials, but by doing something sneaky to externalize their costs, because historically nearly all waste disposal does happen to involve externalizing (at least the city's plan is out in the open for everyone to see). Another way of phrasing "sneaky externalized cost" is "criminal subsidy." So now we're talking about "illegals" and "handouts" so I'm not even sure which side is which in what at first glance appeared to be clear left/right.
Are you really sure about that? I got the impression that with the cable TV companies, their network's physical last mile is something like a shared ethernet (think back when you use ethernet hubs instead of switches, or even further back when you had 10base2 if you're old enough to have gone through that), in that when you're talking/listening, someone else has to wait their turn.
Of course, it sounds like your argument is to try to make them either change that, or at least upgrade its capacity. By charging per capita instead of in proportion to use, the light users who subsidize the heavy users will demand the sum of everyone's bills go down (so that their own bill goes down), thus being the incentive to upgrade the network.
I wonder if we could use this same strategy to advance Everything. Imagine if gasoline/petrol companies were to charge car drivers a fixed monthly fee for fuel, instead of per gallon. That would give us incentive to use our cars more, and give them incentive to obtain more fuel more cheaply. And since oil prospecting and drilling is much like residential cable/fiber laying in that it's nearly free and the only barrier to doing it is having the desire to do so, the strategy should work equally well.
But what if you reframe the question as "Should X be a condition for Y service?" then it gets harder to answer, and also much more interesting to think about.
"Should composting be mandatory?" Absolutely not.
"Should composting be a required condition for using municipal garbage service?" Maybe. And that's what the real discussion should be about.
A lot of seemingly left-vs-right authoritarian-vs-libertarian flamewars could probably be avoided by looking at things in a quid-pro-quo "not just abstract social contract but a tangible you-see-it-in-action every day contract" perspective.
Why? What a boring discussion that would be. But ok, here it is: users, carriers, and manufacturers have conflicting interests, and software which serves counter-user interests is almost always bundled with the hardware, which is why average consumers never end up with good phones.
There. Now that discussion is over, let's move the discussion on how to get a good phone, i.e. how to avoid being an average consumer.
CyanogenMod is one way to get a pretty decent one. Buying an out-of-production and doomed Maemo is another. Anyone know of any other options?
Hmm.. not exactly the same thing, but JFS already lets you store the journal (yeah, I know that's not what you really mean) on a different device that the rest of the filesystem. I've never tried it (mainly because I don't know how to decide how much space to give it) but I wonder how that'd work out: an SSD just for journaling your HDD data. That would have to reduce some seeking.
Ever heard of infection? You can't understand bacteria and viruses, let alone treat them effectively, if you don't know about evolution. Imagine these people giving out antibiotics.
You might be able to argue that people who are completely ignorant of basic biology can handle certain specialties (e.g. how much do you have to know to put a splint on a broken arm?) but AFAIK the people who hand out medical degrees still require some broad knowledge. They could probably still be trained as medical technicians of some kind, but they'd definitely be incompetent as doctors.