But how many people with LA degrees have mastered these?
The idea that the aim of education should be professional mastery and specialization is very modern and has significant detractors, particularly among those who would say that it simply turns the University into a factory that produces graduates like goods.
Also this debate happens in the context of middle-class university education. The children of the rich are absolutely still getting rigorous liberal arts educations, as this seems to be a prerequisite for politics and leadership, for people who look forward to living rich and full lives, and not merely being a useful commodity for someone else to consume.
... employees with STEM degrees have critical thinking skills *and* STEM degrees. Just sayin'.
Hrmmm. Just some random thoughts, as someone with a film degree that also codes and has a highly technical job -- I am a sound designer and a recording engineer. I will to some extent generalize, but that's what we're doing here.
1) I've noticed that people can have really extensive technical knowledge but really not have any concept of social context or even the social utility of what they do. Indeed they'll often argue that the social utility is meaningless when compared to some teleological "search for knowledge," which is portrayed as valueless and objectively good, and questions of economy and competing interests are morally inferior.
2) STEM people can be total philistines. They'll often deride art and creative pursuits as somehow less essential or necessary than the cause of science and progress. They don't seem to understand that "progress" itself is a moral concept deeply embedded within a complex philosophical value system, and indeed a lot of STEM people know nothing of philosophy or epistemology, and think the entire enterprise of philosophy is some sort of academic scam. I love me some Neil DeGrasse Tyson, but he's completely put the foot in his mouth on several occasions when he thinks he's talking about philosophy of science, and I loved the new Cosmos but his depictions of certain historical events, particularly about Giordano Bruno, were glib and lacked rigor or sensitive knowledge.
3) I've noticed that a lot of people with an engineering or medical background are subject to many forms of woo, quackery and crank ideas. Whenever someone prints a list of "scientists" who oppose Evolution/Global Warming/Old Universe, take your pick, the list is generally chock full of engineer Ph.Ds.
4) Relatedly, I've noticed a lot of engineers are dilettantes who tend to see all problems in the world as simply problems of applied computer science, who don't respect professional expertise or knowledge, or respect the fact that things in the world can fundamentally differ in kind from the problems of science and engineering.
5) Some STEM people can be highly dogmatic, if you ever get into an argument with one over some point they will not let go of, eventually they'll resort to some form of scientism, and insist that the thing you believe is false because its existence cannot be falsified. An important part of exposing yourself to art and creativity is acknowledging that you can't prove beauty exists falsifiably, and everyone can argue over wether this or that tulip is beautiful, but beauty exists.
Go back to 2002 or so and s/Objective-C/Java. They're committed for the time being, but if they see people switching to Swift uniformly they'll dump Obj-C like a bad habit.
But even at $7 a month it's not clear it's worth as much as one HBO, it's first-run original programming is pretty thin, all you've got is the back catalogue, which competitors can easily replicate -- just as Amazon has. If a shop like Netflix wants to keep subscribers they have to offer something beyond just the library, in a cost game there's not much question an Amazon can destroy them -- the original programming is the tail that wags the dog, they have to constantly produce it an improve it. HBO's sub growth is driven almost completely by people wanting to get into new original programming, just having movies wasn't enough.
Note that the reverse trend is happening. Thanks to the very low cost of production and distribution, there are many, many, many alternate "shows" out there that you can watch.
As a happy contributor to Red Letter Media on Patreon, I've found that the quality of this kind of indie, samizdat prodcutions to be pretty uneven, it'd be hard to get any kind of mass penetration with it. From a producer's perspective, that's the big peril of going YouTube -- you'll definitely get your stuff out there, and you may even be able to make a living, but there's never going to be a "hit." Even if you do hit, there's really no good way for you to monetize your programming long-term, all of the rents in the system that used to flow to creators through copyright now flow to advertisers and search aggregators.
You'll only make a killing if you turn yourself into a sort of brand celebrity, a Lady Gaga or a Justin Beiber, who, musical talent aside, are salient primarily due to their ability to brand media and consumer experiences. They're a substrate for ads -- they're the kind of artists the world gets when no one pays for art.
I think the undesirable qualities of cable TV would find their way into Netflix and similar services.
Your Netflix bill is already paying for Orange is the New Black and House of Cards -- these are very good shows, so that's a saving grace, but it's not like you can tell Netflix to take $2 off your bill in order to skip their original programming. And presumably as Netflix expands its original content offerings, your bill is going to be subsidizing a lot of content you couldn't care less about. Shops like Amazon and Crackle already crank out unruly gobs of uneven content, they only get away with it because Amazon Prime offers many other valuable services, and Crackle doesn't charge subscriptions.
Further, it's still not realistic for a producer, even a David Fincher, to just set up his own website somewhere and get people to give him $10 a month to make a TV show. He needs to piggyback off of a platform like Netflix, which already has a lot of brand recognition and traffic.
The problem with "a la carte cable channels" is the presumption that people want channels. They want shows that are suited to their tastes. The center of value is the program, that's what brings in the people, but due to underlying economics, the center of costs remains the channel, this Netflix must offer its subscription on a channel-wise, take-it-all or leave-it-all basis.
If the NSA wants your credit card number they're not going to get it from your phone. If law enforcement has a warrant they'll just ask your credit card company.
In the particular case of the TouchID data, the actual fingerprint image is only stored in RAM,and while it's in RAM, it's AES encrypted with a one-time session key known only to the TouchID hardware, the CPU does not have this key and cannot read it, it's stored in a secure enclave and made available only to the TouchID hardware. The collection of approved fingerprints is stored, encrypted, in a reduced and vectorized format that cannot be used to reconstruct the original fingerprint image.
The TouchID hardware does the actual work of fingerprint comparison, on an ASIC that doesn't share memory space with the CPU and only communicates with the CPU through the secure enclave.
Killing off legacy support early is both a strength and a weakness for Apple.
It depends, Apple is strategic about which APIs it keeps and which it cuts. QuickTime has finally been deprecated after 20 years, and up to 10.7 or so it was still the default platform for working with video on the platform. In that time it changed very little, they just kept adding codecs to it -- occasionally in Mac development you'd have to go into the QuickTime headers to work with some data structure or interface with the old Component/Code Framgment Manager, and it was like digging through grandpa's attic, Handles and UPPs and big-endian FourCC fields. To this day you can take an Apple Intermediate Codec.mov file with AAC and reencode it as Sorenson Video 3 with 8 bit Mu-Law, the 90s legacy media platform is still completely intact.
The Core Audio and Core MIDI APIs are also basically unchanged since OS X 10... 1? The media frameworks are where Apple's core business is; the Apple systems people are constantly tweaking data persistence, and languages, toolsets, UI elements, and the deployment package, but the media libraries seem to be sacred cows.
They're beginning to subsume CoreAudio under some new AV frameworks but it's all still there; QuickTime is finally going away because it isn't deployed on iOS (and probably can't be). And not many people have CinePak or Apple Animation MOVs anymore.
They are still storing your credit card number somewhere. How is that different from storing a photo?
Just this year Apply wrote a very long, detailed white paper about exactly what the difference is. The short story is that, on a 5S, things like your password keychain, the unlock password itself and the signatures that sign the system and certificates is kept either in a secure enclave chip, or on a block of the flash media that the secure enclave can read and write, but the regular flash controller itself cannot address. This is a security tier itself that sits above the normal full-disk encryption of the phone (where your photos live), which is done with your unlock password.
Those of us with 6-digit IDs remember. You see, there were once companies called Creative Labs, and Rio, and they made these iPhone like things, except they couldn't make phone calls and couldn't text, they just played music (and maybe they came with Breakout if you were lucky).
And I have had my cards rejected exactly zero times in a decade. This policy is clearly an utter failure -- can you seriously see the cashier at The Gap hand your card back to you and say "I'm sorry, this card doesn't have a valid signature." That's a great way for a shop to lose customers, regardless of whatever the processors policies may be.
In the end, if the CC processors want firm confirmation of identity, an electronic frob (like a phone) or chip-and-PIN is going to be required. Merchants don't care, they do whatever they want as long as the word "APPROVED" appears in the window.
So if you lose or upgrade your phone you have to re-setup all your stored cards? That doesn't sound very Apple like.
If it works like everything else on it's on your backup, which, if you're smart, you only do locally. It's a good question if they'll put it in the cloud backup -- I don't use the Cloud backup features.
Reimporting the cards doesn't seem to be a big deal, you just have to take a picture of it with the camera, frankly I wouldn't mind doing that every time I get a new phone.
Given what we know, if Dread Pirate Roberts made me choose between having my wallet stolen or my phone stolen, TAKE THE PHONE. It's clear that the information in phone form can do a lot less damage.
And the cashier will never see the owner's name.... a NOT wonderful idea
I have "Ask for Photo ID" written on the back of all my credit cards. I'd say the cashiers do as they're instructed about 1% of the time. We can't rely on the merchants to enforce the security of the system more than bare compliance requires, they're not on the hook for the losses.
The stuttering I can attribute to an ISP or the raw demand. But the ISP didn't stick crosstalk of a Cantonese interpreter over the English audio for the first 20 minutes.
If we take the CEO and a corporate VP of Apple at their word, then this is how it works. Apple doesn't store CC numbers, they stay on the phone and all the transactions themselves happen with one-time codes.
If they're lying or they're misinformed that'd be a big deal
Water is a deadly if you drink enough of it. Things aren't "pollution," pollution is not an essential characteristic of anything.
Pollution is a consequence of how we dispose of something. Pollution isn't a substance, pollution is something one does, and the thing he does it with is a pollutant, by dint of the nature of the polluting activity.
That said, very few people make the "let's have warmer winters!" argument; they know that's a loser, so they throw up various smokescreens about how somehow scientists don't agree, or that agreement is not, itself, a meaningful or serious thing to contemplate. The "consensus" of scientists isn't itself a scientific fact, but there's no law saying that only scientific truths are real or valid, or that consensus, even political consensus is ipso facto garbage because it's the product of a political or collective, deliberative process.
If we were to restrict ourselves and say that falsifiable truths were the only truths, and go full metaphysical realist, then yes, carbon taxes would not be rationally justified. But that wouldn't get you anywhere, because the belief that taxes must be rationally justified relies on utilitarian and small-L liberal ethics that aren't scientifically provable, either.
People like John Oliver, trotting out a bunch of people in lab coats saying, "look how many people say your wrong" is not an argument; funny yes, but not a valid argument.
It's a valid argument if you're countering the claim that a meaningful set of scientists reject anthropogenic global warming. It isn't a valid argument that AGW is actually happening, true.
A scientific fact is a different thing than an authoritative claim, and you need consensus and political debate in order to create the latter. Science produces testable facts but the question of wether or not we, as a people, must do something in response to these facts, or if these facts are relevant or important, are not questions science can answer.
Implicit in the successive warnings from the IPCC and other bodies is the basic philosophical assumption that AGW is unnatural and hazardous, and must be stopped, because it threatens multitudes of human lives. Science can't really draw a firm line between unnatural and natural, that's metaphysical. Science cannot fundamentally indicate things that are a "hazard," because this is a concept that rests on analytic assumptions that are subjective to human values. And as odious as it is to say, science cannot prove that a human life has value, thus, science cannot justify any action that would save life, on it's own.
all scientific papers for publication, and by extension all term papers, were required to be written in the third person past passive voice. This was thought to appear more objective.
Of course the objectivity of the categorical claims stand regardless of the verbal tense or mood, the adopted style is strictly for the sake of appearances, or some sort of underlying metaphysical commitment to the idea that scientific facts occur indifferently to observation, which does open up some interesting questions. If a tree falls in the woods, and no one is there to hear it, I cannot be sure that it makes a sound, but I'm relatively certain it fell in the passive voice.
I'm reminded of my Lewis Carroll:
Alice was too much puzzled to say anything; so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. 'They've a temper, some of them — particularly verbs: they're the proudest — adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs — however, I can manage the whole lot of them! Impenetrability! That's what I say!'
Slashdot Mirror
We demand strict orthographic projection in all marketing materials!
The idea that the aim of education should be professional mastery and specialization is very modern and has significant detractors, particularly among those who would say that it simply turns the University into a factory that produces graduates like goods.
Also this debate happens in the context of middle-class university education. The children of the rich are absolutely still getting rigorous liberal arts educations, as this seems to be a prerequisite for politics and leadership, for people who look forward to living rich and full lives, and not merely being a useful commodity for someone else to consume.
PS. On (3), I don't think it's any accident that the government of the People's Republic of China is made up of engineers to a large extent, or that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and many Iranian politicians are engineers, or that many members of the Muslim Brotherhood (including Ayman al-Zawahiri) are medical doctors.
STEM fields give intelligent people a way of working in the world that will not fundamentally challenge their philosophy or beliefs.
Hrmmm. Just some random thoughts, as someone with a film degree that also codes and has a highly technical job -- I am a sound designer and a recording engineer. I will to some extent generalize, but that's what we're doing here.
1) I've noticed that people can have really extensive technical knowledge but really not have any concept of social context or even the social utility of what they do. Indeed they'll often argue that the social utility is meaningless when compared to some teleological "search for knowledge," which is portrayed as valueless and objectively good, and questions of economy and competing interests are morally inferior.
2) STEM people can be total philistines. They'll often deride art and creative pursuits as somehow less essential or necessary than the cause of science and progress. They don't seem to understand that "progress" itself is a moral concept deeply embedded within a complex philosophical value system, and indeed a lot of STEM people know nothing of philosophy or epistemology, and think the entire enterprise of philosophy is some sort of academic scam. I love me some Neil DeGrasse Tyson, but he's completely put the foot in his mouth on several occasions when he thinks he's talking about philosophy of science, and I loved the new Cosmos but his depictions of certain historical events, particularly about Giordano Bruno, were glib and lacked rigor or sensitive knowledge.
3) I've noticed that a lot of people with an engineering or medical background are subject to many forms of woo, quackery and crank ideas. Whenever someone prints a list of "scientists" who oppose Evolution/Global Warming/Old Universe, take your pick, the list is generally chock full of engineer Ph.Ds.
4) Relatedly, I've noticed a lot of engineers are dilettantes who tend to see all problems in the world as simply problems of applied computer science, who don't respect professional expertise or knowledge, or respect the fact that things in the world can fundamentally differ in kind from the problems of science and engineering.
5) Some STEM people can be highly dogmatic, if you ever get into an argument with one over some point they will not let go of, eventually they'll resort to some form of scientism, and insist that the thing you believe is false because its existence cannot be falsified. An important part of exposing yourself to art and creativity is acknowledging that you can't prove beauty exists falsifiably, and everyone can argue over wether this or that tulip is beautiful, but beauty exists.
It happens often enough, but I don't know if I'd describe it as "easy."
Go back to 2002 or so and s/Objective-C/Java. They're committed for the time being, but if they see people switching to Swift uniformly they'll dump Obj-C like a bad habit.
I work in media.
But even at $7 a month it's not clear it's worth as much as one HBO, it's first-run original programming is pretty thin, all you've got is the back catalogue, which competitors can easily replicate -- just as Amazon has. If a shop like Netflix wants to keep subscribers they have to offer something beyond just the library, in a cost game there's not much question an Amazon can destroy them -- the original programming is the tail that wags the dog, they have to constantly produce it an improve it. HBO's sub growth is driven almost completely by people wanting to get into new original programming, just having movies wasn't enough.
It'll never be $70 a month, but $20, or $30?
As a happy contributor to Red Letter Media on Patreon, I've found that the quality of this kind of indie, samizdat prodcutions to be pretty uneven, it'd be hard to get any kind of mass penetration with it. From a producer's perspective, that's the big peril of going YouTube -- you'll definitely get your stuff out there, and you may even be able to make a living, but there's never going to be a "hit." Even if you do hit, there's really no good way for you to monetize your programming long-term, all of the rents in the system that used to flow to creators through copyright now flow to advertisers and search aggregators.
You'll only make a killing if you turn yourself into a sort of brand celebrity, a Lady Gaga or a Justin Beiber, who, musical talent aside, are salient primarily due to their ability to brand media and consumer experiences. They're a substrate for ads -- they're the kind of artists the world gets when no one pays for art.
Your Netflix bill is already paying for Orange is the New Black and House of Cards -- these are very good shows, so that's a saving grace, but it's not like you can tell Netflix to take $2 off your bill in order to skip their original programming. And presumably as Netflix expands its original content offerings, your bill is going to be subsidizing a lot of content you couldn't care less about. Shops like Amazon and Crackle already crank out unruly gobs of uneven content, they only get away with it because Amazon Prime offers many other valuable services, and Crackle doesn't charge subscriptions.
Further, it's still not realistic for a producer, even a David Fincher, to just set up his own website somewhere and get people to give him $10 a month to make a TV show. He needs to piggyback off of a platform like Netflix, which already has a lot of brand recognition and traffic.
The problem with "a la carte cable channels" is the presumption that people want channels. They want shows that are suited to their tastes. The center of value is the program, that's what brings in the people, but due to underlying economics, the center of costs remains the channel, this Netflix must offer its subscription on a channel-wise, take-it-all or leave-it-all basis.
If the NSA wants your credit card number they're not going to get it from your phone. If law enforcement has a warrant they'll just ask your credit card company.
In the particular case of the TouchID data, the actual fingerprint image is only stored in RAM,and while it's in RAM, it's AES encrypted with a one-time session key known only to the TouchID hardware, the CPU does not have this key and cannot read it, it's stored in a secure enclave and made available only to the TouchID hardware. The collection of approved fingerprints is stored, encrypted, in a reduced and vectorized format that cannot be used to reconstruct the original fingerprint image.
The TouchID hardware does the actual work of fingerprint comparison, on an ASIC that doesn't share memory space with the CPU and only communicates with the CPU through the secure enclave.
It depends, Apple is strategic about which APIs it keeps and which it cuts. QuickTime has finally been deprecated after 20 years, and up to 10.7 or so it was still the default platform for working with video on the platform. In that time it changed very little, they just kept adding codecs to it -- occasionally in Mac development you'd have to go into the QuickTime headers to work with some data structure or interface with the old Component/Code Framgment Manager, and it was like digging through grandpa's attic, Handles and UPPs and big-endian FourCC fields. To this day you can take an Apple Intermediate Codec .mov file with AAC and reencode it as Sorenson Video 3 with 8 bit Mu-Law, the 90s legacy media platform is still completely intact.
The Core Audio and Core MIDI APIs are also basically unchanged since OS X 10... 1? The media frameworks are where Apple's core business is; the Apple systems people are constantly tweaking data persistence, and languages, toolsets, UI elements, and the deployment package, but the media libraries seem to be sacred cows.
They're beginning to subsume CoreAudio under some new AV frameworks but it's all still there; QuickTime is finally going away because it isn't deployed on iOS (and probably can't be). And not many people have CinePak or Apple Animation MOVs anymore.
Just this year Apply wrote a very long, detailed white paper about exactly what the difference is. The short story is that, on a 5S, things like your password keychain, the unlock password itself and the signatures that sign the system and certificates is kept either in a secure enclave chip, or on a block of the flash media that the secure enclave can read and write, but the regular flash controller itself cannot address. This is a security tier itself that sits above the normal full-disk encryption of the phone (where your photos live), which is done with your unlock password.
Those of us with 6-digit IDs remember. You see, there were once companies called Creative Labs, and Rio, and they made these iPhone like things, except they couldn't make phone calls and couldn't text, they just played music (and maybe they came with Breakout if you were lucky).
And I have had my cards rejected exactly zero times in a decade. This policy is clearly an utter failure -- can you seriously see the cashier at The Gap hand your card back to you and say "I'm sorry, this card doesn't have a valid signature." That's a great way for a shop to lose customers, regardless of whatever the processors policies may be.
In the end, if the CC processors want firm confirmation of identity, an electronic frob (like a phone) or chip-and-PIN is going to be required. Merchants don't care, they do whatever they want as long as the word "APPROVED" appears in the window.
If it works like everything else on it's on your backup, which, if you're smart, you only do locally. It's a good question if they'll put it in the cloud backup -- I don't use the Cloud backup features.
Reimporting the cards doesn't seem to be a big deal, you just have to take a picture of it with the camera, frankly I wouldn't mind doing that every time I get a new phone.
Given what we know, if Dread Pirate Roberts made me choose between having my wallet stolen or my phone stolen, TAKE THE PHONE. It's clear that the information in phone form can do a lot less damage.
I have "Ask for Photo ID" written on the back of all my credit cards. I'd say the cashiers do as they're instructed about 1% of the time. We can't rely on the merchants to enforce the security of the system more than bare compliance requires, they're not on the hook for the losses.
It looks like you can use the Find My iPhone to wipe the CC numbers...
The stuttering I can attribute to an ISP or the raw demand. But the ISP didn't stick crosstalk of a Cantonese interpreter over the English audio for the first 20 minutes.
If we take the CEO and a corporate VP of Apple at their word, then this is how it works. Apple doesn't store CC numbers, they stay on the phone and all the transactions themselves happen with one-time codes.
If they're lying or they're misinformed that'd be a big deal
Water is a deadly if you drink enough of it. Things aren't "pollution," pollution is not an essential characteristic of anything.
Pollution is a consequence of how we dispose of something. Pollution isn't a substance, pollution is something one does, and the thing he does it with is a pollutant, by dint of the nature of the polluting activity.
That said, very few people make the "let's have warmer winters!" argument; they know that's a loser, so they throw up various smokescreens about how somehow scientists don't agree, or that agreement is not, itself, a meaningful or serious thing to contemplate. The "consensus" of scientists isn't itself a scientific fact, but there's no law saying that only scientific truths are real or valid, or that consensus, even political consensus is ipso facto garbage because it's the product of a political or collective, deliberative process.
If we were to restrict ourselves and say that falsifiable truths were the only truths, and go full metaphysical realist, then yes, carbon taxes would not be rationally justified. But that wouldn't get you anywhere, because the belief that taxes must be rationally justified relies on utilitarian and small-L liberal ethics that aren't scientifically provable, either.
It's a valid argument if you're countering the claim that a meaningful set of scientists reject anthropogenic global warming. It isn't a valid argument that AGW is actually happening, true.
A scientific fact is a different thing than an authoritative claim, and you need consensus and political debate in order to create the latter. Science produces testable facts but the question of wether or not we, as a people, must do something in response to these facts, or if these facts are relevant or important, are not questions science can answer.
Implicit in the successive warnings from the IPCC and other bodies is the basic philosophical assumption that AGW is unnatural and hazardous, and must be stopped, because it threatens multitudes of human lives. Science can't really draw a firm line between unnatural and natural, that's metaphysical. Science cannot fundamentally indicate things that are a "hazard," because this is a concept that rests on analytic assumptions that are subjective to human values. And as odious as it is to say, science cannot prove that a human life has value, thus, science cannot justify any action that would save life, on it's own.
Of course the objectivity of the categorical claims stand regardless of the verbal tense or mood, the adopted style is strictly for the sake of appearances, or some sort of underlying metaphysical commitment to the idea that scientific facts occur indifferently to observation, which does open up some interesting questions. If a tree falls in the woods, and no one is there to hear it, I cannot be sure that it makes a sound, but I'm relatively certain it fell in the passive voice.
I'm reminded of my Lewis Carroll: