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.

It looks like you can use the Find My iPhone to wipe the CC numbers...

ISP problem.

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

If CO2 is pollution, than what isn't?

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!'

They'd have to Foley cath everyone on a flight longer than 2 or 3 hours.

Maybe if the airlines want to cram so many folks into the space, they should look at preventing the seats from reclining at all.

The stable equilibrium will be for the airlines to stack everyone in with about 20 inches per person, like spoons in a drawer, and to make this bearable by sedating everyone on a amnesiac tranquilizer like Versed/Midazolam, perhaps with a catheter to remove the need for a lavatory. Do not eat 24 hours before flying!