I've been frustrated with many free podcast apps so I paid for Pocket Casts and I've been happy since. I think it's a smart move by NPR et al. What they want is the usage data like where they pause, where they skip, etc. These data were traditionally not available to podcast publishers because podcast is really just an mp3 file uploaded to some server.
NPR has the NPR One app but I guess not enough people are using it. They've been open about what data they're collecting and I honestly don't mind NPR knowing about my podcast listening habits.
I don't like using fingerprints because my fingerprint is literally left on the reader. Anybody with a scotch tape can get a copy of my fingerprint left on the reader or the screen. That's like writing down your password on a post-it on your monitor. Anybody dedicated enough can then make a fake finger that can log in.
Not that I'm worried about someone pulling this spy operation on me but if my laptop is lost or stolen, I won't have the peace of mind.
I think what killed AIM, MSN, etc. was SMS. You had to meet your friends in person at school or be home in front of a computer to talk to your friends. With SMS you can talk to them anytime, anywhere. Then smartphones came out and apps like WhatsApp, FB Messenger and LINE took over.
This might be a good scenario for Apple. Apple doesn't have to build a backdoor, which is good for PR, and the Feds got what they want to they'll stop bothering Apple. Which is the position Android/Google was in all along.
One thought I had was that species evolved to maximize the survival of the species, not the individual organism. Once an organism is too old to reproduce or contribute to the survival of the species, it's probably better to die than becoming a burden to the rest of the members of your species. It sounds cold hearted and brutal but that's just how nature works. Maybe it is possible for an individual organism to reproduce and live forever someday but that would be very hard to achieve and we're probably stuck in a local maxima.
Who are the "wilfully accepting" people you speak of?
I think most people aren't accepting nor rejecting anything.
Someone is hungry and now they have food delivered. Someone doesn't have a job and now they have a delivery job. It's a win-win situation in a short-term micro scale and people are just responding to short-term incentives. It may have a bad effect in the long term but hungry/unemployed people don't have time to think about that and middleman-apps are making good profit exploiting that.
I think the point of undergrad is to have as much exposure to relevant material in the field, so later in their professional life if something relevant comes up they'll at least remember that they learned about it and know where to look. Also, if the students find one particular thing interesting and want to learn more about it, that's what grad school is for.
I don't remember the details of every algorithm I learned in college, but if a need arise, I know what my options are and the details are usually one Google search away.
I've been wondering why Korean and English is so different and one obvious reason is geographical. If humans originated from Africa and spread East and West, Korea is pretty much at the Eastern end of the spectrum and England is pretty close to the Western end of the spectrum.
Finding the origin of contents are already a challenge these days. A random idea I have is creating a blockchain where content creators can register their creations to prove their origin. Also, camera manufacturers can get involved and build in a hardware that signs every picture and video captured by that camera which can then be registered to the blockchain.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2V06LLTNxc4