The fact that through an unfortunate twist of history you even need to consider arming your teachers is simply incredible. There are a lot of great things about the US, but sadly the gun ownership fiasco is not one of them.
159 karma · joined May 21, 2012
www.skyhook.io
I based my M16 bought at Walmart caricature on the little I've learned from news media and documentaries like Bowling for Columbine.
You can substitute M16 for shotgun, and Walmart for Corner Gun Store and add in a mandatory 24 hour waiting period, which maybe doesn't make for quite as nice a sound bite, but is just as ridiculous.
In my original post I described an exaggerated caricature of gun ownership. The point still stands though: that any private citizen (regardless of the amount of paper work they filled out) can choose to sleep with an assault rifle (or shotgun or semi-auto pistol etc.etc.) under their pillow at night is rather .... disturbing.
The issue arises when every schmoe off the street can go in and purchase a fully automatic, purpose built people killing machine.
I also don't buy the people vs. the government scenario you allude to. Could you really picture a reality where a group of citizens could overthrow the US government just because they had some AK47s?
In the event of run-away government, a far more rational and realistic scenario would be for mass protests that essentially halt the economy over night. There are countless examples of almost completely bloodless revolutions happening in exactly this manner (Polish Solidarnosc and more recently Egypt during the Arab Spring immediately come to mind). The alternative is a bloody coup which usually ends in civil war or military dictatorship.
So from my perspective statements such as 'Guns are a tool' just don't wash. They are the only tool that comes to mind that are specifically designed to kill humans. There is no other use (besides sport shooting) that I can think of for a handgun. The same goes for high powered fully automatic military style rifles. Zero use for hunting an animal, perfectly tailored for hunting humans. That's disturbing to me, and I wouldn't want to live in a society that vehemently fights for the right to bear these arms.
Of course it is better to fix the root cause (mental illness, lack of empathy, education etc). Fighting the root is really hard and will take America generations of effort. Removing semi and full auto weapons can be done over night (the actual effectiveness could be argued ad nauseam, but at least the laws could be in place and some claw back of the 300 million odd weapons could begin).
Psychos would still rampage, but there's a lot less damage you can do if you only have a knife, or you have to reload after each shot.
[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_Australia#The_P...
PS: I'd be happy to be corrected, but from the little I know about the issue, the meaning of 'right to bear arms' in the US constitution has been twisted away from the original intent of organised and well disciplined militias, to: hey look ma I bought a M16 from Walmart today hur hur
Then there's spam... don't even get me started on spam filtering. For me personally $50/year is a bargain considering that running, maintaining, patching a mail server is time consuming and has no real upside.
As a learning experience it's fine, but in practice delivering mail (reliably) sucks hard.
Have you actually used or tried to deploy ChromeFrame? Its plenty ready for prime time, and features:
1. A 60sec installation
2. No browser restart required
3. No admin rights necessary
4. IE6+
5. Autoupdate just like regular chrome
Even the most technophobic user can follow 2 links to be able to use an app they really want to use.
And remember this is all about applications, not your average brochure site.
This statement is itself hyperbolic.
A lot of these advances are going to impact web applications. Sure if you're building a brochure site then you should probably stick to web technology circa 2000.
The article mentions 350MM chrome users, FF has about the same market share. That makes close of 3/4 of a billion web users who will automatically receive the updates that allow app developers to target these new features. That's a lot of potential customers.
Oh and for those who can't or don't know how to upgrade away from IE7-10 there's ChromeFrame. That covers the remaining portion of the web.
In other words... no, the article is not hyperbolic and feel free to take all of it seriously.
The only circumstance where missing JIT support for the webview would come into play would be with games, and even here there is plenty of room for performance (check out impactJS)
Because organisms that evolved to avoid that thing we call pain survived long enough to pass on their genes, whereas those that didn't got burned up, crushed or in other ways extinguished?
In other words an aversion to that thing called pain gave an evolutionary leg up. And it seems that this aversion is fundamental to life since every creature has a tendency toward self preservation.
There are many examples of people who enjoy physical pain and perform cutting even down to bone, and sometimes including amputation. Clearly this is an example of brain wiring which is not beneficial to the individual and, in extreme cases will self-filter out of the gene pool.
Not to mention that simply building such a copy would yield its own set of insights.
a) don't exhibit emotional pain or very little compared to "normal" (sociopaths/psychopaths)
b) are autistic and have "...difficulty with “subtle emotions like shame, pride, things that are much more socially oriented” [1]
c) people with Congenital insensitivity to (physical) pain, some of whom experience the condition due to excess production of endorphins in the brain
You seem to suggest that the question "but why does it hurt" is somehow mystical or metaphysical. I don't think it is. It hurts because your brain is wired so that it does. If it is wired otherwise (as in some people it is) then it doesn't hurt.
[1] http://bigthink.com/ideas/do-people-with-autism-experience-e...
There are lots of examples where the underlying workings are not understood, and yet useful work is done. Look at medicine for example. For thousands of years people knew that if you mix herb A and B and boil them for time X you get something that fights infection or helps with headache. The underlying biochemistry doesn't need to be known or understood to be able to follow the steps to get the desired outcome.
The same might hold true for the brain. If we can catalogue all the connections and information pathways (chemical, electrical), we may not need to be able to explain how every combination of subcomponents interact, but, we may know that a particular arrangement gives the outcome we're after.
PS: "the search space of ideas is vast, and one can't reasonably be expected to exhaust them all even with help."
That's true but in this example we're not searching for anything. Over millions of years one solution to intelligence, from an infinity of other possibilities has already evolved. Each of us already has a working version of what we want to replicate in our own skull. Now we need to tease out all of the cogs and springs and how they are arranged, arrange them in the same ways, and unless there truly is a metaphysical component we will have something indistinguishable from human intelligence/consciousness.
My gut tells me that we'll have more success building an exact 1:1 copy of a brain, but from digital components rather than wetware. The discovery of memristors[1], and other yet to be discovered building blocks, may lead to just these types of advances.
If consciousness still doesn't emerge in such a 1:1 copy then that would be spooky.
Do you mean physical or emotional pain? I imagine that physical pain is very well understood and can be explained in (maybe) all of its entirety as a purely material (as in atoms) phenomenon.
I personally don't see any reason why emotional pain can't be explained in the same way i.e. without requiring a metaphysical component.
A few things immediately come to mind though:
A sentence is just letters, but that doesn't mean that thorough examination of each letter provides you with the knowledge necessary to understand the sentence
I see what you're saying here, but consider this example:
Give someone a box of clock components and a clock from which to draw inspiration, and without any understanding of how a clock works or how the cogs and springs are manufactured etc, they will, given enough perseverance build a working clock.
This simple analogy illustrates that understanding exactly the functioning of each sub-component of a system is not necessary to be able to exploit its usefulness.
Here are some of my observations after using the app for about 45 mins.
- First impressions are very strong. A great design aesthetic, pleasing to the eye (although a bit overwhelming as others have pointed out)
- After about 5-10 mins frustration started to set in for the following reasons:
-- Hard to use on a 1280x1024 screen (overlapping toolbars)
-- Re-size handles don't seem to do anything most of the time
-- Positioning elements was difficult and often seemed to require some mind-reading to try to work out how you intended to have the tools work
-- Was difficult to conceptualise the underlying structure of the document (I noticed the breadcrumbs which help to explain element nesting)
Seems that you're targeting the tool at designers. The tool has loads of potential for this user base, but I think it would be difficult for a designer to pick up as it is. The reason for this is that it seems to have a lot of required knowledge of bootstrap's underlying structure to make use of it. The kinds of questions a designer will be asking:
- Whats a 'Well'?
- Can I put a 'Row' in a 'Layout' or does it only go in a 'Container'?
- What's the difference between a 'Container' and a 'Layout'
If you're familiar with the code then this stuff is going to be obvious.. otherwise it will lead to frustration.
I think the best way to tackle this type of issue is by having the tool abstract away the underlying layout. This could be done by splitting the workflow into 1) Layout, 2) Components. Users could be given a set of existing layouts (let's face it there aren't that many ways to lay out a document), and then they move onto Component mode that then shows the options for adding buttons, forms, tables etc.
Having about 10 pre-built layouts would be plenty and any modifications could be done by splitting/merging columns.
On the other hand you could be targeting the app at existing coders who need a way to quickly do some visual layout without opening a text editor (nobody really wants to write another layout from scratch again right?). For this use-case I think the tool can already be quite useful as the developer already has a mental model of the code and how a document/layout should be structured.
Overall great stuff, hope things go well.
Cheers, Eli
'...this screen looks like.. well you know a stock tableview'
And sometimes these people aren't in the same room/building/country
Simply dismissing the tool because you cant think of a use-case is a bit short sighted.
PS: also when designing for the iphone, elements have a surprisingly different feel when shown on a device.
GDrive works just like you describe: a simple, normal folder. That's it. I put stuff in, it got synced
Not sure how you could miss the distinction.
Just to clarify - I'm not passing judgement on 99D one way or the other. The people that participate there are free to do so if they think it is the best use of their time.
Only problem is that this has become so ingrained that I keep doing it on computers without this setup!
Multitasking is boned
...it works badly with multi monitors.
- You id="mask" element has a higher z-order than your formatting popup making it impossible to select styles in the demo.
- The blink from the original to the edited content is kind of jarring. Not sure where your servers are, but here from AUS the lag was very noticable.
- This is a peeve I have with all editors: When you select a H1,2,3 etc style the entire block is styled. This is the opposite of what users expect. Instead you should break that fragment out and run your execCommand on it. This way only the selected text receives the style and your users aren't left scratching their heads :)
- Consider adding an in-line editor for in-line images. Popping over a modal editor onmouseup is not intuitive for your average Joe.
We're finally getting some progress on constraint-based layout in the form of the flexible box model (great modern browser support), and CSS grid layout, which surprisingly enough is coming from MS.
I agree, the fact that it's almost 2013 and we're still wasting valuable brainpower on f*ing around with what should be trivial layouts is a bit of a shame.
[1] - http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/constraints/solvers/ui...
Of course minified code is also usable, however it makes things just that little bit more difficult for rip off artists.
I'm all for free and open software, but some aren't, and they're free to feel that way.
Instead what worked really well for me is to find a practical problem that I wanted to solve (maybe with the goal of making money from it). It turns out that just about any interesting project that you dream up for yourself will have aspects that are outside of your current knowledge/ability. Then as soon as you hit these parts start looking for reference materials, documentation or tutorials specifically related to this problem. Before you know it you're learning new stuff.
And the upshot of this approach is, that if you stick with it you may end up with a functional product at the end, which you can sell.
Also read other people's code. I find it really humbling to read well crafted code. It also motivates me to continue refining my own code.