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.
I have no problem with the military and police having access to weapons. They are (or should be) highly trained, Psych tested and they work within a regulated, highly structured, hierarchical organisation. All of this serves to keep the wanton violence (almost completely) in check.
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.
My perspective is different since I come from a country with a different culture. Here in Australia there is essentially zero gun ownership by private citizens. We also had a gun buyback (1996) and changes in legislation after the Port Arthur massacre[1]. Basically, I would feel really nervous just being in the same room as a gun.
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.
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
There was a study released on the effectiveness of the gun reform in australia after Port Arthur, with a pretty clear result. In the 18 years prior to the reforms, there were 13 mass murders, and in the 10 years from the reforms to the study's publication, zero mass murders. People will take what they want from that sort of data (one person basically told me that the study was unreliable because it didn't take into account lead poisoning), but hopefully it might be useful to some.
> 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.
> hey look ma I bought a M16 from Walmart today hur hur
It's a sad thing that your opinion will soon be discredited on the basis that you do not know the fact that automatic weapons are much more strictly controlled in the US, and that they are very rarely used by criminals.
I also live in a country with a strict gun control (to get a gun, apart from a plausible reason to own one, doing an expensive course on gun usage and safety, tons of paperwork, psychological tests and similar stuff, you also need to have one of the 16 county sheriffs to approve, and they usually don't). The result is 20 homicides using guns last year, in the country of 40 million. Recently I was having a lunch in a bar, during which two policemen entered the bar, also for a lunch. I have seen their guns at their belts, and it made me feel just as uneasy as when taking night bus home, with drunk people shouting insults at each other, even though I knew that they would only use guns to protect me.
Thanks for the correction. I'm clearly showing my ignorance when it comes to some of these issues.
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.
Please educate yourself about American gun availability before you give the wing nuts a reason to discredit your point. We do not sell automatic weapons without a whoooole lot of paperwork and money, we could not remove the weapons overnight, and your Walmart example is tasteless.
Automatic vs semi-automatics is brought up frequently. The simple fact is that for killing a bunch of people in an enclosed space a semi-automatic is the 'right' kind of weapon, full-auto would actually be a lot less efficient. You'd run through your ammo quicker and you'd put many rounds into the walls and the ceiling.
As I mentioned, I'm from Australia, so if I misrepresented anything about the US then I'm happy to be corrected.
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.
> We do not sell automatic weapons without a whoooole lot
> of paperwork and money
Availability of money has zero bearing on mental health and fitness to carry a weapon, so that criterion goes right out the window. What kind of paperwork is required? Does it entail thorough background checks etc.?
Erecting barriers isn't sufficient; we need the appropriate type of barrier.
The short answer is that it is very hard to acquire fully-automatic weapons in the US today. Aside from the fact that anything available for sale to civilians will be both prohibitively expensive (1-2 orders of magnitude more expensive than a comparable semi-automatic weapon) and most likely an antique (only weapons manufactured before 1986 are available to civilians), the acquisition process itself is pretty arduous (e.g. FBI background investigation, signoff from head of local law enforcement, etc.). From my understanding, these weapons are almost never used to commit crimes.
The real danger are handguns - something like 3/4s of gun deaths are from handguns.
From my own experience I can tell you that running your own mail server is a massive PITA. There's a good chance that even if you jump through all the required hoops to improve trust for your domain you will still have trouble delivering mail to certain addresses (Hotmail is notoriously hard to get white-listed for).
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.
If it's just deliverability that's an issue, you can use the regular Gmail SMTP server for outgoing mail, without Google Apps. You just have to add the address you're sending from as an alternate address in Gmail.
>Then there's spam... don't even get me started on spam filtering.
You could sign up for Google Apps, point your domain MX to Google and forward all your SPAM free mail to your private server from the Google Apps console.
No kidding, I've seen so many companies that had their mail systems in premises setup a 1 user Google Apps account ($50/year) to do what I just mentioned above. They got rid of most of their SPAM and saved tons $ on wasted bandwidth.
the article has way too much hyperbole to take any of it seriously.
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.
> 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.
Most people who can't or don't know how to upgrade away from IE7-10 won't be able to manage installing a plugin either. That aside, I don't consider a beta plugin to be an acceptable answer to this question in any context.
As my original post said this all applies to webapplications. If you're building a consumer facing brochure site then you neither want nor need most of these new web features.
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.
What proportion of web applications are funded by large companies? Obviously in terms of actual users, there's always going to be far more consumers than corporate users, but in terms of dollars-per-user? Any large company will have a large number of internal, normally web based, tools for all sorts of things - training, asset management, expenses, travel booking - and the amount of money that the company will pay for these tools will always be higher on a per-user basis than either adverts or consumer payments would bring in. Certainly sites with almost no broad corporate use - social networks and the like - will have fairly insignificant IE use, but corporate facing web applications will see broad IE use.
ChromeFrame is great, but it is probably against the usage policies of a lot of companies. Even if it isn't, most people are fairly wary of installing something on their company machine. You'd need the IT department on side to get broad deployment.
> Have you actually used or tried to deploy ChromeFrame?
I'll admit, I haven't. That feature list is mighty impressive and all kinds of commendable.
That said, it still fundamentally is requiring people to install something on their machine. This is a difficult thing to do with the uneducated and often outright forbidden in the corporate world, so the two key demographics here are also the two least likely to use ChromeFrame.
In reality for the vast majority of apps you'll never notice the limit. By far the most effective thing to use for (hardware accelerated) smooth animation are CSS transitions which run at normal speed like safari.
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)
Sorry, not sure if I'm understanding you correctly. Are you arguing that there is more to consciousness than just the atoms in our brains? If so what is your reason for thinking this?
I suspect the argument is more along the lines of, "The human brain does not obey the superposition principle." 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.
Anyway, saying "It's just atoms" is also misleading, because one also must content with the laws of physics which drive the atoms. Those laws are not yet thoroughly understood, and even with our significant current understanding we still have trouble programmatically predicting protein folding, to say nothing of the staggering complexity contained in the brain.
Thanks for your answer, its given me something to think about.
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.
I was primarily making an argument the other way around: I said that understanding the subcomponents (i.e. the letters) did not guarantee understanding of the whole (i.e. the sentence), while you're giving an example in which someone builds a whole, presumably by understanding and replicating the connections of major components, but does not understand the parts. More analogous to my point would be attempting to understand the workings of a clock by examining each gear.
Also, I don't know that your thought experiment holds water. I can certainly conceive of a universe in which a person never makes the logical leap from holding a clock and parts—or even having a thorough understanding of the workings of the subcomponents of a clock—to building their own. The pre-Columbian New World civilizations, for example, had all the resources to build wheeled vehicles, and certainly understood the principle behind them enough to build wheeled toys or use rolling logs to transport large objects, and the Inca Empire even had a sprawling complex of roads—but never in their long history did the notion of a wheeled cart occur to any of them. Which is to say: the search space of ideas is vast, and one can't reasonably be expected to exhaust them all even with help.
That's not really the point I was making. My point is that you don't have to understand the workings of a clock (or its subcomponents) to be able to build one given the subcomponents and an example from which to work. Simply mimicking exactly what you observe will produce the desired outcome.
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.
Kurzweil can identify the basic components that make up a working human brain, and concludes that if you put together a similar assemblage of components, what you'll get is going to be a working human brain.
The problem is that we're not sure we have all of the right components, we're not sure of how those components need to interact, we're not sure of what subtle patterns have arisen through evolution to head off design traps that we're not even aware of.
In short, yes we may be confident that we are described by physical processes, and intelligence is an emergent phenomena. But it is by no means guaranteed that when we put our components together that we'll get will be intelligent. Or if it is, then how similar to us it will be.
So far what I've said can be dismissed as abstract hypothesizing (of course so can the bulk of Kurzweil's work), so let me give a concrete example to worry you. Humans have an innate ability at language. If you have deaf twins who never encounter a language that they can understand, they will invent one complete with a consistent grammar. (This experiment has been conducted by accident.)
Other primates have no such innate ability at language. We've managed to teach chimps sign language, but they have been unable to master grammar.
There is a gene, FOXPRO2, that has 2 point mutations between us and chimps. Humans who lack either of those point mutations have extreme grammar problems. There is therefore clear evidence that putting together a primate brain is NOT SUFFICIENT to get language. Whatever it is that FOXPRO2 does differently between us and chimps is necessary for language.
The problem is that we don't know what FOXPRO2 is actually doing differently between us and chimps. We've recently shown that if you put our version of FOXPRO2 into mice, they behave differently. We can catalog the differences but we don't know why that happens.
Now suppose that we wire something artificial together that we think should be similar in capacity to a human brain. Given that we don't know what FOXPRO2 actually is doing to our brains, what are the chances that our artificial model manages to capture the necessary tweaks that FOXPRO2 makes in brain function for language function?
My bet is, "A lot lower than Kurzweil would have people believe."
You make a great argument, and I agree with you that it is very unlikely that a model which can only ever be an approximation of a human brain will ever exhibit intelligence.
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.
Making a 1:1 copy of the brain without understanding its mechanisms is pointless, because there's no way to bracket the problem. You don't know how low-level you have to go: if there's only a single crucial quantum interaction, you have to model that level as well, increasing the complexity many orders of magnitude (if you have to model quantums or atoms, the simulation wouldn't even fit on earth I'm afraid). Similarly for the higher levels: it's obvious that brain development depends crucially on a stimulating environment (and meaningful interaction with it), so are you going to simulate a complete environment and upbringing? Reminds me of the Sagan quote "if you want to make apple pie, you first have to invent the universe."
In a similar vein, we have succeeded in copying (digitizing) the full human genome. But, to actually do something with that requires an even greater tasks of understanding what all those genes in it actually mean (what the proteins they express do). For the brain we haven't done the former, let alone the latter. I believe there's more point in trying to understand the working of the brain or mind on a more abstract level.
I agree with you that an more abstract understanding would be more useful than a naive copy, however I think calling it "pointless" is a bit of an exaggeration. Imagine being able to make an indistinguishable 1:1 copy of your own brain at the exact moment at which you die, voilà immortality. Tad Williams wrote an interesting bit of fiction about exactly this called the Otherland series - well worth a read.
Not to mention that simply building such a copy would yield its own set of insights.
Well, here we have an interesting demonstration of a quirk in the human mind. I guess you could call it a misattribution of word memory.
Your description of "FOXPRO2" interested me enough that I searched wikipedia for it after reading your comment,
then found out FoxPro2 is a programming language and database management system, ha, a fitting misattribution for this crowd.
Then using google's implementation of a collective phrase memory(search suggestions) I determined you likely meant -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOXP2
I'm not the author of the comment you'replying to but I'm pretty sure that consciousness is more than atoms. Feeling pain can't be explained as an interaction of physical particles. You could describe the chemical processes in the brain accompanying pain to very high detail. But at no point you can't explain why does it hurt so much when the atoms in the brain are in a specific state.
Because physics doesn't even have the language to describe the feeling of pain. Similarly, physics doesn't have a language to describe how "green" looks, it can only describe the frequency of green etc.
Feeling pain can't be explained as an interaction of physical particles
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.
Both, it doesn't really matter, basically any state of consciousness. Physical processes in brain accompanying physical pain may be understood very well. But we don't understand the mechanism that translates the physical state of brain matter to the hurting feeling. Why does it hurt, when we arrange brain's atoms in a specific way?
Your explanation doesn't make sense. We know that there are people who
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.
Yes but the question is, why does it hurt when the brain is wired in a specific way. What makes some positions of brain's atoms painful? Physics doesn't even have a way to scientifically define what "feeling pain" is. Physics can only define physical processes accompanying feeling pain.
"why does it hurt when the brain is wired in a specific way?"
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.
We can describe the entirety of an operating system down to its individual ones and zeroes. Do you posit that some irreducible "Tuxness" state exists that computer scientists just refuse to acknowledge?
The unpleasant feeling of pain is a very real phenomenon, unlike tuxness. It can't be reduced to smaller parts. All that we can do is say "When we arrange brain's atoms like this, it hurts."
We could construct robots, that react to pain exactly like humans (screaming, sweating, ...) without feeling anything. Why aren't we like that?
“Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.” Max Planck
If you posit "why anything exists instead of nothing", then I will have to ask whether "why" even makes sense in this context.
From what we now know of quantum physics, "nothingness" itself might be either less likely than having anything or perhaps nothing but a fiction born of our mental heuristics.
Congratulations for shipping! It's a huge milestone to reach and I'm sure it is nerve wracking to press that submit button on a 'Show HN'
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.
Thanks Eli, we've actually been shipping for the past several months but it's good to get such a large new feature out the door none the less.
This is great feedback, we've definitely struggled with how to present building up a document in HTML to people who don't understand HTML. If you're purely a designer or a product manager you'll most likely to use the other aspects of Easel which allow you to position elements absolutely and style their CSS properties with the inspector on the right.
The bootstrap feature is aimed more specifically at developers and designers who are HTML and CSS savvy. We've found that there are many people out there who are interested in designing responsive application. While they can "design in the browser" with code they've found into inhibiting their creative process.
We've built this feature to allow those savvy designers to get back to what they do best, design and not code. It sounds like we're in the right direction and with the right mix of introduction, learning and clarification it will be alot easier to use.
Thanks again for taking the time to try things out and for giving us such honest feedback.
It's a lot harder to email paper? there aren't many good paper VCS? Paper is great for quick sketches and has its place. Digital is good for lots of other use cases. Maybe use what suits on a case by case basis?
I'd like to see a designer speak up about using stuff like this more than one time. I find I'd hard to believe that you would sit down, after already playing around with this once, and say "this time I'm going to add a chevron to each cell, put the button on the left side, and go test it in the hallway". If your app is a table with a stock navigation system do you really ever need to build a second version of the same thing?
Every project/team is different. Sometimes a designer wants to communicate with another designer, sometimes with a developer and sometimes with a client. Each of these stakeholders will react differently to:
'...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.
