skyhook_mockups
Joined 14 years ago
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Comment · 14 years ago
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.
Comment · 14 years ago
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.
Comment · 14 years ago
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.
Comment · 14 years ago
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.
Comment · 14 years ago
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.
[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
Comment · 14 years ago
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.
Comment · 14 years ago
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.
Comment · 14 years ago
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.
Comment · 14 years ago
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)
Comment · 14 years ago
"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.
Comment · 14 years ago
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.
Comment · 14 years ago
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.
[1] http://bigthink.com/ideas/do-people-with-autism-experience-e...
Comment · 14 years ago
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.
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