The old question
on
RFID Hell
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· Score: 3, Insightful
It was good use; the political reasons behind it might not have been.
Now you're getting into the old discussion of whether technology can be good or evil, or whether it's always neutral.
On a personal note, I do think that technology is indeed neutral, only its uses can be good or bad. However, regardless of how many good uses there would be to determining someone's exact identity from DNA (crime solving, etc), Gattaca was an example of how this technology can be abused. Determining your genetic risks for certain diseases can also be good, if used to help prevent you from getting that disease, but when it's used for profiling, it's not. The movie used it for profiling.
So where's the problem with RFID tags and the such, and Gattaca-like DNA technology? Can you really trust that it'll be used properly? Or are we better off not risking our freedom and living without any benefits said technlogy may offer? That's a hard question, and I won't even bother offering my opinion on it.
Uh-huh. Why don't you tell me exactly when the technology to "determine exactly who someone is from a piece of DNA" was put to good use in the movie? The protagonist had to dodge that, because if they ever found out who he really was, he'd lose his freaking job for no reason other than his identity. He'd probably also go to jail for faking his identity for so long.
The technology in Gattaca prevented anyone not "genetically perfect" from living in normal society. It's the reason the main character had to fake his identity, and go through all the hoops to fool that technology. And his only "flaw" was a genetic high risk for heart disease, although he was perfectly healthy.
I completely agree kids don't grow up to be their parents. My problem is with saying they're not responsible at all for such extreme cases. Specifically, I wasn't attacking the statistics you provided, I was attacking the study itself. It's surprising how many published studies are just ill-conceived or the wrong conclusion is drawn from them. Remember the Johns Hopkins study a few years ago that claimed caffeine did not change the taste of the soda, and that their purpose was merely to maintain addiction? That study, which they dared to take public, was done with a sample of 25 people, some of which were smokers, with warm soda. Wth?
When you mentioned "twin studies", I was specifically worried about how they were using twins to determine parents influence versus peer influence.
One, difficult to find, is twins that are raised separately: compare the types of family they are raised in, compare the peer groups they grow up in. I can't point you to specific examples, sorry.
Twin studies are useful in determining how much of our behavior is genetic. You compare twins who live under different environments, and you find out how much they are alike, and attribute that to genetics. Comparing their differences isn't useful because there's just no way to tell where exactly that came from, other than "external influences". There are just two many variables, some of which depend on the method of parenting, others on the culture the child lived amongst. If you could just compare the child to their parents to determine how much influence the parents have, you wouldn't need twins at all.
Two, much easier to find, is immigrant children. Observe how they learn the language and habits of their peers much more than the language and habits of their parents.
Children are much better at acquiring language skills then adults. An immigrant child coming to the US will pick up English from their peers and speak fluently in months. Adults and adolescents will take longer, and may never shed the accent. Similarly, children whose parents speak their native language at home have greater difficulty in learning English.
The point is this: blaming the parents is an old game that delivers no results. Look elsewhere, and perhaps there is a way to resolve the problem.
Blaming anyone is an old game that delivers no results. If my blaming the parents doesn't cause them to change their ways, then the problem doesn't get solved. Sure, parents can't shield their children from everything, and there are problems in our society we need to solve, but for god's sakes...these kids picked up rifles and started shooting cars because they saw it in a video game. If this was a general society problem, this type of thing would happen everyday, but it doesn't. It's isolated, it's specific, and even though I'll agree it's a combination of many different variables that caused them to do it, I think it could have been avoided with some decent parenting.
One long twin study showed approximately 50% coming from genes, 45% from unknown sources but presumably peer influence, and 5% from parents.
So, tell me about this study. Specifically, how was this determined? By how alike the children are to the parents? If the parents are not doing any parenting (as the parents of these kids obviously weren't--the kids were obviously mentally disturbed, but weren't kept away from rifles), sure their influence is very low.
Maybe parents should take a more active role in the raising of their children. You know...teach them the difference between fantasy and reality, have other forms of family entertainment available, generally be around their children more. I think the parents would then be able to take on more of that non-gene share.
The first thing is to understand the way violence is propagated. Like all youth cultures, it goes from youth to youth, bypassing all adult control. You have to work at this level, thus.
Oh c'mon, you can't be serious. Why didn't I hang around with violent peers that caused me to do violent acts? Probably because they didn't want to hang around with me because I'm too boring, and I didn't want to hang around with them because they were too violent. So, my guess is that the violent ones got to that stage individually, and their violence tendencies were reinforced by those around them. Do you really think that any amount of peer pressure could convince a normal 14 or 16 year old to grab a gun and start shooting cars? I know that if I were approached at that age with such a proposition, I'd be running the other way too scared to even say "nah dude, that's not cool."
Overall violence now is indeed pretty low. What we have here is an increase in violent crimes among young people. People are trying to find out why there were no columbines back in the 50's. So you get all sorts of explanations like, "It's the violent movies and videogames" or "If I even thought about doing something bad, my dad would throw me off the second floor window...now I can't even spank my child before it's called 'abuse'". How about another explanation: No parenting. In today's world, both parents are working all day long, so who's raising the kids? Tv? Video games? Peers who are also being raised by tv and video games?
Of course I'm not seriously recommending that all women give up their jobs to go raise their kids, and we all go back to happy 50's mode. If it were possible for any one parent to stay at home for the first decade, that would be cool, but nowadays that's just not possible. So, what parents need to do is make sure that they make the most out of the time they can spend together with their kids. Instead of grabbing the beer and chips in preparation for watching tv in the living room while your kids play video games in their own room, how about watch something together, play a nice board game, go to the theater together. Encourage other activities like little league. Go watch the kid play whenever possible (just don't start fighting with the parents of the oppositing team).
Maybe it is true that parenting only accounts to 5% of the child's character, but hey...maybe that's the problem. Stay with the kids more, get a bigger piece of the pie.
That's exactly why it wouldn't work. Parents would then be exposed to lawsuits by being responsible for their kids's actions.
What about that wouldn't work? You're telling me that a 16 and a 14 year old manage to get ahold of SHOTGUNS without adult supervision and the parents are not accomplices to the crime? You're telling me that these kids somehow reached that age without learning the difference between right and wrong, between a frigging video game and reality, and the parents should be in the clear of any punishment?
I don't know why so many people seem to think that people are born already with a "conscience" or "morals"...those things are taught. My parents raised me, not my school teacher, definitely not TV or video games. They were around long enough for me to learn by their example not by the example of the animated character in the violent video game. They taught me the violent video game was a fun game, or at least they raised me well enough so that I could realize that on my own by the time I was playing them.
Why shouldn't those parents be exposed to lawsuits? Hell, they shouldn't be sued for money, they should go to jail for the crimes their children committed, because they're just as guilty.
I *really* shouldn't reply, but calling people childish because you don't understand their arguments is something you should refrain from doing. I'm not dismissing it because it doesn't meet "my requirements". It's hype because universities have been putting that type of information online long before OpenCourseWare, even you admit that. It's not unique. Ok, so they put it all in one server, and gave all pages the same format and look...that's not a new idea in any form...it takes a sysadmin for the server(s), new accounts for professors, and a template web page they can edit. Do you really think that if some small no-name university had announced before MIT they would put their normal course webpages "available for the public" in a central site they wouldn't get the shrug?
they're the first to do so in a standard format on a single server, with the announced goal of making all class materials available to the public at large.
That's part of the "hype" I was referring to. What does "all" class materials mean? You do know faculty are not requrired and will never be required to post anything to OpenCourseWare, right? It's in the faq. That by itself guarantees you'll never have a standard content availability in all the classes. And having everything in the same format "on a single server" really isn't useful to me. Sure, it's easier to get to class webpages, but I still don't have cool content in those pages.
And of course it will never allow the same level of access that tuition-paying students get.
I don't want the same level of access tuition-paying students get. In fact, I'm not very difficult to please...I want to be able to get to two things, and an optional third thing. I want lecture materials for the entire class that stand by themselves (ie, no referring to a textbook which I think is a bad practice anyway...students in a class can read the textbook, they don't need a repeat of it in the lectures), and I want problem sets with answers. Optionally, video lectures might be cool, but I can definitely live without it.
OpenCourseWare value
on
MIT Everyware
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· Score: 3, Interesting
OpenCourseWare is a lot of hype because it has the name "MIT" attached to it. I suggest anyone, especially the people currently posting about how great it is to get a system of education online, to click on the article description link and try browsing a few classes. Virtually every university has about the same content (basically just pdf slides of class lectures) in their class webpages, such as my power electronics class at the university of south carolina.
Now, there are a few courses in OpenCourseWare that have videos of lectures, more organized readings and problem sets...but they're very few. If every course was published in that format, then I'd be impressed...and I don't mean every course MIT teaches, just every course listed in the dang OpenCourseWare site...it's such a waste of time to go, "oooh...this looks like a nice class" only to see that there's nothing in there you can learn from (some of them don't even have pdf lectures, just the syllabus and homework assignements for a textbook you don't have).
This is definitely offtopic, but I run into a lot, and since you posted that information, I figure it's as appropriate as any other time to ask.
I see you have -enable-optimize=-O2. Just about every single program I've compiled has O2 as the default optimization level...any reason not to use O3? I changed some programs to use it, and it didn't cause any problems, so that just added to the confusion.
the geek and correct way to do it...yes. Although I'd argue 1/3 =.333... to be a statement that can also be proven in on of itself (and a lot easier to visualize than asking non-calculus people to take that sum).
That said...there probably aren't many non-calculus people in slashdot:)
Ummm, but.333 repeating +.333 repeating +.333 repeating does not equal 1
.333... +.333... +.333... =.999...
That's why.999... exactly equals 1. That was the argument. 1/3 * 3 in fraction equals 1, 1/3 * 3 in decimal form must also equal one.
There was a remainder when you divided 1/3 that got thrown out.
What in the name of Gauss are you talking about? Remainder thrown out? No remainders at all...decimals...0.333..., 3 repeats forever. If you kept doing the division, you keep getting 3. Trust me, pal 1/3 exactly equals.333...
It's incredible how much resistance there is by people whenever this is mentioned in a math class...it's a solid argument.
Ack...yeah, sorry about that. As another poster who replied to my message said, I got confused when looking at the date that the poster joined the forum
Now, as far as your driver troubles, are you using the November 2002 drivers?...
Actually, I am using the latest ones. The November 2002 ones don't work with XFree86 4.3. I still have issues though, but it makes me happy to know they're still working on it. I thought ATI had pretty much abandoned the whole Linux effort, when I noticed that they didn't even bother to include the firegl drivers on the download page for 8500 drivers
the link to rage 3d shows that ATI has recently called for Linux Catalyst driver beta testers.
Recently? That post was done in October last year according to the time stamp.
And ATI Linux drivers are *still* horrible. I'm yet to be able to properly play a game on my 8500. Neverwinter Nights client locks up at the title screen, Unreal Tournament has some really weird artifacts...hmm...I haven't tried any other games, but as we all know, the choices are not plentiful. Not to mention I can't use tv out...
It would be fun to be a buff geek though. "You talkin' to me?"
More like, "are you attempting to communicate with me by sound propagation through air?"
If other geeks are like me, that's a very unusual method of communication, much less frequent than the electric or optical signal binary transfer methods.
Shouldn't broadband providers be sending emails to their clients with a link in them?
I get enough junk mail as it is. I don't want to be reminded of people who are too stupid to patch their computer. Besides, it wouldn't work. Even though "the most clueless of windows users can click on a link and then click the 'Yes' button", remember that they DON'T. Windows update comes by default set up to check for updates periodically...then the screen pops up and asks you if you want to update. Unfortunately, the screen also gives you the option to turn off windows update, and that's what the clueless people choose, because they don't want to be "annoyed" by it.
Instead of bothering me with e-mails, Microsoft should remove the option to disable Windows Update from the "first use" screen. If you can't figure out how to go to system properties and disable/reschedule your windows update, you're not supposed to have it disabled. I think that would maintain quite a few computers with up-to-date patches.
The "data" is anonymous now. It's possible to tell who voted and where, but not which person you voted for (which is the meaningful data). The votes are secret to prevent abuse of the type that existed before they were secret (employers telling employees to vote for a certain candidate or lose their jobs, etc.)
I'm pretty sure the parent of your post meant something similar to this method: you go vote very much the way you do now (by presenting your id and signing a sheet of paper)...then you assign your vote to a number (that is not associated with your name in any record) and you make those numbers public, so that you can check against them. I think this system is also good because you can check certain numbers (for example 10,354 voters showed up at this voting location, so there should have been exactly 10,354 vote numbers assigned)
Realplayer has certainly tried to beat them in the realm of streaming content, but due to such little things as shit for quality and lack of content, they didn't do so well.
For the longest time "shit for quality" made me hate RealPlayer...but have you seen the newest ones? Awesome quality...heck, it was even good enough to be included in a doom9 codec comparison. So "lack of content" might be because people won't use might be because they remember the "shit for quality" days or because of the competition from media player, I don't know, personally I think media player's codec (wmv) isn't all that big myself, but I guess popularity is increasing.
Quicktime...while it has done fairly well, never really got quite big
Hold on a second...what media content sites do you browse? Almost every online clip is in quicktime...movie trailers, fan movies...you get your eventual real video clips now and then (most of them old ones from the crap quality days) and if you visit a microsoft site, you get some wmv, but that's still the least common.
Microsoft hasn't been offering much competition in the codec department (although it's been pushing the new windows media 9 a lot, to the point where T2 Extreme Edition comes with the entire movie encoded in that format). Now...using the player...it's compatible with divx, mpeg, wmv, and a whole bunch of other formats except for quicktime and real video, and it comes installed with your OS, so people don't bother looking at the other players to play the formats media player can handle, and I guess that's the "unfair competition".
Building a better calculator only builds better idiots.
That statement is so single-minded, it's almost like something I would say...except I'm single-minded in the other direction this time around, so I have plenty of stuff to argue.
Ever think about all the people not in school? How efficient is it for an engineer to whip out pen, paper, and an sliderule?
What about calculus? No calculators in classes like that piss me off. Don't get me wrong, I'm for a calculus class that only allows a scientific calculator, so you can't use your TI-89 to whip out complicated anti-derivatives for you, but requiring you to spend more time working on arithmatic using scratch paper than the calculus in your exam is ridiculous.
Building a better calculator helps those that have already learned their stuff. It doesn't mean that you should always use the best calculator in a learning environment, but there's nothing wrong with their existence.
You make good points. I wanted to use the Turing Test because I was attempting to argue his definition of "human" rather then "sentient".
As you pointed out, the Turing Test is rather limiting in measuring simply self-awareness. I don't think it will be used a serious test of self-awareness in a computer, since it can fail in two ways: not only because a computer might be self-aware and fail the test as you described, but also because it's believed it could pass the test without being self-aware. It would most likely be simpler to have it respond in a "human" way without understanding its responses than actually making a self-aware computer.
Slashdot Mirror
Now you're getting into the old discussion of whether technology can be good or evil, or whether it's always neutral.
On a personal note, I do think that technology is indeed neutral, only its uses can be good or bad. However, regardless of how many good uses there would be to determining someone's exact identity from DNA (crime solving, etc), Gattaca was an example of how this technology can be abused. Determining your genetic risks for certain diseases can also be good, if used to help prevent you from getting that disease, but when it's used for profiling, it's not. The movie used it for profiling.
So where's the problem with RFID tags and the such, and Gattaca-like DNA technology? Can you really trust that it'll be used properly? Or are we better off not risking our freedom and living without any benefits said technlogy may offer? That's a hard question, and I won't even bother offering my opinion on it.
Uh-huh. Why don't you tell me exactly when the technology to "determine exactly who someone is from a piece of DNA" was put to good use in the movie? The protagonist had to dodge that, because if they ever found out who he really was, he'd lose his freaking job for no reason other than his identity. He'd probably also go to jail for faking his identity for so long.
What's good about that?
When you mentioned "twin studies", I was specifically worried about how they were using twins to determine parents influence versus peer influence.
One, difficult to find, is twins that are raised separately: compare the types of family they are raised in, compare the peer groups they grow up in. I can't point you to specific examples, sorry.
Twin studies are useful in determining how much of our behavior is genetic. You compare twins who live under different environments, and you find out how much they are alike, and attribute that to genetics. Comparing their differences isn't useful because there's just no way to tell where exactly that came from, other than "external influences". There are just two many variables, some of which depend on the method of parenting, others on the culture the child lived amongst. If you could just compare the child to their parents to determine how much influence the parents have, you wouldn't need twins at all.
Two, much easier to find, is immigrant children. Observe how they learn the language and habits of their peers much more than the language and habits of their parents.
Children are much better at acquiring language skills then adults. An immigrant child coming to the US will pick up English from their peers and speak fluently in months. Adults and adolescents will take longer, and may never shed the accent. Similarly, children whose parents speak their native language at home have greater difficulty in learning English.
The point is this: blaming the parents is an old game that delivers no results. Look elsewhere, and perhaps there is a way to resolve the problem.
Blaming anyone is an old game that delivers no results. If my blaming the parents doesn't cause them to change their ways, then the problem doesn't get solved. Sure, parents can't shield their children from everything, and there are problems in our society we need to solve, but for god's sakes...these kids picked up rifles and started shooting cars because they saw it in a video game. If this was a general society problem, this type of thing would happen everyday, but it doesn't. It's isolated, it's specific, and even though I'll agree it's a combination of many different variables that caused them to do it, I think it could have been avoided with some decent parenting.
So, tell me about this study. Specifically, how was this determined? By how alike the children are to the parents? If the parents are not doing any parenting (as the parents of these kids obviously weren't--the kids were obviously mentally disturbed, but weren't kept away from rifles), sure their influence is very low.
Maybe parents should take a more active role in the raising of their children. You know...teach them the difference between fantasy and reality, have other forms of family entertainment available, generally be around their children more. I think the parents would then be able to take on more of that non-gene share.
The first thing is to understand the way violence is propagated. Like all youth cultures, it goes from youth to youth, bypassing all adult control. You have to work at this level, thus.
Oh c'mon, you can't be serious. Why didn't I hang around with violent peers that caused me to do violent acts? Probably because they didn't want to hang around with me because I'm too boring, and I didn't want to hang around with them because they were too violent. So, my guess is that the violent ones got to that stage individually, and their violence tendencies were reinforced by those around them. Do you really think that any amount of peer pressure could convince a normal 14 or 16 year old to grab a gun and start shooting cars? I know that if I were approached at that age with such a proposition, I'd be running the other way too scared to even say "nah dude, that's not cool."
Overall violence now is indeed pretty low. What we have here is an increase in violent crimes among young people. People are trying to find out why there were no columbines back in the 50's. So you get all sorts of explanations like, "It's the violent movies and videogames" or "If I even thought about doing something bad, my dad would throw me off the second floor window...now I can't even spank my child before it's called 'abuse'". How about another explanation: No parenting. In today's world, both parents are working all day long, so who's raising the kids? Tv? Video games? Peers who are also being raised by tv and video games?
Of course I'm not seriously recommending that all women give up their jobs to go raise their kids, and we all go back to happy 50's mode. If it were possible for any one parent to stay at home for the first decade, that would be cool, but nowadays that's just not possible. So, what parents need to do is make sure that they make the most out of the time they can spend together with their kids. Instead of grabbing the beer and chips in preparation for watching tv in the living room while your kids play video games in their own room, how about watch something together, play a nice board game, go to the theater together. Encourage other activities like little league. Go watch the kid play whenever possible (just don't start fighting with the parents of the oppositing team).
Maybe it is true that parenting only accounts to 5% of the child's character, but hey...maybe that's the problem. Stay with the kids more, get a bigger piece of the pie.
Outside awareness portal? So you still think the images you see there are real? pfft...
Ok, that's it! I'm going back to Windows.
What about that wouldn't work? You're telling me that a 16 and a 14 year old manage to get ahold of SHOTGUNS without adult supervision and the parents are not accomplices to the crime? You're telling me that these kids somehow reached that age without learning the difference between right and wrong, between a frigging video game and reality, and the parents should be in the clear of any punishment?
I don't know why so many people seem to think that people are born already with a "conscience" or "morals"...those things are taught. My parents raised me, not my school teacher, definitely not TV or video games. They were around long enough for me to learn by their example not by the example of the animated character in the violent video game. They taught me the violent video game was a fun game, or at least they raised me well enough so that I could realize that on my own by the time I was playing them.
Why shouldn't those parents be exposed to lawsuits? Hell, they shouldn't be sued for money, they should go to jail for the crimes their children committed, because they're just as guilty.
Oh wait...my name is "TrekkieGod"...yeah, I *should* be proud. And yet, I just don't feel it.
I *really* shouldn't reply, but calling people childish because you don't understand their arguments is something you should refrain from doing. I'm not dismissing it because it doesn't meet "my requirements". It's hype because universities have been putting that type of information online long before OpenCourseWare, even you admit that. It's not unique. Ok, so they put it all in one server, and gave all pages the same format and look...that's not a new idea in any form...it takes a sysadmin for the server(s), new accounts for professors, and a template web page they can edit. Do you really think that if some small no-name university had announced before MIT they would put their normal course webpages "available for the public" in a central site they wouldn't get the shrug?
That's part of the "hype" I was referring to. What does "all" class materials mean? You do know faculty are not requrired and will never be required to post anything to OpenCourseWare, right? It's in the faq. That by itself guarantees you'll never have a standard content availability in all the classes. And having everything in the same format "on a single server" really isn't useful to me. Sure, it's easier to get to class webpages, but I still don't have cool content in those pages.
And of course it will never allow the same level of access that tuition-paying students get.
I don't want the same level of access tuition-paying students get. In fact, I'm not very difficult to please...I want to be able to get to two things, and an optional third thing. I want lecture materials for the entire class that stand by themselves (ie, no referring to a textbook which I think is a bad practice anyway...students in a class can read the textbook, they don't need a repeat of it in the lectures), and I want problem sets with answers. Optionally, video lectures might be cool, but I can definitely live without it.
Now, there are a few courses in OpenCourseWare that have videos of lectures, more organized readings and problem sets...but they're very few. If every course was published in that format, then I'd be impressed...and I don't mean every course MIT teaches, just every course listed in the dang OpenCourseWare site...it's such a waste of time to go, "oooh...this looks like a nice class" only to see that there's nothing in there you can learn from (some of them don't even have pdf lectures, just the syllabus and homework assignements for a textbook you don't have).
I see you have -enable-optimize=-O2. Just about every single program I've compiled has O2 as the default optimization level...any reason not to use O3? I changed some programs to use it, and it didn't cause any problems, so that just added to the confusion.
That said...there probably aren't many non-calculus people in slashdot :)
Ummm, but .333 repeating + .333 repeating + .333 repeating does not equal 1
.333... + .333... + .333... = .999...
That's why .999... exactly equals 1. That was the argument. 1/3 * 3 in fraction equals 1, 1/3 * 3 in decimal form must also equal one.
There was a remainder when you divided 1/3 that got thrown out.
What in the name of Gauss are you talking about? Remainder thrown out? No remainders at all...decimals...0.333..., 3 repeats forever. If you kept doing the division, you keep getting 3. Trust me, pal 1/3 exactly equals .333...
It's incredible how much resistance there is by people whenever this is mentioned in a math class...it's a solid argument.
.999... is exactly equal to 1. To the non-believers out there, consider that 1/3 = .333..., and that 1/3 + 1/3 + 1/3 = 1.
Ack...yeah, sorry about that. As another poster who replied to my message said, I got confused when looking at the date that the poster joined the forum
Now, as far as your driver troubles, are you using the November 2002 drivers?...
Actually, I am using the latest ones. The November 2002 ones don't work with XFree86 4.3. I still have issues though, but it makes me happy to know they're still working on it. I thought ATI had pretty much abandoned the whole Linux effort, when I noticed that they didn't even bother to include the firegl drivers on the download page for 8500 drivers
Recently? That post was done in October last year according to the time stamp.
And ATI Linux drivers are *still* horrible. I'm yet to be able to properly play a game on my 8500. Neverwinter Nights client locks up at the title screen, Unreal Tournament has some really weird artifacts...hmm...I haven't tried any other games, but as we all know, the choices are not plentiful. Not to mention I can't use tv out...
More like, "are you attempting to communicate with me by sound propagation through air?"
If other geeks are like me, that's a very unusual method of communication, much less frequent than the electric or optical signal binary transfer methods.
I get enough junk mail as it is. I don't want to be reminded of people who are too stupid to patch their computer. Besides, it wouldn't work. Even though "the most clueless of windows users can click on a link and then click the 'Yes' button", remember that they DON'T. Windows update comes by default set up to check for updates periodically...then the screen pops up and asks you if you want to update. Unfortunately, the screen also gives you the option to turn off windows update, and that's what the clueless people choose, because they don't want to be "annoyed" by it.
Instead of bothering me with e-mails, Microsoft should remove the option to disable Windows Update from the "first use" screen. If you can't figure out how to go to system properties and disable/reschedule your windows update, you're not supposed to have it disabled. I think that would maintain quite a few computers with up-to-date patches.
I'm pretty sure the parent of your post meant something similar to this method: you go vote very much the way you do now (by presenting your id and signing a sheet of paper)...then you assign your vote to a number (that is not associated with your name in any record) and you make those numbers public, so that you can check against them. I think this system is also good because you can check certain numbers (for example 10,354 voters showed up at this voting location, so there should have been exactly 10,354 vote numbers assigned)
Realplayer has certainly tried to beat them in the realm of streaming content, but due to such little things as shit for quality and lack of content, they didn't do so well.
For the longest time "shit for quality" made me hate RealPlayer...but have you seen the newest ones? Awesome quality...heck, it was even good enough to be included in a doom9 codec comparison. So "lack of content" might be because people won't use might be because they remember the "shit for quality" days or because of the competition from media player, I don't know, personally I think media player's codec (wmv) isn't all that big myself, but I guess popularity is increasing.
Quicktime...while it has done fairly well, never really got quite big
Hold on a second...what media content sites do you browse? Almost every online clip is in quicktime...movie trailers, fan movies...you get your eventual real video clips now and then (most of them old ones from the crap quality days) and if you visit a microsoft site, you get some wmv, but that's still the least common.
Microsoft hasn't been offering much competition in the codec department (although it's been pushing the new windows media 9 a lot, to the point where T2 Extreme Edition comes with the entire movie encoded in that format). Now...using the player...it's compatible with divx, mpeg, wmv, and a whole bunch of other formats except for quicktime and real video, and it comes installed with your OS, so people don't bother looking at the other players to play the formats media player can handle, and I guess that's the "unfair competition".
That statement is so single-minded, it's almost like something I would say...except I'm single-minded in the other direction this time around, so I have plenty of stuff to argue.
Ever think about all the people not in school? How efficient is it for an engineer to whip out pen, paper, and an sliderule?
What about calculus? No calculators in classes like that piss me off. Don't get me wrong, I'm for a calculus class that only allows a scientific calculator, so you can't use your TI-89 to whip out complicated anti-derivatives for you, but requiring you to spend more time working on arithmatic using scratch paper than the calculus in your exam is ridiculous.
Building a better calculator helps those that have already learned their stuff. It doesn't mean that you should always use the best calculator in a learning environment, but there's nothing wrong with their existence.
As you pointed out, the Turing Test is rather limiting in measuring simply self-awareness. I don't think it will be used a serious test of self-awareness in a computer, since it can fail in two ways: not only because a computer might be self-aware and fail the test as you described, but also because it's believed it could pass the test without being self-aware. It would most likely be simpler to have it respond in a "human" way without understanding its responses than actually making a self-aware computer.
I didn't preview my post, as always...having a machine think isn't the Turing test, just conversing with one without knowing the difference.