I guess it depends on the invidual. Personally if I only had to do it once a week I would be fine with a 2 hour commute. Small price to pay for actually being able to own my own home.
Pigeons do the exact same though, I never slow down for them because I know they always fly out of the way just in time, even when it looks like you're about to roll over them.
Pigeons have been trained to discriminate between different styles of art [1], which suggests complex, adaptable, visual processing and skill retention. So they may not be a great example of a bird that can only exhibit simple behaviours.
Well, you should. Pigeons can have an illness or fights that make them loose some toes and because of this, they can walk slowly or not react as fast as the others. One day I saw one on the street while a truck was comming fast towards it. I heard pretty clear a "plop" sound, like the sound of a bag exploding. I just hear it because I didn't want to look at it. It's not the kind of image you want to remember.
I still remember seeing a bird die when I was a small child. The bird was in the street right next to an intersection, and a car made a right turn at the intersection and caught the bird unaware.
I thought the same until I almost got a pigeon trapped in my bicycle pedal! It got dragged along for several seconds before it managed to flap away. Not one of the bright ones, I guess.
You can completely disable Siri or whatever your device's equivalent is. The entire purpose of Alexa is to be listening all the time. They're not equivalent.
Can you prove that you've disabled it? That it's not listening all the time and logging interesting sounds?
I don't see a huge difference between a speaker that's designed to have an always-on mic listening for a code-word and we're just going to trust that it doesn't log anything unless it hears that codeword, and a phone that's designed to have the same, but has a software option to turn it off.
Either way, we're trusting that the device isn't abusing the fact that it has a mic.
No, I can't prove that it's disabled, but that doesn't matter much. There are people out there who probably could and would be more than happy to publish their results if they did.
More importantly, the difference is in intent. I don't intend to carry around a device that's always listening to me. Anyone with an Alexa device is intentionally inviting Amazon to listen to every word spoken in (part of) their home.
It is always listening. A coworker has Siri enabled and it regularly interrupts meetings because it thought some random noise was a wake word. It then proceeds to do whatever Siri does, which I assume involves sending whatever it hears after that point back to Apple.
I carry around and iPhone where I've done my best to completely disable Siri so I expect it not to be listening. That's antithetical to the use-case of Alexa and similar devices.
But the intent isn't there for Amazon to listen to everything you say - which is why hotword detection is done locally on Alexa and only then is an audio stream sent to their servers.
I have a coworker who has Siri enabled on his phone. It regularly wakes up and starts recording seemingly at random. Maybe "always listening" isn't the correct phrasing. "It might be listening at any time" might be better.
Of course, but the convenience of a smartphone does outweigh the potential surveillance. I getwork done on my phone, book cabs and flight tickets, get food delivered. I've tried living without my smartphone but it's not feasible.
As an example of Fermi estimation, it's pretty reasonable. 10 m/s is too much, given that most people wouldn't want to spend a lot of time accelerating at the rate of a Corvette on a drag strip. So the correct number is between 1 and 10.
First, we’re talking about a short burst of acceleration, not a multi-day burn on the way to Mars. 1g of lateral acceleration is not a big deal for a few seconds. Most people think it’s fun.
Unfortunately that was actually the least wrong thing about lmm’s comment. We’re not launching a rock, it will not come down as fast as it goes up. And I don’t know what the mixup is around a “receiving railgun”.
Perhaps, though not really. Commercial aircraft generally accelerate at takeoff at around 2-3m/s. For most people, that is quite enough, and that only gets you to 140kt. By comparison, doing 1g for 5 seconds (being generous) only gets you to 95kt. So you aren't really going to be able to get much flight out of that. More realistically, a gun would have to accelerate you to nearly the speed of sound or more. Mannned rocket ships have a (throttled) peak acceleration of 3G, so that sets a realistic upper bound and probably way over what might be considered reasonable. I've read that the Willis tower elevators accelerate downward at 8m/s and that is uncomfortable and just for a short time. It's likely the case that such acceleration would feel better if one were lying down. It's a curious question.
Ryanair make their own rules, other budget airlines have started to follow them now too. As a precaution I never fly without checking in online before reaching the airport.
Yeah, it's kind of concerning that an article about essentially black-hat behavior is earning so much praise in the comments. You have to remember that this kind of thing put a huge strain on Jagex when they had to (and still do) spend resources fighting against bots and gold sellers rather than development of the game.
And in fact the difficulty of dealing with this problem led to the update which restricted free trade and did a great deal of damage to the game and the people who played it.
Aren't the MMORPGs also at fault? By requiring a long, boring "grind", they are encouraging players to automate their gaming hours. After all, we play games to be entertained, not to repeat boring tasks.
That's a good reason why this activity (writing bots) is not seen in a negative light even if it may cause problems for the company running the game and/or other players and the game economy.
The repetitive tasks are the fun aspect for many people. If it isn't fun for you, you have two choices: Either quit the game and find something you actually like, or use bots and ruin the fun for other people that like the game.
Fantastic set of posts, its good to see this system being rescued for future generations! The National Museum of Computing for which these gentlemen volunteer is a great place, when I visited it the passion of the volunteers there was really evident, and seeing the likes of the Colossus and WITCH in working order and being demonstrated really is amazing.
