Poll NZ - Should texting while piloting a plane be made illegal?

27 votes so far

Should texting while piloting a plane be made illegal?

Hah! How does reCAPTCHA know whether the answer is right or wrong then? If it is presenting people with un-OCR-able text, how does it know when people get it right? I suspect it knows some of it, but not all of it, and once enough people have answered the same word, going by statistics it assumes the most popular answer must be right. I'm only guessing, of course. But one thing we do know for sure is that reCAPTCHA allows you to get one character wrong and it will still accept it.

Oh, reCAPTCHA can be solved by bots now? That's great news! Now all those books and periodicals can be digitised without human help.

reCAPTCHA is too weak. Spammers are getting through at the rate of 17% - see http://www.allspammedup.com/2010/01/google-recaptcha-cracked/ In a way it's not surprising since it's based on dictionary words. An algorithm would often only need a partial match because the remainder can be determined from a word list. I know it's easier for humans because it's word-based, but then also easier to crack.

It depends on the type of plane. Apparently it's possible to safely fly a commercial airliner for quite some time while messing around on the internet and paying no attention to the plane (as happened on Northwest Flight 188 which overshot the airport it was supposed to land at by around 150 miles), so I presume a few seconds texting would also be safe. However, they'd better keep the cellphone turned off so it doesn't affect the avionics. :D Any thoughts of getting a reCAPTCHA here? It'd be easier for humans than the current one, and you'd be helping digitise books.

32 votes

How do you usually check the time?

13%Cellphone

19%Computer

9%Wall clock

59%Wrist-watch

0%I don't