It's not just the internal state but the prediction that makes it intelligent.
Your brain is taking in a lot of information at the edges of your awareness, light, sounds, touch, etc. are all getting absorbed and transmitted to your brain. As that information is transmitted along your neurons it's getting summarized, then merged with other summarized information and summarized again. The brain is getting summaries of summaries, and developing a unified categorizing of the global state across all it's inputs.
Then the brain takes that summary and makes a prediction about the future state. The summarization is energy-efficient. By categorizing all that data into a global state you make decision making possible. "When my boss seems stressed all week, then calls a bunch of people one-by-one into his office on Friday afternoon, I know lay-offs are coming. I better polish up my resume." From "stress/anxiety/unease" in the environment to "danger is coming I need to fight/flight".
Your brain is taking that summary/categorization and figuring out what it needs to do next. If "X" happens then I should do "Y" to "stay-safe/get-food/find-a-mate". The brain is very good at capturing and summarizing data, and making a prediction because that process is much more efficient than doing otherwise. Instead of foraging everywhere for food and hoping I just bump into something that will provide sustenance, I know if X, Y, and Z happen then food will be "here", and I can get lots of it.
You can apply this same model to all actions the brain directs. It also helps make sense of why maladaptive behaviors develop. Sometimes the summary is incorrect, or was formed based on past information that no longer applies, and it may need to be unlearned.
Reminder that the capital of Idaho, Boise, is (apochraphally) named for the trees (les bois) that surround the Boise river. French made it quite a ways west, and definitely made it as far as Idaho.
The ffmpeg page for AV1[1] seems to recommend the SVT-AV1 encoder. Using the SVT-AV1 encoder and -crf 17 I was able to get an 8x encoding speed (about 250 FPS) with a very basic set of options similar to this:
In the United States carts are free. You collect a cart at the entrance to the store, and return the cart to a cart corral in the parking lot next to your car. Then a worker from the store periodically goes out to the corral to collect the carts and return them to the store entrance.
I don't think it's a coincidence at all. The closer a language and it's speakers are to English speakers the more likely those languages are to cross-pollinate, by sharing vocabulary, grammar, and culture. It makes sense that the closer someone is to you both culturally and geographically that the easier it is to speak their language, and understand their meaning.
No, because the postal service doesn't have access to read the contents of letters and parcels in transit. Not only do they not have access, but it is illegal for them to access the contents without a warrant.
The OpenType [1] font format does allow for stylistic alternates [2], which is basically what you're suggesting, in that different forms of characters are included and can be selected based on rules (like ligatures) or I believe selected at random. When used with a handwriting font it does more closely resemble natural handwriting to the casual observer.
> The original pitch for the RFIDs was that they'd just be able to scan your whole cart.
I'm sure the limiting factor at the moment is the incremental cost to the product. If an RFID tag costs 25¢ would you be willing to spend $1 instead of 50¢ for a can of corn, just for the privilege of not interacting with anyone? You might, but the average customer won't.
RFID is primarily used in application where the tag can be reused. I haven't seen many disposable RFID tags.