While it would be great if a judge could rule in Disney's/NBCU's favour, it will never get that far - a settlement will be reached long before that.

None of the AI mega-corps wants to establish a precedent that empowers the "little guy/gal" creators to sue based on it.

If this were the headline, perhaps we'd see fewer of them...

Failing that, a permanent disbarment from practicing law... and a mandatory year working retail, because they need to learn some humility, damn it!

Unfortunately, what I suspect will happen is firms will engage "sarcraficial interns" who'll be there only to be thrown under the bus to preserve these bastards.

Commercial satellite photos are of insufficient resolution for this sort of use.

The high-quality overheads on Google Maps and others are actually taken by camera-equipped light aircraft, and the only differences between that and using a drone are:

Altitude.
Size & quality of camera.
Where the pilot sits.

The obvious solution is for the county to be completely open about what they're doing, and send out something like:

Before taking these things out into the real world, they need to do some proper outdoor testing, perhaps by renting out one of the "towns" the military and police use for urban training. Testing needs to include "adversarial encounters," because that what's going to happen when they face real people.

And do it somewhere in the north-east, in winter.

It always amazes me that tech-bro's can call something - like autonomous vehicles - fully tested when it's only been run in So-Cal, Nevada and Arizona.

That giant touchscreen is attached to the car so, yeah, there's a difference.

If the driver in the case had spent five bucks on a vent-mounted phone clip, things would never have got to this point. However, he chose to behave like a bell-end, and so was rightly found guilty.

FWIW, I think touch-screen controls for things like A/C, wipers, demist and audio volume are the stupidest idea in cars since... actually, I can't think of anything stupider.

Oh, wait. This was.

Large companies have been cutting costs by ditching experienced and capable staff and replacing them with poorly-trained/gullible/out-sourced people who nevertheless have sufficient system privileges and lack of oversight to download and run random executables from the internet.

Until the C-suite types responsible for this sort of idiocy are fired, fined and prosecuted, nothing will change.

You've very much missed the point of my post.

Today, there is a greater volume of content available than yesterday. Tomorrow there will be a greater volume of content available than today. With the exception of the event highlighted in another reply to my post, this has not changed since the inception of either medium. This progression is unlikely to change absent some sort of multiple catastrophic data centre failure, or a misguided corporate strategy that removes content wholesale.

So, my point is that yesterday was neither unprecedented, nor a milestone. Likewise today. Tomorrow? Probably the same.

Oh, and when I was growing up, there were just three TV channels, they were in black & white, almost everything shown was "original", and at the end of an evening's broadcast - around 11pm - the national broadcaster would play the national anthem and remind you to switch off your TV.

We had dedicated weekly listings magazines and listings in daily newspapers to enable us to "find new content" to watch... or listen to, as they covered radio as well. We also had "friends," who would recommend things to us. So, not so much of a challenge.

Finally, I'm wondering if you're the sort of person who, when they hear that the rate of price inflation has fallen, expects prices to go down? Yes, COVID caused a slow-down of new film & TV content creation... but it didn't go into reverse.

Actually, for a while, NetFlix was a single-source for streamed movies from pretty much every studio, and for a single, reasonable subscription.

However, corporate greed always trumps the consumer, and so we've ended up with each producer siloing their own streamed content, and demanding their own subscription.

Really? An unprecedented milestone?

Every day since the invention of film & TV has seen more content exist than any previous day, so exactly how is this a "milestone," or, indeed "unprecedented" ?

Who wrote this drivel?

Irrespective of knife (FWIW, I use a Sabatier ceramic for onions - it's stupidly sharp), I find that when I wear glasses I get tears, but no tears when I'm wearing my contact lenses.

It could be argued that the contracts that require service but don't generate any income are not actually an "asset"...

On the other hand, it could be argued that contracts with on-going paid subscriptions are an asset, and lifetime subscriptions are not...

Either by accident or design, you are very much missing the point.

The previous post is saying that, because it is possible to have a trivially-serviceable battery in a submersible device, it is therefore possible to have the same in a phone that only needs to protect itself from water.

Off-the-shelf replaceable batteries were the default in phones - including smart-phones - for many years. It was only when battery life could comfortably outlast device warranties (up to three years in some countries) that manufacturers could take the step to both reduce costs and increase sales by making battery replacement a specialist chore.

Consumers didn't "vote" for this. As with most things, consumers didn't have a choice, vendors simply stopped offering the alternative that didn't make them as much money.

Actually, I can't recall any Android phone ever getting 5 years of OS upgrades . Security patches and updates, yes, at the high end of devices, but actual upgrades?

I suspect some lawyers will be cashing in over the distinction between "update" and "upgrade".

I also suspect that some vendors will automate a process to deploy a release of their current OS build every three months with just an increment to the minor version number.