Money buys you the justice that you want.

They want to use footage from Steamboat Willie and do not want to be sued for breach of copyright. Although this fell out of copyright last year and entered public domain the Mouse is sufficiently litigious that they have a fear that they might be sued -- a reasonable fear IMHO. Thus the request for clarification which Disney would not give. Thus going to court is their only option.

That Disney refused to answer suggests to me that they know that they would lose any attempt to sue for breach of copyright but they are going to make it as hard & expensive as possible for anyone to use Steamboat Willie -- typical large corporation behaviour (that of a bully).

It is called a letter before action. The courts like it if you have tried to come to an agreement before going to court and, potentially, wasting their time on something that did not need to be litigated.

but give the guy a break. This is hardly the first new product demo to have failed. Maybe they should have had the foresight to run it over a private network and not the center's WiFi, but knowing what will happen in the real world is very hard to get right.

Yeh, the UK government will pay $50 billion to use that $15 billion (which was inflated to justify the $50 billion expenditure) technology.

The UK got a great deal. The US always pays more.

If China wants to invest In space and constructive things instead of using their military as a way of employing a huge part of their country, they should.

The US doesn't need constructive things. That's socialism which is bad. Instead, the US can hire a few million children to swing around guns and pick fights. China just teaches their kids how to mass produce drone swarms so they don't have to give their babies guns.

Hopefully for the US China will play nice and try to look scary so the US can hire more children and teach them to swing around guns.

I've been buying Huawei SSD and hard disk. I buy tape in tens of petabytes, disk in petabytes and SSD in hundreds of terabytes. Huawei is shipping cheap 64TB SSDs, but they need Huawei backplanes. So $120k gets you started with 100TB across 3 controllers and dual hundred gig switches. Growth is much cheaper. It looks like about $260k per petabyte. I'm paying about $100K per PB for hard disk but on 18TB drives. I expect $80K for 30TB drives when we switch. But that will put 3PB in a single chassis which at 20GB/s is somewhat impractical for evacuating or migrating.

IBM tape by comparison is closer to $18K per PB when adding a new drive per PB. But it really doesn't make sense until 10PB

I have never used an AI to write code. The code that I write I understand and am able to document.

Let's start with math.

I sampled all the questions marked hard.
I felt the questions were often obscurities for no valuable reason. It was as though they wanted to test reading comprehension rather than mathematics. As a dyslexic, I disapprove of this.
That said, there were no questions on the exam at any level that were more difficult than "sorta trivial". I think Khan Academy (I've watched every math video on the site as of 2021) covers every topic on the exam by 9th or 10th grade math.

Reading

Oh holy hell. I started by reading an essay... Nay... A diatribe on the importance of communicating clearly through simple wording. The author mastered the art of the 10 word run on sentence (feels as though it will never end) and perfected wording their sentences in the most technically proper but naturally uncomfortable forms. The author conveyed all their points in the first page or so and then used substantially more text to annoy the reader with absolutely unnecessary and uninteresting examples. The author should read Plato and Cicero on rhetoric as they have absolutely no knowledge of it themselves.

I can honestly say that I grew so bored of the writing that eventually started skipping a bit.

The questions were ugly. I'd like to believe I am skilled at these types of exams. But in the case of multiple choice questions, there were often intentionally ambiguous choices.... and I felt this was true for even the basic questions.

I've taken similar national exams in 5 different languages. (Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Spanish, Italian). I faired poorly on Swedish and Italian because I understand them only due to their similarities to other languages.

The other countries had much harder math exams but that's not unusual because at least Scandinavian countries don't teach math. They teach math exam tricks to a very advanced level.

Reading exams in other countries are much better. The texts are much less pretentious and favor vocabulary common people would actually employ. Not like the author I mentioned earlier who I guess hero worshipped Chaucer.

The one notable exception I've encountered is the Norwegian B2 language exam. As someone comfortable reading university research papers written in varying degrees of Norwegian complexity the wording employed on the Norwegian B2 reading exam, a test of whether you can communicate without you peers having to change how they communicate in order to facilitate you, I encountered entire essays where I couldn't even guess what they meant. I believe this was because rather the author of those essays didn't respect the spirit or intent of the exam, a test of a person's ability to communicate and function in real world environments, they made it an academic test which tested syntax and semantics.

In summary, I wouldn't be concerned by the reading scores. I feel strongly this is a reflection upon the authors of that topic of the exam. I would be concerned by the mathematics. The exam was trivial. I've felt strongly for some time that math should be entirely self paced. Classrooms destroy mathematics. If you miss one topic you may as well just stop or retake the entire year. Teachers should focus on grading whether students learned the topic in math or if they memorized the patterns.

P.S. As a point of interest, I have evaluated many adults who scored with top grades all through school but never learned math. When a person learns math, there is no memorization involved. If you understand it, you can figure it out. "Top achievers" memorize and regurgitate. When they feel as though the information no longer holds value, they forget it.

Back to naive (probably American too), every time people are asked to face realities that make them uncomfortable, they accuse people of ludicrous nonsense like siding with maga or some other nonsense like believing in Bill Gates conspiracies.

I'm working myself to build an app and/or standardize API to link health monitoring data acquired from phones and wearables into federal medical databases for civilized countries where people are lucky enough to have governments who actually care about the welfare of their people. It's an opt-in service allowing people to choose to provide invasive data to their doctors including even GPS tracking data. So, if you get poisoned it could be useful to know where you've been to identify the poison and prevent others.

I also work with nanotech. We are experimenting with electronics that can gather data when passing through you.

Do you feel it's difficult to believe that these technologies may eventually converge? Or that it may even reach the point where these sensors a use in water management for troubleshooting the network but are seen to have health benefits? Imagine if we could produce nanotech indicators and phone sensors that would allow tracking all public water through the network, people's bodies and waste management. Each indicator would transmit nothing but a serial number. This would be so insanely useful. Airbags for water. I'll chat with my boss about it. I'd bet he could get funding for that.

And for the toilet robots. No we don't. For the sake of brevity and avoiding macroeconomics, the toilet robot is an incredible ROI. Need proof? Look at Japanese toilet seats. Toilet paper is surely cheaper.

The robot flushing would also clean. This is long overdue. Transgenderism alone has forced the need for effective methods of maintaining unisex toilet stalls. Robots will facilitate this. You finish and exit the stall and a robot rolls in to flush and clean. Same for the sinks. Men in general require great assistance sticking things in holes. Paper towels land next to the bin, toilet paper on the floor, tinkles everywhere. The smell issue too.

There are human assisted AI droids coming to the bathrooms. I'd bet your soul on it.

The number of developers capable of clearly expressing their requirements is small.

I posit that the greatest gains are achieved by the most coherent communicators.

I have seen massive gains from using AI. I turn on the microphone and dictate what I want. I break tasks into small achievable tasks with clearly defined goals and strict testing requirements. I make the AI commit changes to git and monitor the CI/CD pipeline. I constantly review code and train the models (I generally use three in parallel and choose the best result) to produce the code and comments I prefer.

But it takes time and effort to learn the tools

Kids like my daughter are obsessed with learning. They avoid AI because they'd rather get a lower grade but learn the topics. Other kids want top grades but figure they can learn it later if they choose.

I never look at grades when evaluating CVs. I look at github

The shut down their plants as a result of the scare of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident, this is now seen as a mistake but at the time the big worry was escaping radiation.

please continue to reduce use of coal in spite of some other countries trying to burn more. Future generations will thank you.