No, equating the number of publications to productivity in research is flawed and often frustrating, as it prioritizes quantity over deeper impact, quality, and genuine contributions. Higgs published fewer than 10 papers and he has a Nobel prize.
For many years it actually did work like this in the US. You had to register the copyright and then renew it after 28 years within a certain window. You can even see at the scans of the old registration indexes - they're still relevant for determining public domain of many works.
The US is usual an oddball in international agreements and this is no exception. The modern "copyright by default" method is relatively recent in the US, in 1989, when the US acceded to the Berne convention of 1889 which was already in use by many other countries.
Every country has it own rules and dates of various laws coming into and out of force so the overall global picture is rather muddy for any random given work. Generally "death of last surviving author plus 70 years" is the rule for works made in living memory, and if it's not that it's "publication plus 95 years". The general upshot is that if anyone is still alive who was alive when the author was, it's in copyright still.
It’s baffling that on one hand we suspend in‑drive app interactions for safety, yet on the other, a product built to sidestep those safeguards and promote driver multitasking still attracts funding. I’m a little sorry to say it, but celebrating ‘move fast’ execution without deeper safety thinking is genuinely disturbing.
I guess I read it as the opposite. This would allow someone to use purely voice control to interact with maps, podcasts, etc since iphones have pretty limited voice controls built in. Plus obviously accessibility use cases.
The reason conversations can be held safely between the driver and with (some! people are different) other occupants in the same car, is that all occupants can asses what is happening and react to microcues from the driver in realtime. (Phone calls add many milliseconds in reaction time, plus the other person is not situationally aware.)
I do think an AI could help here though. This app isn't quite that. The AI would have to be very fast and responsive, notice with cameras and microphones when the driver needs a microbreak in the conversation, seamlessly continue when appropriate, perhaps be plugged in to the car radar and so on. Really be a polite and attentive passenger.
Cars are expensive. Roads, charging infrastructure, gas stations, traffic enforcement, and parking all cost monstrous amounts of money. Registration fees don't even cover the cost of road maintenance much less everything else.
