Agreed but arguably some of the first home computers were too but they evolved to become indispensable. So perhaps not ChatGPT but the 'son' or 'grandson' of it might be just as useful if they can fix some of its limitations...like hallucinations.

People do not _need_ to do either. They want to do both. You may not want to change the clocks and that's fine but that's a personal preference and has literally nothing to do with the story. It is appallingly bad journalism to use a story you are writing as a vehicle to air your personal views. As for 'bad' the 'cost' in this case is almost certianly nothing: the algorithm that identifies and filters the noise from traffic will simply identify an filter the noise an hour later. Indeed, it is potentially a positive since it helps to confirm that the source of the noise is traffic.

If they were even vaguely interested in reducing their own carbon footprint they would not have 45,000 delegates attending. There are fewer than 200 countries in existence which means the average delegation size is insanely large.

That's why I said "usually" which is true - it's the exception that the largest party is excluded, not the rule and as the largest party they still won the election. Winning an election does not mean that you have to have more than 50% of the vote it just means you are the party with the largest representation in parliament. Many countries have party in government who got there will under 50% of the vote but that does not mean they did not win.

Yes, because although there were no atoms back then we know it was so bright because 13.8 billion years later we can still see the afterglow today imprinted on the universe!

They've been wrong since the end of the stone age when bronze technology made all the flint knappers redundant. It's just that we did not know to call them Luddites back then.

Right, so they won the election. The largest party after an election is usually considered the winner and gets to either directly form the government or lead a coalition in government. So, exactly as I said, Nazi's were democratically elected: they won the election and that's how they got into power.

Have they considered random chance? We know that today's arrangements of continents and ocean currents is just the result of random plate tectonics over the last 4.5 billion years so why would we expect that there is a reason other than random chance? The moon happens to be almost the exact same angular size as the sun which is why we get such spectacular solar eclipses but there are no astronomers wondering why the two are the same angular size - it is just random chance.

Unless there is evidence that the two hemispheres have always had the same albedo over the last few billion years i.e. over a period where the arrangement of continents and ocean currents have varied widely, then there is no reason to suspect anything but random chance.

Yes, in fact 13.8 billion years ago you would not believe how bright it was.

It's a bit sad to think that the internet has gone from something that was originally designed to be capable of functioning after a nuclear attack to something that can now be disabled by one stray bullet.

Yes but to be fair any system that allows for decryption of the data is insecure because, if you can encrypt the data then so can the bad guys even if that means they have to turn up at your house and hold a gun to your head to get the decryption key. Hence, if you want to reduce security to a simple binary choice we always chose the 'no security' option because absolute security is rather pointless.

No, even the colloquial english phrasing of average is synonymous with arithmetic mean. The median and mode are not the same as the average or mean of a distribution.

Not always. Germany went effectively bankrupt in the 1930's leading to hyperinflation which in turn lead to the democratic election of a far-right party National Socialist Party to address the problem since the mainstream parties were ineffective and the rest, as they say, is history. Things are not yet that extreme for the UK but there are definitely clear parallels: the country is spending more than it collects, the mainstream parties are entirely ineffective at dealing with the issues and there is a far-right reform party that is doing really well in the polls.

So national bankruptcies do not always play out like personal ones, since I've never heard of a personal bankruptcy triggering both a genocide and world war before.

Different brands sell different things to different people. Think of it like this. If you took a brand like "Toilet Duck" - a toilet cleaner - and tried to use it to sell Toilet Duck branded chocolate bars do you really think that you will sell many even if Toilet Duck was massively popular?

That's not true for universities in Canada and the UK until perhaps relatively recently and it's still not true for at least the Oxbridge colleges who elect a Master who is an academic. The Vice Chancellor or President is always (as far as I know) an academic. The central administration will include non-academics in specialized roles like finance, building management, fund raising etc. but ultimately they are all answerable to an academic at whatever level they are.

Generally it was more senior faculty who were good at administration (not all are!) who took these roles so they had experience of teaching and research in whatever discipline they came from which helped universities remain focussed on teaching and research. However, more recently there seem to be "career" administrators - faculty who move straight, or very quickly, into admin roles and then stay there moving from institute to institute. This means that the upper levels of administration now seem to have much less experience of the core mission of the university: teaching and research which makes them much more susceptible to getting sidetracked by heavily corporate governing boards but technically they are still academics an hold a tenured appointment in and academic department even if they may never be seen there!