Exactly. In the UK you'd never usually consider London as a day trip from Yorkshire but here in Alberta I've driven to Calgary from Edmonton and back in a day and it's exactly the same distance - it is a long day mind you.

Which is exactly what we do a lot, if not all, the time. We take existing ideas but rearrange them into something that can appear very new. A lot of people at the time that the iPhone launched complained that everything it did had been done before but just not quite in the same way and all in the same device - and yet that was something we typically regard as new, innovative and revolutionary. Arguably, any new musical composition is merely a rearrangement of notes that have all been played before. etc.

That's the problem with inspired vs. copied when it comes to AI and humans. I'd definitely agree that AI perhaps has more of a propensity to copy than a human and definitely it can produce infringing output, just like a human can. However, if nobody can recognize AI output as having been copied then it has done pretty much the same thing as we humans do: produced a new, unique arrangement 'inspired' by previous content. While AI clearly does not have the same thought process as a human, its inputs and (when it works) its outputs are functionally the same and if we start writing laws that differentiate on the process in between that's getting very dangerously close to legislating allowed thought patterns.

That's my big concern with this. The ultimate consequences of the types of legislation that people are now calling for are potentially very damaging if you have a large corporation willing to aggressively pursue law suits. Even limiting any new laws to just AI-generated content won't help since it is impossible to differentiate human and AI content reliably meaning humans could get sued for content they created.

The problem with this is that it makes us all thieves. All our work, regardless of field, is based and built on the work of those who came before us. As Newton himself said back in 17th century "if I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants". Three and a half centuries later we've got here by doing a lot of shoulder standing and never paying royalties of everything we go on to create to those who taught and inspired us.

I'd be very, very leery of expanding IP rights to allow this. I'm sure the artists calling for this are not planning to abuse it but we all know by know that standing in the wings are corporations who will that such rights and clobber us all with them.

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.