Input and Output Randomness

The fundamental difference between randomness that support strategy and randomness that under cuts strategy, input randomness allows the player to build the strategy output randomness undercuts it and limits your ability to plan ahead. For example let's look at Pandemic this is a great example of input randomness flicking the cards is certainly random, create a situation that the players need to react to that reaction is completely deterministic. If for example you have to roll dies if you re...

 Picard Defends Data as Life

Commander Riker has dramatically demonstrated to this court that Lieutenant Commander Data is a machine. Do we deny that? No, because it is not relevant: we, too, are machines, just machines of a different type. Commander Riker has also reminded us that Lieutenant Commander Data was created by a man; do we deny that? No. Again, it is not relevant. Children are created from the 'building blocks' of their parents' DNA. Are they property? [...] Your honor, the courtroom is a crucible; in it, w...

 People Freed by DNA Evidence

...there is a distressingly long list of people who have been wrongly convicted on eye-witness testimony and subsequently freed - sometimes after many years - because of new evidence from DNA. In Texas alone, thirty-five condemned people have been exonerated since DNA evidence became admissible in court. And that's just the ones who are still alive. Given the gusto with which the State of Texas enforces the death penalty (during his six years as Governor, George W. Bush signed a death warrant...

 Judge Me on My Merits, or lack of them.

Judge me for my own merits, or lack of them, but do not look upon me as a mere appendage to this great general or that renowned scholar, this star that shines at the court of France or that famed author. I am in my own right a whole person, responsible to myself alone for all that I am, all that I say, all that I do. It may be that there are metaphysicians and philosophers whose leaming is greater than mine, although I have not met them. Yet, they are but frail humans, too, and have their fau...