I think it depends on the specific serious crime. Intuitively, it seems to me that serial raping is more likely than serial killing (normalizing the relative frequency of both types of events).
That may well be true, but my point was that a one-time rapist is far more likely than a serial-rapist, or a one-time murderer is far more likely than a serial-murderer, rather than that different crimes have any relation to each other. Petty crimes might have a higher rate of repeat offense, but do we really need a DNA database for those?
The problem with collection on an as-required basis is...
IMHO the best option is to allow police to take DNA samples of people they can show reasonable suspicion of.
I guess you have a different definition of "as needed" than I do. These sound the same to me, and any definition of "needed" that doesn't include "can show reasonable suspicion" is problematic, I think.
To be fair, though, even in the case you presented...
if the police ask for your DNA and you refuse you instantly become a suspect
... do you mean to tell me you weren't already a suspect when they asked before you refused? Do you expect that the police will just swab the whole metropolitan area whenever any crime is committed? If they have no reason to believe you were involved why would they swab you, and if they think you might have been involved how is that different from being a suspect?
Except that when that laws gets passed around in congress, "rape" will be transformed to "convicted sex offender", which currently means a whole lot of people who really don't belong in that category, unfortunately. Examples abound of minors doing perfectly normal minorly-things and ending up labelled as a sex offenders for life.
This.
Also, why do we need a record? That's only useful if you believe they'll be a repeat offender, and anecdotally it seems like most serious crimes are one-off incidents. I think DNA evidence can be useful in many situations, but why can't that be collected on an as-needed basis? That avoids this whole issue.
If it looks like a big-ass toy instead of a doll there's no conflict, and you will be able to attach to it emotionally as you can with dogs/cats/other animals.
I bet your girlfriend wouldn't like receiving a love letter that you had bought from "Love Letters Unlimited" and just inserted her name into, would she?
This is why the greeting card industry has been such a failure.
Humans anthropomorphize *everything*.
This.
My brother attributes a personality and identity to his iPod, I'm sure people will be able to empathize with a robot. The fact that the robot doesn't empathize back is irrelevant -- even in human-to-human interactions, my perception of your intent is far more important than your actual intent, which is recognized in the original comment:
Even if we know it's disingenuous, or that it's part of a person's job, there is still something in the back of our minds that responds to it as a genuine human connection.
But it's never a specific rejection letter - it's always a simple mass-mailing to everyone who applied and failed. Even if you went to an interview, they won't say why you're being rejected, just that you are.
So you have no reason to believe you were rejected based on anything you said or did, only that you didn't get the job. A job is a very nice thing to have -- one might argue necessary -- but I'm not going to self-censor before I see evidence that people are losing their livelihoods based on "remotely political" comments they've made, if then.
It isn't advisible to say anything at all under your real name any more, not when everything is archived and googleable. There is nothing you can say on any issue remotely political without the risk of upsetting someone, and that someone may be your now-or-future co-worker or boss.
If you have such frail conviction in your own beliefs and values... I believe what I believe regardless of what someone else thinks of it, and if my boss would fire me over it then I probably wouldn't be happy working there any ways. If it gets to the point that I can't find any job because of my opinions, then there are bigger problems in the world.
Truly random play has the same expected results against every single strategy.Think about it this way: no matter what the computer thinks you will do, if you play truly randomly, its odds of winning, losing or tying are all 1/3. If it did any better, it would be able to predict randomness, which is by definition impossible, and if it did any worse, then by inverting its strategy it would do better, and the same reasoning holds.
That makes sense, but it supposes that someone is playing randomly. If the premise is that humans can't play randomly, then you don't have "random vs strategy," you have pseudo-random vs pseudo-random, and it's possible/probable that the computer's choices are skewed. Which is kind of what you said in the second paragraph (and what I said above, if maybe not as elegantly as you).
Purely by chance these numbers should be the same.
That's probably the key -- although you might be close-to-random, the computer is using some kind of prediction algorithm which *isn't* random, so it's choices are going to be skewed based on previous experience.
So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of money? -- Ayn Rand
