Depends. We have never tested our society under the threat of a true "doomsday" epidemic. The closest we came was the Spanish Flu in the early 1900's, and even then, we had it better than the rest of the world. I think of Africa, and how borders during the recent ebola outbreak were closed under threat of deadly force. If guy was visibly puking blood with some hypothetical super-ebola that you knew, for a fact, has a 100% mortality and transmission rate, would the average person be egalitarian about it? I hope we never have to find out.

Personally, I thought Songs of Innocence was a return to form for U2, and thus more enjoyable for me than their 90's work, which was mostly, IMHO, dreck.

Sounds like zombies are being used in this model as a fun generic template for easily communicable diseases. The model they created could just as easily apply to any highly virulent doomsday outbreak.

The guy on controller two has to make sure he correctly presses the button every five seconds that loops a slice of a better, older song.

Why not become a CIA operative and get shot in the head in a Russian airport in a shocking but easily predictable double-cross?

I was a big fan of the Deckard-as-replicant conspiracy theory, but it was confirmed in an interview not too many years ago that that was not the case. Deckard is a human, as dull as that may be.

I still believe in Ridley Scott, even if I'm the only person on god's green earth that liked Prometheus. So Charlize Theron is not an ambi-turner; so what?

Err, you do know what this thread is about right? The FCC regulations that allow exactly this?

Bullshit. The expectation of available anonymity is one of the things that makes the internet work. The only way to ruin your life on the internet is not availing yourself of this.

One day they may welcome you to post under your real name, AC.

Well, if new players can lay fiber now, we might start to see one.

In the definition I proffered in the GP, all of the above scenario's present no difficulty. The brain is, itself, a biological machine anyhow.

Sorry, I had to correct your math. :P

Put another way: aren't humans just robots made of organic material. Are our brains not merely (incredibly elaborate and intricate) FSM's? My then should a self-thinking robot not have as much of a soul as we do?

The Greek word for soul in the N.T. is psyche, I believe. A soul assumes the ability to think, and in mainstream Christian theology is a function of our corporeal existance (for instance, "souls" don't go to heaven until judgement day, when the dead rise from their graves, body and all). It can be argued that, if a soul exists at all, then it must exist for all self-aware entities with physical manifestations.