Adjusted for you. Zimbabwe remained perfectly productive and stable for more than a decade after Mugabe took power. It wasn't till he became paranoid that the problems started.

Well, it may all depend on which particular philosophy you subscribe to, but I offer this definition, based on the assumptions that we are talking about human beings as individualistic, social creatures (i.e. creatures that live in and are dependent on their communities, but also have individual senses of identity, desires, and motivations).

Right and wrong are heuristic models we have constructed as societies to help outline sets of actions that are desirable within the society vs actions that are undesirable within the society. Actions which are usually defined as right are generally ones that have a benefit to the community, or potentially the individual, whereas actions defined as wrong are generally ones that are determined to be detrimental to the community. As a society's understanding or assumptions about what are beneficial and detrimental to the society evolve, certain actions may fall into or out of either of those categories, whereas other actions may always be determined to be detrimental under any circumstances to any society (e.g. unregulated murder within a community is universally considered bad across pretty much all cultures, but government sanctioned capital punishment may be debatable depending on the culture, and killing soldiers on a battlefield in a conflict between two different societies is generally accepted as just the nature of war).

A bit rough and under-explained, but it's a start I think. One could argue whether any of these ideas would apply to artificial intelligences because the same assumptions I outlined earlier may not apply (would an AI have an individualistic sense of identity? Would it have "desires" that might motivate it to act against the best interests of the rest of the society?)

Or perhaps we're getting smarter and smarter, and are more able to recognize different types of more subtle intelligence. Then again, maybe when you were little you just weren't involved in these kinds of conversations?

So your point is that science doesn't explain what it doesn't claim to explain, but that somehow this means that religion automatically does explain it? Citation needed.

Wrong. The very bedrock of science is that in order for claims to be verifiable, they must be observable and repeatable under controlled conditions so as to eliminate any need for faith.

Science makes no claims on this statement other than that beyond very poorly defined terms (define which god you mean here for a start, and what properties it embodies), that it does not have any testable properties that would allow us to verify or falsify the claim. Beyond that, you have the choice of either believing the statement based on faith alone, choosing not to believe the statement (as in, you neither believe the statement is true or false) due to lack of evidence, or choose to actively disbelieve the statement (as in, you believe the statement is false) presumably based on lack of evidence again. The scientific method in similar circumstances would generally take the second position unless new evidence arises that can be tested.

This is not faith. If one requires that a phenomenon be repeatable so that it can be observed under controlled conditions before accepting that it could exist or occur, is basically the opposite of faith. This is based on observations thus far that any occurrence in the natural world can be replicated under the right conditions. So of course, you can say that there are phenomenon that, by their very nature, only occur once in the entire universe, and then never repeat. Of course, this is nice speculation, and the claim by definition cannot be tested by science, but then again, if these phenomenon can only occur once without repetition, then they no longer have any bearing on our universe and thus exist outside of any practical application of intellectual persuit. Science is only interested in finding out about things that will have some application to our existence, and events that will never occur again and cannot be proven to ever have occurred before (this condition excludes the big bang) fall outside this category. It helps that so far we have not encountered anything (to the best of our knowledge) that would fall into this category, but I'm sure you'd dispute that point.

Again, this is not faith. The application of the scientific method as a means to determining the fundamental nature of any known aspect of our natural universe has thus far, through countless observations, been demonstrated to be the single best method. This is after science got to questions that for centuries, philosophers, preachers, and mystics had claimed to have the answers to, but have long since been shown to be just flat out wrong about. So this belief is based on countless piles and piles of evidence, built on piles and piles of more evidence. The very fact that you are typing your post at all, and that I am able to see it are yet more testaments to the effectiveness of the scientific method.

No, occam's razor would exclude you going that further step. Attempting to shoe-horn a god into that claim about the existence of the forces merely begs a lot of questions that you then can't answer; see my previous statement about precisely defining god, which god you're talking about, is this Old Testament God, New Testament God, Southern Baptist, or Anglican interpretation, Jewish, Muslim, or perhaps one of the Hindu incarnations...Then I might ask how you determine precisely which of these gods is the valid one to be talking about...And then we get to the even more unanswerable questions of where you claim this god came from, to which I'm guessing you'll either say "first uncaused cause" or "self created" or some other claim to which I would merely ask why the same couldn't be applied to the forces themselves and leaving the god claim out of it to begin with?

First you are assigning the wrong purpose to science, and then you are asking the wrong question. Or rather, you are asking "why", but you are asking the wrong type of "why". You're looking for a why that implies intention, whereby you are ascribing a conscious effort to the existence of things with some sort of underlying purpose. But the more practical type of "why" to ask is more of a "how" and gets at how we can harness the underlying forces at work in this universe to the betterment of mankind.

Now bear in mind, that in spite of all the above, I'm not actually claiming there is no god (for any given definition of god). I'm merely saying that any of those questions are irrelevant to science, and that your attempts to conflate the two, or render science irrelevant for not making such claims is disingenuous at best. Anyway, enjoy your internet and electricity, the scientific method will not condemn you to candle-light and stone-carvings for not believing in it.

What I like most about Neil DeGrasse Tyson is how he's so deeply passionate about science, the scientific process, and the very philosophy of inquiry into the nature of the universe. He is able to evangelize science, and bring that often overlooked but much needed emotion to the conversation about what could otherwise be very dry and boring subjects.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ai-VvboPnA

Now if you can watch this and not be moved in some way, then I'm sorry, but it is my humble opinion that you are broken. This passion is a quality that almost every good preacher, salesman, or spokesman knows and yet so many science teachers can't seem to figure out: You need to engage your audience passionately, and make them feel the importance of what you're saying, not simply explain it to them.

Innovation is actually about as overrated as execution is underrated

Everybody lost

Sorry, but as you say I must almost completely disagree with your sentiment on scripted events in games. Scripted events are not good example of AI because there is no decision making, which makes them predictable and exploitable. So the only way to scale difficulty in a scripted scenario is to just pump up the AI's accuracy, damage, and health, which are not very interesting. Scripted events work fine for fairly linear narratives and setting up big cinematic set-pieces, but they don't make for interesting gameplay (mind you I did not say they don't make for "fun" gameplay).

The events you describe in AvP are not necessarily examples of scripted scenarios, but sound more like a scripted set of responses to stimuli the player provides (would the AI react differently if you didn't rip off a soldier's head?). The trick for interesting yet realistic decision making is to allow the AI a range of responses that it can make, and then every time you present the same scenario to the computer you may get a different response. So when the AI is actually making decisions, rather than just following a pre-scripted path, this allows the player to make actual decisions in response, rather than just following their own memorized trial-and-error derived path to success.

The key to a good scaling AI doesn't have to be that tricky, it can just be a matter of what range of choices you allow any given AI to make and what sorts of "mistakes" you throw in that pool of choices.

When I face "easy" opponents in an FPS, I want them to use simple tactics (not just be unable to hit the broadside of a barn) like charging forwards blindly, or getting scared easily and retreating or even panicking, and being easily suppressed by heavy fire. When I face more advanced opponents, I want the range of their choices to move up the tactical scale to include flanking maneuvers, suppression fire, use of cover, and tactical retreats. A good mistake for an advanced AI would be to assume you're in the wrong position if you duck out of view and to attack that wrong position vigorously (as opposed to the omniscience a lot of AI's seem to have). They don't have to be any more accurate or need any more bullets to kill than an easy bot, but at least they could present more of a real challenge without artificially increasing their stats. Granted this is harder to do and would require actual programming rather than just increasing a few numbers, but that's the price for good AI in your game.

If you have ever gone to see a doctor who went to public schools growing up, then you have benefited from school taxes. If you live in a neighborhood with other people who have jobs rather than in a street full of vacants full of squaters and crack-houses, then you have benefited from school taxes. If you happen to live in one of those neighborhoods anyway, and have felt the desire to call the police for whatever reason, then you have benefited from taxes.

Basically, if you interact with anyone else in society, and depend on those interactions for any reason, then you benefit from public education, whether you went to public school yourself or not. The benefits of living in an educated society where all members therein are capable of operating on a certain intellectual level are innumerable, and they are what make the cumulative difference between standard of living today and that of the Dark Ages. You can only conceive of the direct benefits to yourself because small minded people think small.

I see the newfound prominence of loot systems as being a standard progression of the gaming culture as it moves beyond the somewhat antiquated and abstract point-system. Very few games outside puzzle games (especially narrative games) can get away with using abstract points as a compelling measure of performance for players anymore. Tying those rewards to in-game mechanics seems to be a much more fluid and logical approach. It is much more common and intuitive for players to discuss their progress in a game in terms of the accomplishments they've achieved and subsequent loot they've acquired than to simply compare scores.