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Showing posts from May 8, 2009

Door A or Door B?

O ne of the most powerful plot devices we can use is a story is the moral dilemma . Suppose that you are standing in front of your mother with a gun in your hand. She had contracted a disease that will soon reach a point that it will spread to the rest of the world, killing millions, but if she dies before it begins to spread, the disease will die and no one else will die. Do you pull the trigger or not? Suppose you sit at your computer with your finger poised over the enter key. You have in your possession a computer program can actively seek out the primary spam senders and terminate their connection to the Internet. With one tap of your finger, you can eliminate all spam from user’s inboxes, but in doing so you would remove the protection on large amounts of data that companies and individuals intend to keep protected. Do you press enter or delete? The moral dilemma typically consists of a wrong action that produces a right result as compared to a right action that produces a wrong...