As David Hume would have it, either our actions are determined, in which case we are not responsible for them, or they are the result of random events, in which case we are not responsible for them.

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He's the judge in a plagiarism case against Random House, publishers of Da Vinci.

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The case for the random walk argument is that trends can appear in patterns that are actually random.

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But some recipients do become aware that a group of random foreigners, in Tursunova's case from Canada, the U.S. and Israel, has formed online to help them -- and to follow their progress through email updates.

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Lawyers who rolled dice that showed a higher requested sentence tended to hand out longer sentences themselves, even with identical facts in the case and the knowledge that the demanded sentence was entirely random.

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To make their case, they cite Thomas Aquinas, to ground their argument that the stochastic and random elements at work in the world, are not incompatible with a classical Christian understanding of God.

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