less fun?

My comment was about the statement that Israel has a "right to retaliate". Which, I think, is very different from
saying that Israel has a "right to defend itself". I think countries, people, and even kids in kindergarten, have a right to defend themselves. Saying that someone has a right to retaliate is very different.

But, since I obviously lack the experience, could you please explain how you distinguish the agression of the ass kicker from that of the ass kickee? How come they "_never_ come back to fuck with you again"? Don't they see your agression also as a reason to retaliate, and finally kick your ass? Or is it that your ass kicking finally convinced them that they were right and you were wrong? Or maybe you were just stronger than everybody else?

It didn't really come up very often, so I don't remember the question ever being raised. I think somehow all the bastards must have gone to your school...

But yes, for you "the right to retaliate" is really a right to be savored? That's how you feel when you get hurt? That you finally have the right to retaliate? Interesting. You see, one of the hardest things is to understand how other people think, because we all think that we all think the same way.

I see. Now I understand how this might work.

I once had a moral dilemma about fish. One of my fish had a parasite, a worm, which would probably then attack the other fish in the tank. I spent an hour trying to rid the fish from that parasite, but still couldn't bring myself to kill it to save the others, or to end its misery. I let it live a few more days. I think eventually it died, the others still live. Foolish? Maybe. But morality and rationality are different things.

"right to retaliate".

There are two interesting words in that statement:

"right". Like they really would like to do it all the time, but only under certain circumstances do they gain the right. "In a democracy every citizen has the right to vote". "The right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness". "The right to retaliate". Does the police have the right to put you in prison when you commit a crime? Do they have a right to put you to death for murder? Or maybe they have an obligation? An obligation to the state? An obligation to do something that normal people would try to avoid?

"retaliate". This is not about preventing further attacks, or saving its citizens, or bringing justice to the perpetrators. No, it is simply a right to retaliate. Like when someone steals your purse, you gain the right to punch them back. Because that will make you feel so much better.

"In our school, when a kid gets punched, he gains the right to retaliate."

Up to this point, you kinda made sense. But, animal cruelty laws aren't just for public property. Even you intend to eat a cow, and it is your own private cow, you're not allowed to just kill it whatever way you like. You might get away with it, because no one can monitor you, but you'll still be committing a crime. It would also be highly immoral.

Same for fish - it doesn't matter if you own the lake, dug it on your private farm, hand raised the fish etc, etc, and you intend to eat it, and are on the brink of starvation. You're still not free to do with the fish whatever you want in terms of animal cruelty. Again - you might get away with it.

Morally, I don't see how you could get away with it, though.

I eat meat. It tastes great when prepared right. But one of the reasons is that I assume the animals where killed so as to cause minimum suffering.

We'll never win this fight. How about we make up a new word for "hackers", and let it go? It happened to the best words... that's why it is good we have a symbolic language, mostly - easy to switch signs.
Maybe code artists? code artisans? cartists?

Not to mention all those nasty deseases the european immigrants brought with them to america.

Well, you have to also include the gain to the competitors.

No, just clone a chicken, and you'll have cloned a dinosaur. Not a very big one, though.

I'm always suspicious of such calculations. It seems you can get whatever answer you want.
But in mining coal, is there no CO2 emitted? No CO2 in the construction of the plants? All the workers get to the plant by bikes?
In theory you could construct and mine both of these with 0 CO2 emission: just use electricity from solar power, and electric vehicles.

Writing as someone who knows nothing about networks or fire or anything even closely related, but I am a bridge player, this is taken from bridge, and I know a bit of game theory...

I would act on the scenario that minimizes your loss.
If the fire doesn't reach you, you don't want to have a big loss from having to build everything back, debugging everything from scratch.
Don't take apart too much that is hard to put back together.

But, be ready for the worst case. Take the data, everything easily movable and easily put back in its place.

What you should really be doing is minimize loss incurred over all actions, integrating for every action over the probability of every possible outcome. The strategy I outlined above is supposed to be an approximation to this exact formula....

Previous studies showed that organic farming doesn't give bigger nutritional value. But both of these aren't the point of organic farming. It isn't to get a bigger yield, or to get more nutrients, it is to get LESS POISON. This third little ingredient in food. I don't like it.

And the question when we make food with LESS POISON, how much nutritional value and yield do we have to give up. The answer that recent studies give is "not much". I'd be willing to give up 33% yield to get food without poisons.

My own experience (i.e. sample size=1), trial and error in the end takes longer. That's the problem really... that it seems to take shorter, but enventually takes much longer. Probably mainly for slightly complicated problems.

Google doesn't make money from ads. They make money from selling user attention classified by user type. They have a resource of user attention to sell, because of their ability to do searches, provide mail services, and this they managed to do because of their algorithms in search and distributed computing. They manage to classify users with similar algorithms.

So, google converts algorithms and infrastructure to user attention, which they can then sell.