You drink the water, not the milk (which is made from white flesh). Should be OK unless you're allergic/sensitive to coconut. Coconut water is hypotonic, so if there's a good supply of coconuts you can live quite long just on coconuts alone - get calories from the coconut flesh. Add fish and you'd do even better.

Think of it as recycling ;).

But yeah crab, lobster, prawns are basically roaches of the sea.

Modern military is tail heavy and will stay that way till we go back to sticks and stones.

In the old days you had the spear-head, the shaft and the person holding it, and the person who made the spear (who could be the same person as the one holding the spear).

Nowadays the "spear head" could be a bomb, behind this "spear head" could be a bunch of FA/18s (and their pilots), an aircraft carrier, with supporting ships, planes, helis (and maybe even a submarine). And it sure takes a lot of people, factories, mines, farms to build, maintain and supply all that.

A significant part of a country's resources and output is behind the actual "spear head" which is then "thrust" into the enemy. However light you try to make the tail, it's still going to be heavy.

Without the aircraft carrier your options for attacking others[1] become more restricted.

[1] I think US euphemism for that is "projecting force".

Maybe so, but wait till you legalize marijuana and Philip Morris and friends get their hands on it.

1) Go compare what's in tobacco and what's in cigarettes: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn3990-crack-nicotine-in-cigarettes-varies-widely.html
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16728749
2) Industrially farmed tobacco typically is grown from phosphate fertilizers. That results in higher amounts of polonium in the tobacco. Yes there's plenty of other toxic stuff in cigarette smoke that can increase your odds of getting cancer but polonium certainly doesn't help. Anyone going to bet that industrially farmed marijuana won't concentrate polonium?

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/01/opinion
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/tobacco-firms-kept-quiet-on--polonium-role-in-cigarettes-907194.html/01proctor.html

Not saying marijuana shouldn't be legalized, but that you shouldn't be too optimistic about the results.

They would not be factually wrong. The argument is not that their world must "just exist", but rather that there is no evidence either way, and that the model without a creator is the one with fewer assumptions. Both of those statements are factually correct. The burden of proof is on those postulating the existence of a creator to come up with actual evidence supporting the more complex model.

If this world was somehow created, like your virtual world, then either that creator's world "just exists", or it was created in turn. At some point you either have a world which was not created, or you have a cycle or infinite series of worlds, each creating the next. In the former case, there is no evidence to suggest that we are not in that original, uncreated universe; in the latter, there is no uncreated creator.

If you can postulate a world where it is possible for things to "just exist" without being created, then our universe can be one of those things which "just exists". That is a far simpler answer than claiming that there must be an all-powerful creator who "just exists" and who, in turn, created the universe.

I think a virtual toilet would be even less satisfying. When you really got to go, you don't want to go virtual.

I don't drink coffee much but I bet many Slashdotters would be unhappier with virtual coffee machines serving virtual coffee than a virtualized cafeteria.

I'd like my office chair and other furniture real and not virtual. But beanbags might be OK if there's a suitable low table to put keyboard and other stuff on.

One potential thing to consider is many databases assume that the OS and drive isn't lying to them when they say "Yes the stuff is written permanently". When you virtualize you are adding another layer which could lie, or have bugs.

Things should be better now, but for important stuff you should test it e.g. set up a similar test environment and hard power-off the host when the guest running the DB server is busy inserting records (and saying OK to a network client when its done). Then you compare the network client's logs with what is actually inserted when you power up the machine. If after X tries everything is fine, then you have some assurance that the stuff isn't lying.

The last I checked amoebas certainly don't have neurons. Where's your proof that they don't feel anything? They sure seem to react to the environment and it's not just dumb reflexes. http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/artsep01/feed.html
Some even build shells!

I suspect the main difference between single celled creatures and us is the single celled creatures haven't managed to scale to our size and thus get our abilities.

If you pilot an amoeba, you're not going to do that much fancy stuff even if you're a hotshot. Whereas a large committee/organization of neurons controlling a body can do more fancy stuff.

What makes you so certain? If you were in a cockroach body you would have limited senses and physical abilities, so even if you feel horror and misery how would you prove it to some human? Cockroaches may not pass IQ tests, but how can you be so sure they don't feel pain, horror and misery? And how much can you learn with a limited cockroach body? They certainly do have memory: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/09/070927132543.htm

Maybe amoebas too: http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/artsep01/feed.html
Some amoebas even build elaborate shells:
http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/artsep01/shelled.html
Instinct maybe, but what's instinct then? And how sure are you that horror and misery don't come with instinct either? After all pain, horror and misery would be more useful concepts than passing IQ tests to most creatures on this planet and elsewhere even.

I think we're are still far from understanding thought and consciousness.

By the way there are single neurons that specialize in going "BINGO!" whenever someone thinks "Halle Berry".
http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/Single-Cell-Recognition-Research-6260.aspx

Who knows, an individual amoeba might be potentially more intelligent than a single neuron. But there is currently no way for an amoeba to be hooked up to a suitable body to prove otherwise, no super exoskeleton or mecha robot equivalent that it can pilot and be provide supersenses. In contrast, multi-cellular animals allow a bunch of neurons to pilot a body and have their senses extended. But the neurons still have to specialize and cooperate with other neurons to fire the impulses to move limbs, receive impulses etc. A single cell wouldn't be able to do it plus there is no redundancy - if the entire body is controlled by a single cell and that cell dies without a replacement, the body is in trouble.