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C'est la vie. There are many things that it would be interesting to know, but the ethics of it wouldn't play out. It would be interesting to see how well Greg Kroah-Hartman resists under torture, but that does not mean it is acceptable to torture him to see if he would commit malicious patches that way.

To take a more realistic example, we could quickly learn a lot more than today about language acquisition if we could separate a few children from any human contact to study how they learn from controlled stimuli. Still, we don't do this research and look for much more complicated and lossy, but more humane, methods to study the same.




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