Pfft, what a boring distinction to make. A *proper* home server room would combine the functions of both. Haven't you ever heard of a cat5-o'-nine-tails?

Please do kindly explain how you can censor a corporation without censoring some specific person associated with said corporation? Have you merely never thought about it for the two seconds it takes to notice that before regurgitating this tripe, or do you simply not care about censoring people as long as they're evil corporate-type people rather than saintly progressives who plainly can do no wrong?

Or is it that Cold Fusion is totally dismissed in the serious science community for obvious reasons that escape a novice like me.

That. There's no source of energy to overcome the electrostatic repulsion between nuclei in any of the (quite implausibly) alleged cold fusion reactions.

There was already a perfectly good word for that.

So are you claiming the revenue is zero or negative for all tax rates other than 0% or 100% under all conditions, or concede that, holding all other parameters equal, there necessarily must exist some tax rate within that range which maximizes revenue? Apparently, freshman calculus is ideologically motivated. Who would have guessed?

They cold be a Dirac fermion with sterile right-handed counterparts. You can even make the mass of the right-handed neutrinos different: Seesaw Mechanism.

While it's true that the 24th was the traditional leap day, this explanation of why is, shall we say, orthogonal to reality. If a full day of error accumulated so early in the year, the one day every four years intercalation would be much more wrong than it actually is; if there were no leap years, a full day of error would accumulate a few minutes before midnight on Dec. 31 of the fourth year.

In fact, the reason is that in the ancient Roman calendar the days of each month were counted relative to the kalends (first day of the month), ides (fixed day about mid-month, the 15th in March, May, July and October, and the 13th in other months) and nones (two each month mid-way between ides and kalends). Thus, the Romans would have called Feb. 24 in a common year ante diem sextum Kalendas Martias (the sixth day before the Kalends of March; in Latin one counts from one in such contexts, so Feb. 28 would have been ante diem secundum Kalendas Martias in a common year). See Wikipedia on months of the Roman calendar.

After Julius Caesar's calendar reform in 46 B.C., the leap day was inserted after the 24th, and called ante diem bis sextum Kalendas Martias ("second sixth day before the Kalends of March"); thus, the purpose of designating a particular day as the leap day at all becomes apparent in regards to the Roman calendar. At some point later on, the bis was attached to the first day of the two sixths (the 24th), leading to the custom of regarding the 24th as the leap day and the alternate terms 'bissextile day' and 'bissextile year'.

Wow, I can't even begin to untangle the confusion of ideas that could have provoked this post. Maybe yours is different, but the Earth I live on is pretty much a rigid body modulo some viscoelastic and molten parts deep inside and has one and only one angular velocity, which fixes the duration of the sidereal day, and one and only one orbital period, which in combination with the angular velocity determines the tropical day [1], which is what the length of a calendar day should match on average to stay properly phase-locked to the day/night cycle.

[1] Yeah, I know, I know, the orbit isn't perfectly circular and the rate of apparent motion of the sun against the fixed stars varies a bit by the time of year, so this only keeps things synchronized when considered through a sufficient low-pass filter. It doesn't accumulate phase error that increases linearly with time like the proposal in question would, though.

Wow, I see someone sure must enjoy his taxpayer-funded groping.

They'll just set up a checkpoint to get in line for the real checkpoint if that happens. What could possibly go wrong?

Difficult, sure, but saying 'impossible' is pretty much walking around with "I have no idea what entropy actually means" tattooed on your forehead. The human body is in no way a closed system, and the second law of thermodynamics says nothing about the change of its entropy over time as long as it has an energy input and a universe-sized heat sink to dump excess entropy into.

Cancer just means that evolution is hack piled upon hack until it stumbles onto something, so it does much better than human engineers at designing really complex interacting systems without very much abstraction or modularization, but much worse at discovering things which you'd never, ever stumble onto without conceptual understanding, like Reed-Solomon codes. If it had, then it could make the mutation rate exponentially low for only a linear increase of complexity and energy requirements for manipulating genetic material, and cancer would be worth worrying about roughly as much as brute force attacks against AES-256.

Of course, re-engineering such a fundamental, low-level feature of an organism might very well be harder than just designing a new one from scratch, but 'impossible' doesn't pass the giggle test. There's nothing anywhere in the laws of physics to say such a thing is any less possible than the mutation-prone organisms we already do have.

Coherence is not required for me to interact with the rest of the classical world, so why should it be required for me to interact with other universes?

It's required because otherwise your state vector gets entangled with the state vector of the rest of the universe, and then unitary time evolution requires that if you have a superposition alpha |psi_U> x |psi_O> + beta |psi_U'> x |psi_O'> [1] at time t = 0, and U(0,T) is the time evolution operator from time 0 to time T, then at time T the state must be alpha U(0,T) |psi_U> x |psi_O> + beta U(0,T') |psi_U'> x |psi_O'>, so the amplitude for any of the components which contain |psi_O> at time T can't depend on the amplitude for any of the components with |psi_O'> at time 0 unless U(0,T) mixes |psi_V> x |psi_O> with |psi_V> x |psi_O'> for some state of the rest of the universe V, which just amounts to postulating that the observer has an unreliable memory which depends on the rest of the universe.

[1] Here, |psi_U> and |psi_U'> are different states of the rest of the universe corresponding to projecting onto different values of some observable you have just measured; |psi_O> and |psi_O'> are different states of the observer (you) corresponding to having made (and, since they are distinct states, remembered) some observation, and x is the tensor product operator.

Well, I wasn't really considering the body per se either - if I'm still around to have to worry about the heat death of the universe, I expect I will have long since uploaded. That creates one obvious necessary condition for 'strong' (i.e., infinite subjective time) immortality (as distinguished from just the weaker requirement of indefinitely extended conscious experience given adequate physical prerequisites that medical approaches could satisfy): the ability to execute infinitely many computations.

Even a heat death of the universe scenario doesn't necessarily rule this out, because in an open (infinitely expanding, asymptotically hyperbolic) universe the temperature also asymptotically approaches absolute zero (there are other possible heat death scenarios - in an asymptotically flat universe, the temperature asymptotically approaches some non-zero value, but that does not appear to be this universe), and thus minimum the energy cost per computation also approaches zero, and if you compute sufficiently slowly in the limit, you can get infinitely many computations in infinite elapsed time for only a finite energy expenditure. This may be rather difficult to implement with the specific physics we have, though, since masses of elementary particles set a natural energy scale for differences between energies of different states, but maybe something clever could be done.

That in itself is not sufficient, though, since any finite state machine necessarily repeats after finitely many steps. This perhaps does get at your notion that the necessary evolution of consciousness over time challenges personal identity - to experience infinite subjective time, a conscious entity must transform itself in such a way that its state size increases without bound. As far as physical possibility goes, though, I think this makes it fairly clear that the question of whether 'strong' immortality is possible is isomorphic to whether a universal Turing machine is physically realizable.

What the hell is up with people always having such a strong knee-jerk reaction to argue in favor of death? No less a figure than Leonard Hayflick, who surely ought to know better, makes this exact argument. The human body is *not* an isolated system. Sure, if you mean immortality in the sense of a literal eternity then you may have a point, but as long as there's energy available to run the system on, there's nofundamental physical reason it can't continue indefinitely. I'll settle for the next trillion years and worry about it then, I think.

I don't think prosecuting a username would be a particularly effective means of enforcement, and with the hosting outside their jurisdiction it's hard to see how they could force Italian Wikipedia to reveal anyone's IP address.