Are prions alive? For the purposes of this discussion, why do you think they are they more or less alive than viruses, or why do you think they are the same as viruses with respect to being alive?

Many people would substitute the phrase "beings of a type (i.e. species) which at their peak intellect are typically sufficiently intelligent" or "... sufficiently self-aware" for "living", using their own definition of "sufficiently."

A malicious attacker could substitute toxic fake coffee or hot chocolate for the real thing.

A malicious attacker could also substitute a coffee or hot chocolate that is tainted with a chemical that creates slight etchings in the surface of the coffee cup or other cup used to hold the end product. For certain types of cups, the result will be a cup that will be more likely to harbor bacterial growth than one with a smooth surface. Assuming a successful attack, the risk of illness or fatality is low for a healthy adult but it might be significant for a person with a suppressed or compromised immune system.

Recommended mitigation:
Keep people who want to kill you away from your coffee maker.

They want their portrait-mode monitors back.

And this is why there are hundreds of root DNS servers with over a dozen "names" (list).

TOR has (or had) "directory servers." Although it was discarded as not being practical, TOR or its predecessors considered using fully-distributed directory information (see 2004 documentation). TOR now has the option of using bridge-nodes. The addresses of these nodes are typically distributed "out of band" (e.g. by email or personal contact) on a need-to-use basis.

In short, "centralized servers" are not a bad thing as long as there are enough of them without any significant risk of common failure (short of a catastrophic event that would take down the whole Internet or for that matter the whole planet).

Imagine a video broken into small chunks of 1-2 seconds. Imagine a torrent-ified web browser that used the torrent protocol to verify that all chunks were available for download from somewhere then proceeded to download the first few seconds of the video ("buffering") and while doing so figure out how big of an initial buffer it needed (latency, sigh), then after filling the initial buffer displayed them in order, downloading subsequent chunks while the first chunks were displaying.

Oh, that large and ever-changing latency? That's not your imagination, that's real.

I'm not laughing, and I doubt you are either. Sigh.

On a slightly different topic:
Tor increases anonymity by making it much harder for someone to track you down. In practical terms, if neither you nor anyone using your ISP are currently being monitored, you don't use it to visit sites that are being actively monitored by an adversary (including any site that shares an ISP with such a site), and you use it only sparingly (maybe a few MB today e.g. to visit a blocked-from-your-country news or web-mail site, then none at all for a few weeks, changing IP addresses and devices in the meantime) it is much more likely than not that your actual traffic will not be de-anonymized. But there is still a good chance that you could be. Of course, if you live in certain non-free countries, ALL TOR and similar traffic probably triggers alarms at your country's or ISP's border-routers and even of the police can't decode WHAT you are viewing, they can probably throw you in the gulag just for daring to use TOR. In countries that pretend to be free, you won't be arrested but as the parent-posting AC said, you might be put on a watch-list so the NEXT time you use TOR you can be traced much easier. So be sure that your second trip through TOR you pretend to be a good citizen and only visit www.ILoveMyGloriousLeader.[yourcountrycode] and that you post all kinds of kinds words to the public blog.

Thereby lowering popularity - a classic example of a negative feedback loop keeping your server farm from crashing under load.

I know what you are trying to say - that the protocol was not documented in any significant fashion in a popular human language, but I must point out that computer code, to the extent that it is non-ambiguous,* is "documentation in a significant fashion" of the protocol's implementation. Unless there is other documentation to that contradicts it (such as a human-language protocol spec) it is also the de facto documentation for the protocol.

Now all we need is a few million people who can understand Java as well as most people understand their native human language.

*Some computer languages have ambiguities/undefined-behavior in their spec (these are frequently unintentional oversights). Some computer languages have popular implementations that "go against the spec," introducing de facto ambiguities where the original specification had none.

I can see the MPAA accepting "partial" distribution (say, 75% or maybe even 90% or 99%+ of the bits) over hard-to-track torrent-like protocols as long as enough of the bits are distributed "directly" to ensure that those having only the "partial" distribution either get a useless (e.g. encrypted or compressed-with-key-bits-missing) bits or they get bits that result in such an unpleasant viewing experience (drop-outs/noise, segments that have key plot elements removed, or missing audio) that it won't be an economic threat.

Heck, if the recording-industry was smart, they would set up their own "stripped-to-the-point-of-useless" torrent-like system then invite customers to buy/rent unique-per-customer versions of the missing data. Of course there would have to be some incentive/compensation for your average viewer for them to allow others to "upload" from their computer, such as "fan bucks" usable at the movie's official web site online store or some such.

From a marketing perspective, it would also be smart for the recording industry to use existing BitTorrent-type networks to seed sample TV episodes (complete with ads of course, sigh).

Note the lack of a space in "Fun,Edna" in the acceptance letter.

Also, using a gmail address doesn't exactly seem professional. You would think a legitimate professional journal could splurge a few bucks for their own domain-name. Oh wait....