I just want a glass that is always full. :)

Larry Niven invented that back in, oh, late 1960s? I think it was his story "Flatlander". Unfortunately it relies on something we haven't invented yet ... stepping disk technology.

When we will be able to glean useful information from the epigenetic portion of DNA, then we will be able to deal with identical twins.

Um, no.

Forensic DNA analysis already uses the epigenetic portion of DNA, since the useful stuff is far more likely to be identical between individuals. But the epigenetic stuff is still inherited (although somewhat less reliably) from parents, and is the same between identical twins. Said twins are, after all, clones.

And anyone whose had a transplant (especially a bone marrow transplant) or a recent transfusion or is one of the not-all-that-rare instances of a person who merged with a potential fraternal twin while still in utero will have cells with different DNA.

There are ways of creating totally unique identification markers.

But it's very, very difficult to keep them unique if somebody has an interest in copying them.

Most questions on a "classic intelligence test" (Stanford-Binet, Wechsler, etc) are ultimately pattern-recognition tests, albeit some classes of question (eg the verbal ones) require prior knowledge too. E.g., in the Wechsler tests, the "Perceptual Reasoning", "Working Memory" and "Processing Speed" subtests all include (or benefit from) some pattern extraction/recognition skill, only the "Verbal Comprehension" does not. Whether those tests actually measure those things, let alone "intelligence", is another question entirely. But if there's something in the brain's hardware or firmware that assists that visual processing, chances are it assists in the above tests too. (And yes, I recognize that with visual processing there's also a bunch that gets done in the hardware before the information ever gets to the higher levels.)

Although as the saying goes, IQ is that thing which is measured by IQ tests, and may or may not have any bearing on intelligence. From personal observation, it certainly has no correlation with common sense.

Yeah, most of the time the lawyer screws the client without actual sex.

"but we're not talking about letting monkeys run the place."

Wait, has he even seen the Steve Ballmer developers dance?

...to stick with my (antique?) flip phone.

Besides, a big slab of glass and plastic looks much less cool than the flipper when you want to call "beam me up, Scotty."

(Okay, granted, even the latter isn't cool anymore, but...)

Are you sure? Neo takes a pill and becomes the chosen one and gets the girl. You sure he wasn't laboring under a delusion caused by the pill he took, with just a little grittiness thrown in to make it convincing?

(See also: Total Recall)

How'd that work out? Oh right... Android (Linux based) is the most easily hackable mobile phone OS out there!

You say that like it's a bad thing.

No, mathematics is a kind of philosophy. It happens to have some real-world applications, but then so do some other branches of philosophy.

Right, we know it has positive inertial mass. We haven't yet properly observed their gravitational mass. We assume the two are equivalent; they may not be.

Actually, physicists have antimatter all wrong. A positron actually does have a negative charge but also has negative inertial mass, so it will react to an electromagnetic field the opposite way an electron does. We just observe that as reversed charge.

(Yes, I did just make that up, tongue firmly in cheek.)

Much (most?) of the energy from an ordinary nuclear bomb comes off as gamma rays. Because the atmosphere happens to be relatively opaque to gamma, it absorbs them and superheats. That's what generates the fireball.

So, expect the same thing to happen with antimatter.

And actually pure gamma emission is what happens when electrons and positrons collide. Proton-antiproton collisions tend to produce gamma plus some secondary particles (pions (pi-mesons), if I remember right, but I may not).

Will it blend?

From Wikipedia: "The Internet protocol suite resulted from research and development conducted by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the early 1970s. After initiating the pioneering ARPANET in 1969, DARPA started work on a number of other data transmission technologies. [...] From 1973 to 1974, Cerf's networking research group at Stanford worked out details of the idea, resulting in the first TCP specification."

And then it took about 8 years to be blessed as a standard, which is about average.

I laugh, ha!, at your check mate.