NASA never tried to send another schoolteacher into space. They don't want civilians to get into harm's way, even 15 years later.
That said, I think if this guy convinced the Russians that he's fit for space, he should be able to go. It's none of NASA's business, really. Russia is responsible for selecting and training their own cosmonauts.
I just hope they really trained him enough. If something goes wrong that's Tito's fault, I guess NASA will have the right to be mad. Until then, I think we're better off just trusting the Russian Space Agency's judgement on this.
Cells die all the time, and they need to. If you think your skin is the same you were born with, your [sic] very wrong.
Still, aren't there some types of cells in the body that don't regenerate? I can't remember offhand, but maybe it's cells in the brain or elsewhere in the nervous system that don't regenerate. Any biologists want to answer this?
As a capitalistic society, we the consumers have the right to purchase the most value per money that we can. As a matter of fact, we are obligated to so, and it is in our nature to do so.
It seems to me that the problem with this is we consumers aren't organized enough. Heck, we aren't organized at all - and the record companies have organized themselves into the RIAA! Anyway, it's really hard for we the consumers to stand together and not buy something.
Wouldn't it be great, though? What if, starting tomorrow, everyone in the world stopped buying CDs, DVDs, and everything that offends us with its copy controls? And, what if we all wrote letters to the RIAA and MPAA companies, saying, "We won't buy any more until you release your content on the Internet, for reasonable prices, without copy control." It'd be great. We'd crush them.
An organized consumer body would have tremendous power. We could even stoop to their level and lobby congress, set prices on our own whims. But, two wrongs don't make a right.
NAT is a hack, as has been pointed out here many times before. Yes, people are putting effort into making it better, but they're just fixing things that aren't really broken. The Internet works just fine if every interface has a unique, global address. NAT ruins that.
I would say, you shouldn't consider computers that are on private networks (using private IP addresses) to be on the Internet at all. Computers behind NAT are NOT on the Internet. Thus, any connectivity you get though NAT is a bonus. Consider yourself lucky, and don't waste effort trying to get every little thing to work.
Yes, right now it's cheaper to use NAT than to buy more IP addresses. So it is "better" in that one regard. However, there's a good reason for IP addresses to cost money: there is a shortage. That's why we need IPv6. NAT is, at best, a short term solution.
The better solution is IPv6 and firewalls. Then, every computer can have the unique, global address it needs and still get the protection it deserves. And I assume you can open a hole in a firewall much the same way (or even easier) than you can port-forward though NAT. Probably it is easier, because you don't have to play pretend and say that all your computers are really one.
Oh, by the way, I hate NAT. I set up a Linux box to do NAT for my friends' cable modem. What a pain it is when something doesn't work that works just fine on the "normal" Internet.
There are two ways to get rid of these ads, as I see it:
Block and ignore them. The ads will go away, taking the sites that host them along with them.
Support sites directly with dirt-cheap fees (micropayments?) or donations. The ads can go away, but the sites can stay.
Two attitudes I've seen here are interesting to me. There are those who detest ads so much, they find software to block them. Then there are those who are willing to put up with ads to get free stuff - but they have the intention of ignoring them.
If these two groups of people are large enough, no wonder ads are worthless. But what's a site like Slashdot supposed to run on? Love? I don't think so.
I myself don't like the excess of ads on the Internet and off. As a relatively informed and non-impulsive consumer, I don't need to be told what to buy. So, it irritates me to know that a large of what I pay for almost any product or service goes to pay marketers who try to sell their product to me and others.
Even though I dislike ads, I don't block them, because I want to support sites I visit. However, if I could support sites directly and not have to see ads, I would do so. For the same reason, I donated to my local public radio during the last pledge drive.
I'd be willing to pay a reasonable price (a few dollars, maybe) for something like Slashdot. I liked the idea mentioned in an earlier post: free to read, but pay to post. This would cut down on alot of noise, I think.
Remember, the economy works by the flow of money, not the hoarding of it. You earn your pay, presumably, by being useful to someone. If Slashdot is useful to you, you should support it with money. That's the whole point of money.
Sure, ads make lots of content free. But maybe that's why we waste so much time with TV and the Internet. Another interesting thought just occured to me: ads make content free, but encourage us to spend money elsewhere. Wierd. Unless we ignore or block the ads, which brings me back to my original point. Why have ads then? I don't even know, I'm just ranting aimlessly...
Yes, Columbus sailed for the economic benefit of Spain - and he had a hard enough time getting funding for that. If he had just said he wanted money to "go exploring," he would have had even more difficulty. Unlike Columbus, we don't have a large potential to expand trade routes or anything - it'll be mostly exploring for a while. My point is that I think we shouldn't let the lack of immediate economic benefit stop us.
The record labels are also missing out on alot of impulse buying. Say you like a song, the label who owns the copyright will let you download a digital copy for ten cents. One day later, you find the song annoying, but you already paid your 10 cents. Oh, well, maybe in a year you'll feel like listening again. You go to download something else...
All the labels would have to do is take their digital masters, encode the song - or not encode it and charge twenty cents. And put them on a web/ftp server with micropayment capability or something.
RIAA labels could easily do something to make it worth 10-20 cents. Getting a song direct from a digital master, rather than ripped by Joe Schmoe or recorded off the radio, is almost enough by itself. If they would just spell everything correctly in the ID3 tags, that would be enough for me too. People wouldn't get "disconnected" in the middle of a download - another plus. There are all sorts of other ways to add value too.
I think NASA is doing the best with the money it has. It's not like they are doing nothing. We are still launching space shuttles every month or so, and we (as the human race) are still in the process of putting together the ISS. The ISS itself seems to be a big step, because, with it, we may be at the point where humans are in space for the rest of time
I think part of the problem is that we have no competition from other nations anymore. All we have is cooperation, which is good - except it doesn't drive us. Without competition, there is not much motivation besides curiosity.
Sooner or later, I think, we will have a reason to try traveling through space. Possibly to mine minerals on asteroids or something. We might as well start gaining expertise at it now. Congress, however, is rather short-sighted in this regard. It's always been that way. When Columbus sailed the ocean blue, he was able to get financing from Spain only after promising to find a shorter route to the Spice Islands (I think that's what it was.).
Even if there are no practical benefits to exploring space, I still think we should do it. Do we really take oursleves so seriously, as the human race, that we can't afford to have a little fun and continue to explore the Universe we live in?
Yeah, really. I was just going to say something like this. My school, umich.edu, also registered umich.com, umich.org, umich.net - and they are completely unused. What's the point then? It should just be "umich." Similarly, we should just have "slashdot", "dell", etc. Is it really necessary to see from a domain name if an origanization is non-profit, educational?
The distinction between.com and.everythingelse doesn't even mean anything anymore. Slashdot isn't even nonprofit, and they still prefer to use.org. There's no point! The only place I'd almost like to see a new TLD is for.xxx. I think filtering based on that is not such a terrible idea, for parents who want to do that.
In other countries, such as Germany, where I guess they can't/don't want to use.edu, most of the universities have domain names like uni-freiburg.de. Using the country code actually makes more sense than using.edu. And, there's still no reason why uni-freiburg by itslef shouldn't be enough.
The technical changes required to do this, from what little I understand, would simply be to change the behavior of root servers and other DNS servers a little bit. All root servers could have info on all TLDs (no-longer the three letter ones) and they could be contacted at random. Or they could be split up, names starting with a-d go to one server...
I watched a Realvideo newsclip from ABC news the other day. It was maybe half an hour long. There was one commercial in it. The commercial was about 15 seconds long, and they played it twice - once at the beginning and once in the middle.
Now that I can handle. Infrequent, short commercials. The only problem is, I don't think it'll stay that way. TV and radio had short, infrequent commercials in the beginning too. But now, about 1/3 of what I see/hear is commercial. I don't want Internet resources to become polluted to such a degree.
I think the number of distributions should be very large. However, they should try to standardize (as in this story yesterday) as much as they can - reduce the number of arbitrary differences between distros and focus on the meaningful ones.
My school made it's own Linux distribution. It's little more than a slightly altered Redhat 6.1. But, for a Linux newbie such as myself, it was great to be able to install a distro with working AFS/Kerberos that was designed to be interoperable with UofM's other systems.
Lots of customized distros are good. Lots of generalized distros are good too.
Now that i think on it, maybe that's the reason W2K is actually
nice...
I often tell myself that Microsoft would have a pretty fine [desktop] OS
if they ever finished it!! Stop worrying about the server
market. Stop trying to add a video editor, media player, web browser to
your base OS. Stop messing around with the 9x codebase alltogether. Just
finish merging all the good points of Win9x and NT and they'll have a
pretty good OS. Really. I agree that Win2k is pretty nice. But, it's
not as good as it could be. I would like to think MS is trying to make
useful, reliable products, but I don't know if they are.
.NET? I still don't know what the heck that's supposed to be. Why
does every company think it has to expand into every market? Do one
thing, and do it well. Instead of making an OS that does everything, make
an OS with all the hooks/APIs/whatever to support applications that do
everything. And let someone else worry about those applications.
There was one war where messages were encrypted by translating into an indian language (I think Cherokee, not certain), and it was the only code not broken in that war. (Vietnam? Again, not certain).
That would be the Navajo code talkers - WWII. A little search on Google turned up this article, among many.
Hmmm. Using the date of release as a version number might actually make a little more sense for Linux distributions, seeing as they change so often. (It was silly for Microsoft to do, of course, because they only released minor upgrades every few years.) Also, as you said, Linux distributions are made up of many components with their own version numbers. Trying to relate all those separate version numbers to one Distribution version number is probably why there is such bloat. Everytime some components has a major revision - up goes the distribution version number to match.
Maybe they can just list the version numbers of some major components: Linux Mandrake with kernel 2.4.2, XFree86 4.02, glibc [what version is it?], etc.. That could get ugly though.
In conclusion, I don't really know what would be "better," either. I guess it's not so bad the way it is. Maybe all they need to do is start using 0.01 increases. It's probably too late for that now.
I just started exploring www.nasa.gov, and I think it'll be quite awhile before I see all of it. They have quite alot of stuff available. Two of my favorites right now are:
spaceflight.nasa.gov, where you can keep track of current/upcoming NASA missions in realtime.
Earth from Space, where you can find many high-resolution (4000x4000!) images.
The nice thing is NASA "asserts no copyright" on the images without people in them, and they seem to put lots of effort into making archives available on the Internet. Also, astronauts on current missions take some pretty nice digital cameras with them, and they upload images to Earth so we can see them while they are still in orbit.
My first reaction is that I would love to see micropayments on the web - in some form. Back when I was a poor student, I used to depend on adware, free web sites, etc. Now, I'm a not-so-poor student, and I'm sick of the ads. I don't block them, though, because I know they are paying for what I'm seeing. At the same time, I hate knowing that companies I do business with (on and off the web) are spending millions of dollars to advertise their products - and that money ultimitely comes from us customers. I would gladly pay for the content, assuming I liked it and the price is right. Then, I wouldn't have to put up with annoying ads. Also, I could know that all money is going to the people I intend it, and not being wasted on advertising.
Others have expressed the idea that micropayments would encouage higher quality on the web. I think this is true. Lots of things on the WWW right now are just crummy. Magazines may have archives on the web, but they often text-based. In general, there is a vast amount of information in the printed world that just isn't on the web yet. I'm disappointed by that. Sure, I can find lots of info on computers and technology. Duh! That's what the Internet is built on. However, encyclopedias are new the web, as far as I know. They don't seem to be much more detailed than Microsoft Encarta.
Some sites have a micropayment-like systems now (I guess they are macropayments). An example I'm thinking of is the Consumer Reports website. They have some content available for free. For a small amount of money, you can have access to their site for a month. Larger amounts of money...more access time. However, it is interesing to note that I went to the library and looked at their back issues of Consumer Reports rather than pay - but I did put micropayments into the photocopier to make copies of the article!
I have two minor fears about micropayments:
I will become obsessed with money and how I'm spending it. Everytime I go somewhere, I will have to think about my money going away to micropay for what I'm seeing.
I will become foolhardy and never think about the money, rack up huge bills, go bankrupt, etc. After all, they're only 'micro' payments. Click click click.
"Like parrots," you say. I saw once on TV a parrot that could identify (in English) objects, their number, color, and probably some other things too. I think it's reasonable to assume dolphins could do at least that much.
Now, I'm not exactly sure how intelligent dolphins are, but I understand they're pretty smart. Other posts here seem to indicate they might even be as smart as humans. That's pretty interesting. Imagine if you were a dolphin, being about as smart as you are, but trapped in a fishlike body, unable to do much but swim around. And now, the humans are trying to communicate! How interesting.
I wonder if dolphins are aware of the cities we've built and the technology we have. After all, they've never been on land. Surely some have noticed the big ships we float out there, though. Are they smart enough to comprehend what those ships are? Hmmmm.
Re:Offtopic: DeCSS-related words people get confus
on
The DeCSS Haiku
·
· Score: 1
Divx: A failed pay-per-view DVD format pushed by Circuit City and Thomson Electronics. Lasted just over a year before it was killed due to the overwhelming popularity of vanilla DVD.
Hmm. Maybe if something existed that was more vanilla than DVD (read: no region codes. No CSS), then we'd have something to support, and DVDs would fail in a similar way. C'mon MPAA members, one of you should break ranks and do this...You'd get rich!
Are regionless and CSS-less DVDs possible with the current format?
There actually isn't that much snow around in southeastern Michigan. It is cold, mind you. I'm actually very disappointed because it's no fun to have the cold without the snow to play in. If you really want to see snow in Michigan, you have to go north or west. You are right though, I've heard that Michigan is second place in the U.S. for number of cloudy days per year.
In the summer, the weather is not bad. Not bad at all. And there's plenty of outdoors up north to vacation in.
As for technology startups, I'm not sure. I beleive the cost of living in Michigan is relatively low, but I don't know if that affects companies or just their employees.
Oh, and as for the article, this actually sounds like a good idea. I think the idea of making people travel and appear in person for court cases is a little antiquated. For civil cases, this could be good.
In defense of the original poster, the title of this story is Dispute Over IP Sharing Escalates
. The "IP" part of it could easily be Intellectual Property such as songs in MP3 form. You must admit, there has been much dispute over that too. In fact, when I read the headline, I first envisioned some guy running an FTP server filled with MP3s on his DSL line and getting in trouble for it.
Could you figure out from the title or summary that IP stood for Internet Protocol? I sure couldn't. I think you were just lucky that the right meaning happened to pop into your head first.
In conclusion, I don't think it's unreasonable to ask that IP be spelled out in cases like this.
You should really learn what a gene actually is (it is not a base)(hint, a gene encodes a protein, 3 base pairs = 1 codon, 1 codon = 1 peptide, many peptides = protein). And there are only two possible base pairs, 4 bases, two base pairs.
That is, genes are made up of many (many) base pairs and code for one type of protein each. The proteins are the root of most of the work done in a cell, IIRC. Roundworms could have thousands of genes that code for simple, useless proteins for all I know.
Offtopic a little bit...one thing from my high school biology classes that struck me was how similar viruses in real life are to computer virus. (Duh, that's where the name comes from.) They are rouge pieces of DNA or RNA that code for proteins that protect them and help them spread. It's just neat, is all.
I claim that if you can believe normal children get a new soul at some point, then you can believe the same for clones.
You seem to think that clones will not have a soul because transferring DNA is not enough to transfer/copy a soul? OK, that sounds reasonable. But what about normal children? Normal pregnancy involves a transfer and mixing of the parents' DNA. But, transfering and mixing DNA shouldn't be enough to make a new soul either, should it? So, I think there is something "more" in both cases.
I understand there were similar concerns when organ transplants were first attempted. Who are we to mess with what God created? If He wanted someone else's heart in your chest, He would've put it there himself!
Slashdot Mirror
That said, I think if this guy convinced the Russians that he's fit for space, he should be able to go. It's none of NASA's business, really. Russia is responsible for selecting and training their own cosmonauts.
I just hope they really trained him enough. If something goes wrong that's Tito's fault, I guess NASA will have the right to be mad. Until then, I think we're better off just trusting the Russian Space Agency's judgement on this.
Still, aren't there some types of cells in the body that don't regenerate? I can't remember offhand, but maybe it's cells in the brain or elsewhere in the nervous system that don't regenerate. Any biologists want to answer this?
Wouldn't it be great, though? What if, starting tomorrow, everyone in the world stopped buying CDs, DVDs, and everything that offends us with its copy controls? And, what if we all wrote letters to the RIAA and MPAA companies, saying, "We won't buy any more until you release your content on the Internet, for reasonable prices, without copy control." It'd be great. We'd crush them.
An organized consumer body would have tremendous power. We could even stoop to their level and lobby congress, set prices on our own whims. But, two wrongs don't make a right.
I would say, you shouldn't consider computers that are on private networks (using private IP addresses) to be on the Internet at all. Computers behind NAT are NOT on the Internet. Thus, any connectivity you get though NAT is a bonus. Consider yourself lucky, and don't waste effort trying to get every little thing to work.
Yes, right now it's cheaper to use NAT than to buy more IP addresses. So it is "better" in that one regard. However, there's a good reason for IP addresses to cost money: there is a shortage. That's why we need IPv6. NAT is, at best, a short term solution.
The better solution is IPv6 and firewalls. Then, every computer can have the unique, global address it needs and still get the protection it deserves. And I assume you can open a hole in a firewall much the same way (or even easier) than you can port-forward though NAT. Probably it is easier, because you don't have to play pretend and say that all your computers are really one.
Oh, by the way, I hate NAT. I set up a Linux box to do NAT for my friends' cable modem. What a pain it is when something doesn't work that works just fine on the "normal" Internet.
There are two ways to get rid of these ads, as I see it:
- Block and ignore them. The ads will go away, taking the sites that host them along with them.
- Support sites directly with dirt-cheap fees (micropayments?) or donations. The ads can go away, but the sites can stay.
Two attitudes I've seen here are interesting to me. There are those who detest ads so much, they find software to block them. Then there are those who are willing to put up with ads to get free stuff - but they have the intention of ignoring them.If these two groups of people are large enough, no wonder ads are worthless. But what's a site like Slashdot supposed to run on? Love? I don't think so.
I myself don't like the excess of ads on the Internet and off. As a relatively informed and non-impulsive consumer, I don't need to be told what to buy. So, it irritates me to know that a large of what I pay for almost any product or service goes to pay marketers who try to sell their product to me and others.
Even though I dislike ads, I don't block them, because I want to support sites I visit. However, if I could support sites directly and not have to see ads, I would do so. For the same reason, I donated to my local public radio during the last pledge drive.
I'd be willing to pay a reasonable price (a few dollars, maybe) for something like Slashdot. I liked the idea mentioned in an earlier post: free to read, but pay to post. This would cut down on alot of noise, I think.
Remember, the economy works by the flow of money, not the hoarding of it. You earn your pay, presumably, by being useful to someone. If Slashdot is useful to you, you should support it with money. That's the whole point of money.
Sure, ads make lots of content free. But maybe that's why we waste so much time with TV and the Internet. Another interesting thought just occured to me: ads make content free, but encourage us to spend money elsewhere. Wierd. Unless we ignore or block the ads, which brings me back to my original point. Why have ads then? I don't even know, I'm just ranting aimlessly...
Yes, Columbus sailed for the economic benefit of Spain - and he had a hard enough time getting funding for that. If he had just said he wanted money to "go exploring," he would have had even more difficulty. Unlike Columbus, we don't have a large potential to expand trade routes or anything - it'll be mostly exploring for a while. My point is that I think we shouldn't let the lack of immediate economic benefit stop us.
All the labels would have to do is take their digital masters, encode the song - or not encode it and charge twenty cents. And put them on a web/ftp server with micropayment capability or something.
RIAA labels could easily do something to make it worth 10-20 cents. Getting a song direct from a digital master, rather than ripped by Joe Schmoe or recorded off the radio, is almost enough by itself. If they would just spell everything correctly in the ID3 tags, that would be enough for me too. People wouldn't get "disconnected" in the middle of a download - another plus. There are all sorts of other ways to add value too.
I think part of the problem is that we have no competition from other nations anymore. All we have is cooperation, which is good - except it doesn't drive us. Without competition, there is not much motivation besides curiosity.
Sooner or later, I think, we will have a reason to try traveling through space. Possibly to mine minerals on asteroids or something. We might as well start gaining expertise at it now. Congress, however, is rather short-sighted in this regard. It's always been that way. When Columbus sailed the ocean blue, he was able to get financing from Spain only after promising to find a shorter route to the Spice Islands (I think that's what it was.).
Even if there are no practical benefits to exploring space, I still think we should do it. Do we really take oursleves so seriously, as the human race, that we can't afford to have a little fun and continue to explore the Universe we live in?
The distinction between .com and .everythingelse doesn't even mean anything anymore. Slashdot isn't even nonprofit, and they still prefer to use .org. There's no point! The only place I'd almost like to see a new TLD is for .xxx. I think filtering based on that is not such a terrible idea, for parents who want to do that.
In other countries, such as Germany, where I guess they can't/don't want to use .edu, most of the universities have domain names like uni-freiburg.de. Using the country code actually makes more sense than using .edu. And, there's still no reason why uni-freiburg by itslef shouldn't be enough.
The technical changes required to do this, from what little I understand, would simply be to change the behavior of root servers and other DNS servers a little bit. All root servers could have info on all TLDs (no-longer the three letter ones) and they could be contacted at random. Or they could be split up, names starting with a-d go to one server...
Now that I can handle. Infrequent, short commercials. The only problem is, I don't think it'll stay that way. TV and radio had short, infrequent commercials in the beginning too. But now, about 1/3 of what I see/hear is commercial. I don't want Internet resources to become polluted to such a degree.
If ssh doesn't seem to forward X by default, try adding the "-X" option on the commandline. I've had to do that on Mandrake 8 (beta1).
My school made it's own Linux distribution. It's little more than a slightly altered Redhat 6.1. But, for a Linux newbie such as myself, it was great to be able to install a distro with working AFS/Kerberos that was designed to be interoperable with UofM's other systems.
Lots of customized distros are good. Lots of generalized distros are good too.
I often tell myself that Microsoft would have a pretty fine [desktop] OS if they ever finished it!! Stop worrying about the server market. Stop trying to add a video editor, media player, web browser to your base OS. Stop messing around with the 9x codebase alltogether. Just finish merging all the good points of Win9x and NT and they'll have a pretty good OS. Really. I agree that Win2k is pretty nice. But, it's not as good as it could be. I would like to think MS is trying to make useful, reliable products, but I don't know if they are.
Maybe they can just list the version numbers of some major components: Linux Mandrake with kernel 2.4.2, XFree86 4.02, glibc [what version is it?], etc.. That could get ugly though.
In conclusion, I don't really know what would be "better," either. I guess it's not so bad the way it is. Maybe all they need to do is start using 0.01 increases. It's probably too late for that now.
They're using a whole new kernel version. I think that's enough reason to call it Mandrake 8.0.
- spaceflight.nasa.gov, where you can keep track of current/upcoming NASA missions in realtime.
- Earth from Space, where you can find many high-resolution (4000x4000!) images.
The nice thing is NASA "asserts no copyright" on the images without people in them, and they seem to put lots of effort into making archives available on the Internet. Also, astronauts on current missions take some pretty nice digital cameras with them, and they upload images to Earth so we can see them while they are still in orbit.Others have expressed the idea that micropayments would encouage higher quality on the web. I think this is true. Lots of things on the WWW right now are just crummy. Magazines may have archives on the web, but they often text-based. In general, there is a vast amount of information in the printed world that just isn't on the web yet. I'm disappointed by that. Sure, I can find lots of info on computers and technology. Duh! That's what the Internet is built on. However, encyclopedias are new the web, as far as I know. They don't seem to be much more detailed than Microsoft Encarta.
Some sites have a micropayment-like systems now (I guess they are macropayments). An example I'm thinking of is the Consumer Reports website. They have some content available for free. For a small amount of money, you can have access to their site for a month. Larger amounts of money...more access time. However, it is interesing to note that I went to the library and looked at their back issues of Consumer Reports rather than pay - but I did put micropayments into the photocopier to make copies of the article!
I have two minor fears about micropayments:
Now, I'm not exactly sure how intelligent dolphins are, but I understand they're pretty smart. Other posts here seem to indicate they might even be as smart as humans. That's pretty interesting. Imagine if you were a dolphin, being about as smart as you are, but trapped in a fishlike body, unable to do much but swim around. And now, the humans are trying to communicate! How interesting.
I wonder if dolphins are aware of the cities we've built and the technology we have. After all, they've never been on land. Surely some have noticed the big ships we float out there, though. Are they smart enough to comprehend what those ships are? Hmmmm.
Are regionless and CSS-less DVDs possible with the current format?
In the summer, the weather is not bad. Not bad at all. And there's plenty of outdoors up north to vacation in.
As for technology startups, I'm not sure. I beleive the cost of living in Michigan is relatively low, but I don't know if that affects companies or just their employees.
Oh, and as for the article, this actually sounds like a good idea. I think the idea of making people travel and appear in person for court cases is a little antiquated. For civil cases, this could be good.
Could you figure out from the title or summary that IP stood for Internet Protocol? I sure couldn't. I think you were just lucky that the right meaning happened to pop into your head first.
In conclusion, I don't think it's unreasonable to ask that IP be spelled out in cases like this.
Offtopic a little bit...one thing from my high school biology classes that struck me was how similar viruses in real life are to computer virus. (Duh, that's where the name comes from.) They are rouge pieces of DNA or RNA that code for proteins that protect them and help them spread. It's just neat, is all.
You seem to think that clones will not have a soul because transferring DNA is not enough to transfer/copy a soul? OK, that sounds reasonable. But what about normal children? Normal pregnancy involves a transfer and mixing of the parents' DNA. But, transfering and mixing DNA shouldn't be enough to make a new soul either, should it? So, I think there is something "more" in both cases.
But is anyone worried about that anymore?