Global warming hysterics are not content with whipping themselves for raping mother earth want to turn the rest of us into Flagellants as well.

I smile when gas prices rise, because the prices of my oil and refining stocks rise with it. Better to join Big Oil then fight it!

Typically, the way these patents are written, the pattern is "a system and a method to do FOO; here's one possible, but not exclusive or reference, implementation of our idea: BAR" where BAR (e.g. the win95 and modem stuff above) is meant to be an illustration of how an idea like this would work, rather than detailing the specific requirements for the idea to work. In other words, the fact they're using Windows 95 and modem is likely, largely, irrelevant to the actual meat of their claim.

You're wrong. It's both feasible and, in many countries, legal.

Turkey already does this. If you use a foreign phone of any kind with a Turkish SIM, your individual IMEI will be blocked in 24-48 hours. The only way around that is to pay a significant fee to the government, register your phone/IMEI, and then wait a week or so for the registration to take effect. Note that you can't register AFTER the phone is blocked. If you let it get blocked, you're basically screwed.

Turkey does this to prevent the importation of phones that didn't pay local taxes, and also to ensure that all users of phones/data are registered and tracked within the country.