I had this happen once. Fortunately for me, it was a fairly busy day, with a dozen other customers in the showroom. I went to the manager's office, and told him to either return my keys, or I'd go out in the showroom and very loudly complain about this particular tactic.

I got my keys back (and was escorted out of the showroom) in under 2 minutes...

So how is the *government* going to print these things, without having a different set of plates for every serial number?

FYI - Bills are typicallly printed in sheets, without the serial numbers, and the serial numbers are added in a later printing step.

Uh, because anyone making a set of counterfeit plates would just make sure his plates had the same blank spaces? The idea is to put in features that the counterfeiters couldn't easily copy...

(and FYI - it took me about 20 minutes to slap together a simple TSR to provide the proper "bad" sectors where required for those stupid disks. Turns out that was trivially easy to get around too...)

The government would *love* to be able to discontinue those bills, and replace them with coins. But to date, there have been *two* attempts to replace the $1 bill with a $1 coin, and both have failed miserably because people refused to use them.

According to our friend Wikipedia, new ones have been printed as recently as last year...

There are something like 3 million of them in circulation, and new ones are still being printed periodically. But many people, like yourself, have never actually encountered one.

(I've heard anecdotes of people trying to spend one being accused of counterfeiting, because the cashier had never seen one and assumed that it was a fraud).

Care to place a wager on that?

Just out of curiosity, exactly what "offense" did he commit that you think is worth even a year's probabation with a suspended sentence.

He used MIT's computer system to accomplish what it was designed to do. All he did was do a lot more of it than the designers were expecting.

There mght have been a civil copyright issue here, but none of the copyright holders appeared interested in pursuing such a case.

And there definitely was a "using more than your fair share of shared resources" issue, which is not a crime (unless you're a federal prosecutor with an axe to grind).

To me, "common sense" dictates that MIT should have pulled him aside, and informed him that his massive downloads were not acceptable, and if they didn't stop, he would be officially banned from using MIT's network in the future. Once banned from the network, if he continued his activities he would *then* actually be guilty of a crime worthy of prosecution.

Except that bacteria don't adapt to a "strategy". They adapt to the conditions at exist at the moment, with no consideration of the future implications of that adaptation. Because, you know, bacteria aren't intelligent.

No - what needs to be increased (in some cases dramatically) are the patent *maintenance* fees. At present, the patent office has 3 fee schedules, depending on the size of the patent-holding entitiy, but the *highest* of the three only costs the patent holder about $13,000 over the life of the patent. Not even pocket change for a major corporation.

Substantially higher fees would tend to reduce the current tendency of companies to maintain large numbers of "trivial" patents (think "pinch to zoom" as an example). Also forcing "Non-practicing entities" into the highest fee schedule would make it much more expensive for trolls to maintain a large portfolio of trivial or dubious patents.

But then you lose half the nutritional value!

Not all that significant. Remember that the Earth's equator is inclined about 23 degrees relative to the plane of the ecliptic. Because of this tilt, combined with the distance the satelleite is from the Earth, a solar power satellite will experience *no* eclipses from the Earth for about two thirds of the year, and some period of eclipse during the remaining third. But even at the worst point in the cycle, the eclipse period is only about 70 minutes per day.

Net result is that a good old geosynchronous orbit is good enough for a solar power satellite (and greatly reduces the headaches of keeping the power beam targeted at the receiver).

Why? Given the cost of 30 minutes of prime time, it'd probably be cheaper to just buy a few senators, and then have them tell the spooks to back off...

There was no precedent to be set here. Basically, the appeal was Alcatel trying to get its favorite patent un-invalidated, and the the judges looked at the case and are basically telling Alcatel "There's nothing wrong with the lower court's decisions - it stays invalidated. Now go away and quit bothering us".

But one of the things that the law defines as patentable is a novel "configuration of matter". A truly original gene would easily qualify under this condition. While the gene is only useful because it is software for a biological system, if it represents a novel configuration of matter to encode that software, then it should be patentable.

I'm less sure when the case involves taking genes found in nature, and splicing them onto other plants (such as the "Roundup Ready" gene). In this case, while there is unquestionably a lot of work involved in the splicing, I'm not at all sure that the resulting configuration of matter would be truly novel enough to warrant a patent.