I am so not a lawyer, but TFA claims the basis for the case is a Minnesota state statute, but the case was argued in federal court. How does that work?

If this doesn't stop cell phone theft, nothing will.

What you are describing is basically the situation faced by every conference with more than a few hundred people. Everything is fine when you are in break-out rooms or smaller sessions, but put everyone together in a ballroom, add a boring keynote speaker (probability: high), and wireless becomes unusable. Especially geek conferences when every person in the room has a laptop and a iPhone. Or two. The usual solution is large numbers of WAPs and let the proles self-regulate which WAP they connect to: if they can't get one one, they'll try, try again until the connect.

This reminds me of an episode of Simpsons, where someone asks Homer something like "do you imagine what would be a world without lawyers?", and he starts imagine a green, sunny field, with everyone singing, dancing and very happy. :-)

Thank you for this post. This guy's been making the rounds again, and everytime he's been shown to be a borderline nut and a chronic patent applyer. Getting a patent is simply a matter of money, not ability, talent, or creativity. Apple has patents on sliding your finger across a touch screen and Amazon has its infamous one-click patent. Companies like Tivo find it more profitable to sue over patents than to actually sell a product.

This guy represents nothing but the lax process of getting a patent mixed in with some medical quackery.

The consent degree did not apply to Lucent after it was spun off, and they did even worse. Moreover, lack of commercialization was true at _all_ the privately run labs. How much did Xerox make from PARC's great Computer Science work? IBM from T.J Watson?

It's incredible how successful other companies were at commercializing the amazing basic discoveries or inventions that came out of Bell Labs (transistor, laser, Unix, etc. etc. etc.), and somehow AT&T never was all that successful at commercializing these discoveries, and ended up spinning off Bell Labs and selling out to SBC.

Bell Labs held many, many patents from all this basic research, that ultimately weren't nearly as profitable as the inventions that used them. Lessons for those who insist that IP rights are key to innovation.

The Airbus A-380 gets roughly 100 passenger-miles per gallon, cruising substantially faster and further. Surely with only enough fuel for a short 100 mile flight, no cargo, you could cram twice as many people in it, and easily get your 200 passenger-miles per gallon. Of course, chartering one, might cost more than the prize is worth...

If Petty Officer 1st Class Terry Hasenauer is wearing a red shirt, he's probably in trouble by now.

Michael Jackson, great guy, wrote books about beer, died a couple of years ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Jackson_(writer)

1) The JW only have one "product", and can't switch to selling another one.
2) The JW have only stopped by my house once in the last three years, not 30+ times.

What I don't understand is why I, and so many others, got so many calls. I must have received over 30. If these crooks were in business for two years, and made over a billion calls, they were clearly calling everyone they could reach in the US multiple times. Isn't there some point where they hit diminishing returns? TFA says their mantra was "hang up; next" (perl?), that is to not try to convert anyone who sounded remotely skeptical. But if they give up on the sale two second in, why call that same person back, again and again? Had they not called back people they rejected, I suspect that people would be nearly so upset with them, and the FTC wouldn't have gone after them.

According to ftc.gov, violators of the do not call list can be fined up to $16k per call (has the ftc ever fined anyone this much? Anything?) TFA claims they made over a billion calls. I say we hit them up for 1 billion counts @ $16k per call.

You jest, but this one line program is incredibly buggy!

Remember how three years ago Intel sold off the XScale division, to get out of the embedded space, and focus on servers and desktops? (Look it up) I bet some new vice president decided that they needed to get back into this business, knowing nothing about the reasons they sold off XScale. This reminds me of GM dumping the EV1 electric car, and ten years later, starting from scratch on the Volt.