The office gets money for almost every thing the applicant files. They also make additional money off renewals for allowances.

Strangely not every fee covers the costs of examination.

The patent office has been hiring 1,000-1,500+ examiners a year for the past few years. While an increased allowance rate is one factor, when the Office has trippled in size since 2001, its hard to ignore the effects of more examiners.

I've been to china a number of times, and customs and immigration as well as their version of the TSA are all wonderful. Same in Japan too.

There's short fiction that explored this concept. It played with the idea of fully extening all the rights.... and responsibilities to coprorations that natural persons have.

For this short story, when they imprisioned corporations, they would not let the executives leave the company for the duration of the sentence, nor could they hire new people either.

Death sentences for corproations already exist, its called revoking a charter, but it rarely happens.

Very few in the military are in combat arms. If you join the air force you will hardly ever see a firearm unless you are in the security forces or have to qualify with one. You will more likely be a technician.

Its not that much different in the navy either.

The thing is though, that you generally have 1-2 hours between track sessions, so you conceivably extend that rage considerably.

Probably still would have to wait a while before you drive home from the track though.

That doesn't seem all that out of character, I think they had a supercar fuel challenge, and various supecars were geting 3-6MPG on track.

I know my m3 gets about 9mpg on track, though my previous VW on the track got about 11-12mpg.

Wouldn't buddism have more of the moniker relgion of peace?

Buddy of mine worked as an intern for SGI in the late 90's out in the Bay area. I believe his hourly rate worked out to $75,000 a year, but he made very little money because most of it actually went to rent.

Also, when you enlist in the guard, you also enlist in the reserves. Guess who is paying for a sizable amount of NG training?

The states have militias which are not subject to being called up by the president, they're generally are called SDFs, and a few are armed, but most are not.

medical errors kill somewhere between 150k-200k people a year depending on which source you cite. google it

I always thought the economic boom in the late 90's was due to massive corporate infrastructure spending.

I thought the ozone layer was better due to reduction in CFCs and we don't hear so much about acid rain in the USA. Having spent time in china, their polution is atrocious.

If we wanted to "solve" the US's energy and carbon issues, we could make signifigant progress if the political will was there, but it will require massive infrastructure spending and at least in the short term, embracing "scary" technologies. I don't think the demand is there at this point.

Trade secrets?

Of course scientists will still publish their work, but I would imagine that the publication system might change a bit.

Sounds like the author doesn't understand the difference between a design patent and a utility patent.