You are so insightful! You truly understand that only poor people can afford to patent about everything you can think of, whereas rich people are way too busy counting their money.
Patents should be for things that are hard to discover (like a practical application of a new or unknow way a material behaves, or the usefull effect of a substance on a human body), not for just an obvious idea of solving a problem. Any software patent is broken, because software is not hard to discover. Sometimes we may think we have a superclever idea, but usually it turns out that at least a hundred others have had that same idea too.

What would you expect under a one child policy? That they pay more attention to their dog?

No matter how much proof of intelligence and competence we send, the earthlings just don't get it.

We allready did, in 3011.

Ah, an exoplanet as essential exloring. Finding a way to sustain 6000000000 people on this planet when fuel is gone is for stay-at-homers because that doesn't qualify as curious? That qualifies as Proof by Insult.
As for the idea that pictures of exoplanets will solve any part of the problems we need solved here on earth.. I find that hard to believe. We are not speaking of breaking new frontiers here, we are just doing more of the same. Which is fine by itself, my point is just that for the general public it has very little to offer, and that is not because the general public just isn't smart enough to understand it.

If the population of this islands was short of coconuts, i would kick these telescope builders in their rear excremental organ to do something usefull for the island. If this planet has 6 billion people that cannot survive without burning fossil fuels, i would say the exoplanet can wait.
And don't underestimate the military implications of a good pile of coconuts!

Europeans reading this story will know that America is on the wrong path by granting pattents on software. We don't have it here and that is for a reason.

OK, you have my attention, i'll bite: It seems that to the public, the only practical use of a telescope is to warn us that we are going to be hit by a very massiv object just in earths path. And even then it doesn't tell us what we should do about it. Why *should* the public care when we have an image of the surface of some remote exoplanet with life on it? Will it cure deseases? Will it improve our lives? And if so, has the money been spent wisely, or could we have archieved more benefits for mankind with the same amount by spending it on something else?

That should have been a no-brainer..

Even if exclusive means exclusive, it lacks a definition of a commodity or service. Is an operating system with a browser one commodity, or is it two? How about an operating system with a TCP/IP stack, or support for USB ports. Is that one commodity, or are they several? Every producer of anything has a monopoly, given a tight enough definition of the product.
I have a total monopoly on writing this message!

Plus you need to solve this problem before you actualy go out and build a LHC with it. Doing it the other way around is just not smart.
Unfortunaltly it is exactly the way you keep project managers happy, as their value it very important to meet deadlines.

that would be: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18767315/

Read about it here

'The summary had better be: "The European Court of Justice, which is Europes highest court"

The most important thing to know is: when you put \0