Now then, this is the Patent and Trademark Office of the United States! See the story here: http://keionline.org/node/1548 [FWIW, back in the day, I was one of three contract SEs - me, a Vietnamese woman and a Malaysian woman, both ethnic Chinese - who put in their first full text retrieval system. At the time I worked for a German independent software house. My son, a mechanical engineer fresh out of university, went to work there as an examiner last year. We engineered that system before he was born. They were still using it!] [Apropos, his tenure didn't last too long. Let's say in regard to too many applications, his intuit ran counter too often to that of his immediate supervisor, resulting in the inevitable conflict. This, after I told the boy to shut up and go along with the program! But noooooo. :-)]. - Carlton ============================== Carlton A Samuels Mobile: 876-818-1799 *Strategy, Planning, Governance, Assessment & Turnaround* =============================