PROCEEDINGS
MORNING SESSION
COMMISSIONER LEHMAN:  Let me just make a couple of opening
comments.  First let me introduce everyone here, in case you
don't know, I'm Bruce Lehman.  My title is the Assistant
Secretary of Commerce and Commissioner of Patents and
Trademarks.  And this is Larry Goffney, who is our Assistant
Commissioner for Patents designate.
And then we also have Mike Fleming who is one of our SPE
supervisory patent examiners.  If you have any follow-up or
any questions today to this, you can talk to Mike about it,
administrative type questions, or any other questions he can
help you with.
But the staff person for these hearings if Jeff Kushan.  His
telephone number is 703-305-9300, he's way out at the far
reaches of Northern Virginia, and he's not here today.
I think among the papers somewhere there is this Internet
address on there, too.  You can certainly find it there.
For those who weren't here, we will have a transcript of this
hearing.  The transcripts will be available after February
21st this year, and paper copies will be available for $30 and
they will be available on the Internet at our FTEP site for
free.  That site is comments, period, USPTO, period, GOB.
Also, the transcript from our December 20 Federal Register
notice will be available about the same FTEP site.
What I would like to do is that we have two witnesses from
yesterday who didn't make it.  They had problems with
airplanes.  It started yesterday and so we found ourselves
finishing very early yesterday.  So we'll start with them. 
And the first is D.C. Toedt, from Arnold, White and Durkee who
comes all the way from Texas.
Shall we just have them -- do you mind sitting in here?  And
you can turn towards us and use that microphone and talk into
it.

Forward to Daniel J. Kluth