The road to the future goes through... Norfolk? - Yes! Through a quirk of our legal system, one of the most popular jurisdictions for patent lawsuits is the Eastern District of Virginia. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is in northern Virginia, and the Federal courts here have something known as the "rocket docket" -- a strictly enforced set of local scheduling rules to keep a case moving along. (The same rules that handled John Walker Lindh with dispatch and which Zacarias Moussaoui finds so distasteful.) While most litigants would probably prefer to use the Alexandria division, outside of Washington, there are too many cases for the judges there to handle, and Richmond and Norfolk get the overflow. Overflow like this eBay patent lawsuit which could determine the shape of online auctioning in years to come. And Californians think they can safely ignore us! On the contrary -- we hold your technological future in our hands. Bwahahaha! Ahem.