US Pat. Off.

[cjolley]

This is your US Patent Office

This is your US Patent Office high on crack.

This is crazy, software patents have got to go.

[KvHagedorn]

The person who thinks this crap up makes many times what you do.. scary and pathetic, huh?

[schmosef]

We should all get together and patent the process for DISPLAY of white space on a computer screen.

We'd get enough money through our lawsuits against all the video card companies to buy Matrox and release the kind of card that we all want.

Plus we'd be securing the server fund for several generations.

[rylan]

*hit like this is ruining the patent process for everyone, especially people who have real inventions to protect.

[cjolley]

Here is another Doozie.

Method and apparatus for visually emphasizing numerical data contained within an electronic document

Sigh....
A method and system for controlling the repeating actions of a set of computer instructions by any of the following techneques:

1, While a condition exists
2, For a range of steps controlled by an incremented variable
3, Until a particular set of criteria are reached.


This method, here in after refered to as a "loop" would allow....



Oh look! I'm rich, despite doing NO WORK and INVENTING NOTHING OF VALUE out of the ordinary.

[Jessterw]

Here's two:

Method and apparatus for identifying a filamentous organism of the type present in a biological waste water treatment process. A magnified image of an unstained filamentous organism is obtained (122, 124), and initially evaluated for the presence or absence of attached growth and the presence or absence of sulfur granules (142). A computer routine (140) resident in a computer workstation (104) is executed which, for each combination of the presence or of attached growth and the presence or absence of sulfur granules, provides a separate user interactive search tree (144, 146, 148, 150), each search tree leading to a different set of possible types of filamentous organism.

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-P...r&RS=AN/Stover

The present invention provides a method and software for organizing data selected from electronic documents by automatically associating citation information to the selected data. In one embodiment, the source location, such as the URL, is associated with the selected data to reference the source for the data. In another embodiment, desired data is selected from an electronic document, data and citation attributes are collected for the selected data and automatically associated.

http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-...fin;+Steven%22

My proverbial friend wrote both of the software applications that went with those. Now while the first is really a specific sort of application that is going to only be useful in a limited number of fields (namely at wastewater treatment plants), the second is... erm... well, rather broad in terms of how many software applications do just that already.

[Jon P. Inghram]

Sorry, you're all going to have to stop talking about these: I have patented the process of becoming frustrated at the patent office's bad patent decisions.

[Gurm]

Sorry, you're all going to have to stop talking about these: I have patented the process of becoming frustrated at the patent office's bad patent decisions.

No no. Your patent only applies to SOFTWARE which is designed to help express said frustration. Actual patents on common things are harder to get.