Hours upon hours is the problem, hours upon hours isn't very long. Putting a couple of days work into something isn't something that should be patent-able. It's

Hours upon hours is the problem, hours upon hours isn't very long. Putting a couple of days work into something isn't something that should be patent-able. It's practically obvious. I was thinking about this the other day, the basic problem with software patents is that almost all problems are trivial to solve as soon as you actually ask the question. It's just that there are so many questions in software engineering. Most programming problems are fairly easy to solve for a smart person. Many programmers have come up with virtually ideal solutions very quickly, people matching grep's search speed in days or came up with almost an identical shuffling algo as the ideal one in a couple of minutes. Until you have a storefront and logged in users, you can't ask the question "how can my users quickly buy something online", and come up with a one-click button. And so instead of being awarded for hard, complicated work that took months or years of man-effort, patents are being awarded for being the first to ask questions that are simple to solve with a few hours work.