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Your comments on this issue strike me as disingenuous. By my understanding, the patent claims the (obvious, with mountains of prior art) behavior of auto-gener

Your comments on this issue strike me as disingenuous. By my understanding, the patent claims the (obvious, with mountains of prior art) behavior of auto-generating hyperlinks from text using regular expressions, so that (for example) when you receive a text message with a phone number in it, that phone number can be detected with regex and displayed as a hyperlink. When you click it, it can then say "Call, Save To Contacts" etc. That's just one of the supposed infringements. Your comments here make it sound like this is a legitimate patent, and that HN geeks are simply too stupid to understand the issues. Well, we may not understand the obscure details of every patent claim, written as they are in fearsome legalese, but we understand very well when a company like Apple is trying to make an end-run around the Patent Office. We grok it. Don't pretend we don't, or that our understanding is somehow skewed.

hn_decay 15y ago
This is exactly the impression I took from Ptacek's post. It is condescending and remarkably offers no counterpoint but instead deals in vagaries and innuendo. If someone wants to discount an opinion about a patent, they have the patent at the ready for their arsenal. Copy pasting the long-form version of "on a computer" is not a response.
monochromatic 15y ago
> Well, we may not understand the obscure details of every patent claim . . . but we understand very well when a company like Apple is trying to make an end-run around the Patent Office. If you don't understand the patent claims, you do not understand what the dispute is. End of story.
drzaiusapelord 15y ago
The problem is once enough geeks accept that software patents can only hurt them, then the days of software patents are numbered. Instead, geeks tend to fall into the Ayn Rand/Joe The Plumber school of thought and will defend the most asinine patent in the world. This benefits the capital owning class as the peons are doing all their propaganda work for them.

hn_decay 15y ago

This is exactly the impression I took from Ptacek's post. It is condescending and remarkably offers no counterpoint but instead deals in vagaries and innuendo. If someone wants to discount an opinion about a patent, they have the patent at the ready for their arsenal. Copy pasting the long-form version of "on a computer" is not a response.

monochromatic 15y ago

> Well, we may not understand the obscure details of every patent claim . . . but we understand very well when a company like Apple is trying to make an end-run around the Patent Office. If you don't understand the patent claims, you do not understand what the dispute is. End of story.

drzaiusapelord 15y ago

The problem is once enough geeks accept that software patents can only hurt them, then the days of software patents are numbered. Instead, geeks tend to fall into the Ayn Rand/Joe The Plumber school of thought and will defend the most asinine patent in the world. This benefits the capital owning class as the peons are doing all their propaganda work for them.