> just seeing the Slashdot mention in such a document is awesome. I think this is the right attitude towards patents, if they do what they're supposed to: adva

> just seeing the Slashdot mention in such a document is awesome. I think this is the right attitude towards patents, if they do what they're supposed to: advance the state of the art, be inventive/non-obvious/clever/original and so on. (IMO) cmdrtaco is saying that he's happy that an advance in the state of the art builds on his inventiveness - google is standing on the shoulders of him. If only software patents really were what they're supposed to be. I wish patents were a celebration of inventiveness, as they are in other fields, instead of often obvious and consequentially hated in ours. Inventiveness is the highest ideal of our field; and patents, really, should be about that. A secondary problem is that the description isn't intelligible to him - who invented prior art for it. One of the requirements of a patent is that someone skilled in the art is able to construct the invention. If the originator of slashdot, who is cited as prior art isn't "skilled in the art", who is? Software patents have truly lost their way.