Slashdot Mirror
Stupid Patent Contest Winners
Grand prize
Patent on Gratuitous Recognition Solicitation, by Erasmus Darwin.
This was an obvious choice. It captured the spirit and style of a real patent application in every way, and was so stupid that the USPTO would almost certainly approve it as a real application, given the way the office has been behaving (badly) the last few years.
Honorable Mentions
This was a harder choice, but we finally settled on these three:
One Handed Food, by Coplan, Drag-n-Drop Shopping, by booch, and Biological Lens Intermitent Natural Kovering(tm), by aidoneus
And here are the 11 entries that Slashdot moderators chose to grace with the coveted "Plus 5" ranking, from which we made the final selection. Winners, please email roblimo@slashdot.org to set up delivery for your prizes. I'll need your real names, street/shipping addresses, and (for tshirts) your shirt size.
Thanks to everyone who entered. This has been great fun.
The only thing we regret is that this amazingly stupid patent wasn't an entry. But it wouldn't have been eligble anyway because, believe it or not, it's real!
Neither the microchip nor penicillin were patented. But then, you knew that, didn't you.
It doesn't work once the story gets archived, so the links listed above won't function properly after then. Is there a solution in the works for the slashcode?
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
>Chalk this one up as another abuse of the patent system. I can't imagine why
> the patent office didn't throw this one out... the reviewer must never have
> owned an electronic device or even an etch-a-sketch.
Could it be because of the words ``weather-proofing" and ``fish-finder"? Not being a commercial fisherman, I'd guess that in the late 1980's they did not have water-proofed viewing screens, & this guy came up with this as one solution, then patented it with dreams of making a fortune.
And what happened? The obvious solution: the companies making fish-finders started making monitors that were sealed against the weather. This dweeb's patent was worthless.
Until PDAs became popular, & people started protecting the screen by putting a clear adhesive over it. This dweeb saw his chance to make some money, & pay off his landshark bills.
>What this needs is someone with deep pockets to sue this into the ground.
Unfortunately, most people will find it cheaper just to throw money at this dweeb to make him go away. Which is what he & his landshark are hoping for.
Ain't American Entrepreneurialism grand?
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
And then while the page was actually loading, I got a phone call from a salesman at AT&T, so I had to refrain from looking at the winners until I could get him off the phone -- I figured if I suddenly started screaming, "Yes! Holy shit! Yes!" while still on the phone, I might wind up having to explain to my boss why we had a new 10 year long distance contract.
And then after seeing it, I was just too excited to be coherent enough to actually sit down and type something. So I had to get up and wander around a bit to burn off the excess manic energy. The one small problem with that course of events is that, when you're at work, the best excuse to get up and walk around is to get a cup of coffee. Which means I'm now even more jittery and manic and starting to ramble on and on incoherently. Anyways...
I just wanted to thank everyone at Slashdot, not just for running the contest and picking my entry, but for everything else they do, as well.
My thanks also go out to the moderators, without whom, my entry wouldn't have been in the running in the first place.
But most of all, I'd like to thank Natalie Portman, in a shameless effort to get this post modded up, because despite being able to cook up a bogus patent application for karma whoring and trolling, I still haven't been able to actually put those techniques into practice enough to get the "post at +2" bonus.
my patent on checking links before posting them is prohibiting people from posting quality content.
for some reason, even though I've granted a free-use license to my company, my boss is still reticent to check links before updating pages...