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O'Reilly On What Happened To BountyQuest
theodp writes "In his latest Ask Tim, Tim O'Reilly suggests the failure of BountyQuest could be blamed on the inability of amateurs to penetrate the patent mess, noting that numerous people sent in what they thought was important prior art on the Amazon 1-Click patent, but the attorneys who reviewed it didn't find it useful. But in this case, the "amateurs" included two patent attorneys (one an ex-USPTO examiner), who found their 1-Click prior art rejected by BountyQuest for not being specific to the Web, an argument a Federal Court told Amazon a month earlier was an irrelevant distinction that could not be used to exclude prior art. Interestingly, O'Reilly goes on to say that he now has a killer piece of 1-Click prior art 'on my bookshelf, in the odd event that Amazon loses its senses and sues anyone else over 1-click.'"
inability of amateurs to penetrate the patent mess
Do you really want to use "amateur" and "penetrate" in the same sentence?
hunter scams? 0, that was last weak.
250k to get some kid put on probation does seem a little deperate?
that's right, yet another self correction by the wwwildly popular pateNTdead eyecon0meter.
A note to editors...if you want more people to click on your sidebar ads, put them on the left side. It will piss everyone off, of course, but people will click on the ads more frequently anyway.
Additionally, I find it an interesting coincidence that the 500 errors that plagued slashdot recently occured just prior to the introduction of these sidebar ads. I cannot help but wonder if the modifications to the slashcode that enable these ads broke something.
Shenanigans! Everyone, grab your broom!
I remember watching some poor slob in a Chuckie Cheese costume get swarmed by a horde of anklebiters. I can only imagine how wonderful it would be to wear a hot-smells-like-pizza-with-no-visibility rat costume as little tykes randomly ram you in the crotch as they mill about and cling to your legs. After the poor slob had been hammered back against the stage for about 10 minutes, one of the other characters appeared and said, "Time for Chuckie to go kids!" He finally managed to pull enough kids off of poor Chuckie, allowing him to flail backwards out of sight behind the stage curtain. I wonder if they offer free counselling to the wearers of the Chuckie Cheese costumes?