IBM's But-I-Only-Got-The-Soup Patent

theodp writes "In an Onion-worthy move, the USPTO has decided that IBM inventors deserve a patent for splitting a restaurant bill. Ending an 8+ year battle with the USPTO, self-anointed patent system savior IBM got a less-than-impressed USPTO Examiner's final rejection overruled in June and snagged US Patent No. 7,457,767 Tuesday for its Pay at the Table System. From the patent: 'Though US Pat. No. 5,933,812 to Meyer, et al. discussed previously provides for an entire table of patrons to pay the total bill using a credit card, including the gratuity, it does not provide an ability for the check to be split among the various patrons, and for those individual patrons to then pay their desired portion of the bill. This deficiency is addressed by the present invention.'"

Comments

Re:Actually that's not a bad idea

[Lumpy]

You must go to crappy restaurants.. I do it all the time with coworkers.

either that, or the waitstaff there are complete morons and cant figure out the credit card machine.

Re:For everything else, there's the patent office

[Hacksaw]

Making a wry comment based on someone else's poor interpretation of an article: $0.02.

Making a joke in a cliched format you didn't invent: $0.00

Reading the damned source article all the way before you make a fool out of yourself in public: Well, I wouldn't call it priceless, but something like that.

The patent describes a device for accepting credit card payments at the table of the patron, allowing them to pick their amounts paid, and therefore saving the patrons and the waitrons from the hassle of communicating all this back and forth and dealing with the subsequent mistakes.