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USPTO Won't Accept Upside Down Faxes
bizwriter writes "This may seem like a joke, but it's not. The US Patent and Trademark Office will not accept patent filings faxed in if they arrive upside down. That's right, the home of innovation of the federal government is incapable of rotating an incoming fax file, whether electronically or on paper."
That explains it. I had submitted a process patent describing "the use of the 'rotate image' key as it relates to images that are the result of translation from a Facsimile transmission". I thought it was unique and innovative since no one uses FAX any more, but it was rejected. Similarly, my "application of human digits to vertically reorient sheets of paper that come out of a Facsimile machine in an undesired orientation" was also rejected.
My transmission must have been routed via Australia.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
Problem is that would require hiring competent staff at the USPTO. That is expensive. Therefore to keep the incompetent idiots happy, all upside down things will be thrown away. I'm sneaking in tonight and running a imagemajick script to rotate every image file it finds upside down on every server they have.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
This is obviously an artifact of the "Americans with Disabilities Act," a little know provision of which provides federal Senior Executive Service (SES) level positions for "Special Needs" individuals. Here inside the DC Beltway a little yellow short-bus now runs between every department and agency on a 5 minute schedule, sometimes confusing school children from out of town. Seriously folks, this reflects the worst of a bureaucratic mindset that attempts to overlay finite and rigid rule-sets on a richly infinite and chaotic world. Rules are necessary and good, helping us to abstract from the unmanageably complex to humanly manageable bite-sizes. The best rules also enable such concepts as "fairness" and "impartiality" by enforcing consistency to agreed standards on decision-making processes. However, the world is not really so simple, and any abstraction is necessarily imperfect. So, man evolved mental faculties to survive in a complex environment. We call some of these faculties "reason," and "judgment," sometimes referring to a concept called "common sense." Rules, regulations, guideline, and laws must account for some measure of judgment. That is in fact why we employ people we call "managers" and "executives." We, in fact, usually pay such individuals more money than others with the thought, sometimes a delusion, that the education, background, or connections that these people have indicate a superior capacity to occasionally rise above the rule sets as needed to apply common sense where rigid rules may not apply, or, indeed, need to be changed, lest they might be confused with symptoms of insanity, stupidity or malice. So, let me be the first to call for the firing of the dumb SOB SES at USPTO who approved this rule.
You are also required to actually invent something, another requirement that many patent filers tend to ignore.
there's no English letter that looks like a sideways 'b', 'd', 'p', or 'q' or an upside-down 'k' or 'h' or 'y'
Well what if the PATENT is for the introduction of new letters? What the upside-down k say you NOW, sir???
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere