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Supreme Court Throws Out Bilski Patent
ciaran_o_riordan writes "The US Supreme Court has finally decided the Bilski case (PDF). We've known that Bilski's patent would get thrown out; that was clear from the open mockery from the judges during last November's hearing. The big question is, since rejecting a particular patent requires providing a general test and explaining why this patent fails that test, how broad will their test be? Will it try to kill the plague of software patents? And is their test designed well enough to stand up to the army of patent lawyers who'll be making a science (and a career) of minimizing and circumventing it? The judges have created a new test, so this will take some reading before any degree of victory can be declared. The important part is pages 5-16 of the PDF, which is the majority opinion. The End Software Patents campaign is already analyzing the decision, and collecting other analyses. Some background is available at Late-comers guide: What is Bilski anyway?"
More analysis of the decision is available at Patently-O.
The apostrophe is largely used to show contractions or missing letters. "Supreme" is here an abbreviation for "Supreme court justices". So "Supreme's", though annoying, cannot be said to be grammatically incorrect.
Did you just suggest that "Supreme's" is a contraction of "Supreme court justices"? As in Supreme[ court justice]s? If that's what you mean, I find that preposterous. Contractions are only meaningful when generally accepted. You can't just leave out a few words and call it a contraction.
The apostrophe was not there as a contraction. It was there for exactly the reason Dave Barry was making fun of: frequently people insert an apostrophe when they add an S to the end of a word because they're not sure of the rules involved and seem to think it's better to err on the side of the apostrophe.
I think what you've just proven is that a moderate amount of learning is a dangerous thing.