Regardless of whether the behavior could have been done before, the patent would still be valid unless the average professional in the field would have done it as a matter of course.
Given that I've never seen a system with exactly this combination of write permissions, deployments, and automatic configuration, I certainly think it's novel enough for a patent.
That might be related to the large (even by patent standards) list of patent references dating back to 1988. Prior art just means something similar has been done before. If it isn't done in the exact same way, the idea's still novel, and the patent's valid.
Conceivably Tech is one of the most detrimental "journalism" outfits I've yet encountered. I'm fairly certain their writing method is as follows:
Find an event or patent from a big company.
Pick a Fear Of The Week or a Competitor Of The Week.
Pick a Technology Of The Week.
State that the company is aiming for the Fear/Competitor by using the Technology.
Pick a related image that doesn't explain anything.
Publish.
We've all seen this kind of system before, used by psychics to predict various catastrophes. "There will be a water disaster in 2011!" covers everything from drought to blizzard, and they will take credit for predicting it. I suspect that's what these folks are going for, too. If their predictions don't pan out, they can always claim something's "done well amidst fears of..."
The last thing we need is more patent FUD. The patent is quite clear on what it's intended for:
2. Description of the Related Art
Most organizations currently employ local area networks (LANs) of thick clients, e.g., personal computers. While this represents an improvement over the disconnected computing environments of a decade earlier, many limitations still exist. In current LAN environments, each client computer has its own local copy of operating system software, application programs, and user customizations to the desktop environment. Typically there is no centralized mechanism for maintaining a consistent system configuration in such a computing environment. Consequently, individual user workstations often get out-of-sync with each other as one or more users upgrade to newer versions of the operating system, upgrade their application programs, or install application programs that were not part of the original system configuration. Additionally, in this type of uncontrolled, decentralized environment, the operating system of a client computer can easily become corrupted. This is especially true with the Microsoft.RTM. Windows.RTM. 95, 98 and NT operating systems where user modification of a single system file can have undesirable consequences and require significant downtime. For example, editing the Windows Registry file could render a client computer unusable thereby requiring reinstallation of the computer's operating system software and all the application programs.
In view of the foregoing, it should be apparent that administration and maintenance of current computing environments is complex and time consuming. Therefore, what is needed is a reliable computing environment that can be maintained more easily and at a lower cost.
This has nothing to do with cloud computing. This has everything to do with managing a large net-booted environment, like a large corporation with a few thousand workstations. From reading the patent's claims, it's a design for a net-boot server that maintains separate boot volumes for each client class. Those volumes can be modified on the fly, without the need for carefully creating images.
TFA implies that this may be a technology for Apple to have more control over iPods and other devices, by keeping the OS internal and possibly charging a subscription fee to keep the device booting. With today's systems, that's ridiculous. Downloading a whole working OS is impractical over current residential networks, and it kills one of the best features of handheld devices: they're ready at a moment's notice. It simply doesn't make sense for Apple to expect users to wait for a half an hour every time they turn on an iPod.
The more reasonable in TFA speculation is that this is a push to have a bigger corporate Apple presence, but that's glossed over in favor of more outlandish claims.
Yes, if you're very specific about the details of what your program does, and what's novel about it. There's the rub: How much novel material would you be able to gather in one place? How much time and money would it take to compile the material into a marketable system? That investment is what the patent aims to recoup.
This is not a patent covering all forms of IP management. It covers one specific system. Change any part significantly, and it's no longer covered. One of the details is that objects are referenced by a keyword. I'm no lawyer, but you could have a system use a set of keywords, and consider that a novel addition.
If you were to patent a particular system for managing advertisements, any other system that does things differently would be fair game. Maybe you pick an advertisement at random for every display, using weighted probabilities. A different system that draws from a deck wouldn't infringe.
Patents do not cover ideas. Only copyright does that. Patents cover specific novel solutions to problems. Solve a problem differently, and you don't infringe the patent. There's nothing "broken" about rewarding inventors for solving problems. What's "broken" in my opinion is the notion that any interesting solution is fair game for copying by anyone, regardless of how little they contributed to solving the problem.
After reading TFA and finding effectively nothing about the patent itself, other than typical "oh-no-patents-are-bad" scaremongering, I finally found one single link to the patent in question. The title (conveniently not mentioned in TFA) is "Intellectual Property Component Business Model for Client Services". From that alone, it appears the patent covers only a particular method for managing IP. It doesn't directly relate to actually filing patents at all.
Looking at the abstract and claims, it describes a "computer system" (probably implemented as an application like any other) with a large number of modular parts that manages each step of IP creation, organization, administration, and enforcement.
It includes a module to keep track of what is or is not a current patent, and where.
It includes a module to keep track of who's licensing what, and with what conditions.
It includes a module to take a business plan and figure out what IP will be necessary to enact that plan.
Skimming through the other claims, it appears to be pretty benign: It's an application to sort out the mess of IP every big company has. Heck, as a final product, it might even cut down the number of patent trolls, because companies can more easily show all the IP that a particular product uses, and know that what the troll is claiming is not in the product.
The worst part of this I see is that Go now gets a storyline:
The game starts with the player receiving a letter from a Go master explaining that your twin is missing. When you visit the master, he tasks you with the Path of Go quest, through which you must find your twin. Through the experience, you learn and play the game. In the course of your journey you interact with a number of characters and challenge them in games of Go.
As much as I like good stories, there are situations where you just don't need a story. A computer adaptation of a casual game is one of those times.
Coming next year from Microsoft: The Great Solitaire Battle! As the evil sorcerer throws his magic cards at you, you must make order of them to build up your own magical reserves!
Personally, I'm glad that my 25-volt, 5-amp supply doesn't physically connect to my 15-volt laptop, and that I don't have to have a big supply everywhere I take my tiniest netbook. By "standard power connectors", I don't mean "the same power connector across all laptops". Rather, I mean "power connectors that are standard, thus already widely used and available elsewhere".
Almost all laptops I've had in the past 15 years have used some form of barrel jack. Of course every company likes to use a different particular jack, but they're mostly available through electronics suppliers like Digi-key. The connector does not pose a significant barrier to any company that wants to make an after-market part.
Remember the good old days when computers sat on desks? All those connectors on the back (D-sub, mini-TRS, 6-pin mini-DIN, etc.) were already widely used for other electronics, and still are today. Most laptop connectors I've seen are similar examples of reusing existing jacks, and as such there's a fairly competitive market for off-brand replacement power supplies.
In contrast, the Mac connector is (in typical Apple fashion) completely non-standard. Not only was it designed by Apple for Apple's own use, but the design is patented and not licensed to anyone. The only company that can make power cords for Apple laptops is Apple, and I do indeed see that as a bad thing.
Within the cell phone market, most major manufacturers are using custom connectors. Those that do use physical "USB" connectors do not necessarily conform to USB wiring, to the point where one phone I used fried when connected to a real USB port, despite using a mini-USB connector on the charger. That anti-consumer behavior is what I'd like to see outlawed, and in my opinion it's a worthwhile use of bureaucrat time. Better they debate this than read the latest speculative medical research looking for things to ban.
Cell phones are replacing everything else, so the device itself matters more at the moment. Phone connectors matter more than any of your specific examples to the current politicians, who are responding to fears of monopolies and corporate control. Note that laptops already use mostly standard (and cheaply available) power connectors.
Cell phones are also far more portable than TVs, so the plug becomes far more important and a bigger investment as people buy more chargers to keep in more locations. When was the last time you had to plug in your TV anywhere outside your home?
They won't redesign anything important, but I'd bet a few will still throw on their proprietary connector, which coincidentally has four meaningful pins and a size that fits a particular hole in the case.
I can personally attest to Edubuntu's usefulness. I used it to help teach a few dozen rural African kids letter recognition. Not quite reading, but an important step nonetheless.
Conspiracy theories have convenience. Reality often has coincidence.
...happier when they have more rights.
That's getting closer to my point. What give any particular person/group the right to say what others' rights are? Why should you have the right to speak your thoughts, but I don't get the right to control all the natural resources in the world? Why do Americans get the right to practice some religions (that bury their dead), but not others (that, hypothetically, fling their dead at relatives' houses)?
As soon as any restriction is placed on anything, somebody's going to be unhappy with the situation. For kids on a playground, it's the limit of having only one toy. For nations, it's often having a finite amount of land. For the dead-flinging religion, it's having dead things contained.
I believe the best route to having less death through war is to try and understand the reasoning behind conflicts and change them through diplomacy, rather than telling nations to simply stop their wars, accept all offenses, and never return attacks because some arbitrary group finds their opinions "senseless".
Intelligence at the time indicated Iraq was a threat to its neighbors, and had offered allegiance to preexisting enemies. So, rumors and conspiracies aside, there's still no concrete examples of a corruption-led conflict.
On a purely hypothetical basis, let's assume the current Iraq war were simply to ensure a continuing supply of oil for the next few years. The American economy runs on oil. Is it sensible to leave America's economic security in the hands of a dictator who won't follow international treaties?
Also, let's not forget that "rights" are merely certain activities that people think certain groups of people should be able to do. They are as arbitrary as any other human decision, and having a uniform set of "inalienable rights" is damned near impossible. Any given leader can feel their particular group has a "right" to exterminate another group, and you quickly get genocide for the sake of rights.
War is hell. Go watch some children on a playground, and see how they start fights. One kid will do something without realizing it offends another, and it starts an argument leading to a fight. Countries are a lot like children. What one sees as an advance in research is seen by another as aggressive posturing.
I want to see some unusual personality traits, a few quirks, and some out-of-place habits. Real people have those. I don't want a character telling me every twenty minutes how he lost his <body part> to the <current enemy>, implying that nothing happened before or after the current situation.
Heck, it's even a good move for the various copyright lovers out there: By leaving a complex character unrevealed, you can push more sales of books/sequels/prequels that fill in more details of the world!
An example off the top of my head is Jack Sparrow's "piece of eight" in Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End. Through two full movies, Jack's various personal decorations were simply decorations. In the end, there's a reason for some of them, which can be assumed (via suspension of disbelief) to have been the reason all along. It builds the character without distraction.
And who exactly might that be? Perhaps a mercenary or two starting a conflict between a few villages, but I can't think of any major conflict in the past few decades started by corruption.
If you're just defending yourself (or others), then I have no problem with it.
I'm sure every leader who's gone to war would agree with you. They all had reasons they felt to be very good. Maybe it was defending their honor, their land, their resources, or their security. Maybe they just felt their precious bodily fluids were being corrupted by the terrible enemy at the gates. It all makes perfect sense to them, and everybody else's reasons are senseless.
It makes perfect sense. Patents grant a monopoly on a particular technology for a length of time ideally long enough for a competent inventor-turned-businessman to recoup their investment and be rewarded for their idea.
It does take a significant amount of thought to take an existing idea and adapt it to another use. A forum is composed mainly of flat threads and very clearly-defined and well-regulated content. Webpages are far more complex, with some elements hidden, and no clean determination of what's meaningful and what isn't. There's an investment in the adaptation, and the patent reflects that by granting the monopoly, but only among browsers. If the forum idea were patented, it'd need to be included by reference.
Even if the new patent did cover a pre-existing idea, it needs to be patented to be clear-cut prior art. Without a well-defined patent, slight variations can and should be patented as novel non-obvious improvements.
Patents do not imply "I thought of this first", they imply "I'm did it exactly like this first."
Forum software before 1999, perhaps... but not browsers. Patents are very specific. "Like X, but on a browser!" is a valid claim, if X only claims the feature for forum software.
North Korea claims they were attacked by South Korean terrorists. Are they justified to attack South Korea now?
My personal religious views aside, I see no reason to count religion as any more insane than an historical land feud between rival groups. How is it any worse to believe that your god is mad at somebody rather than your great-great-great-great-grandfather?
What qualifies anyone, or any particular group, to decide what's an insane reason?
...provide a tool bar within a web browser application window, the tool bar including a button, for activating a highlighting operation...
Yep, they're patenting a browser feature. Three slight variations (claims 1, 7, 12), but all browser features.
It appears they're patenting a browser button that will highlight the things you searched for, in any page. I don't use Google Toolbar, but it appears to be already implemented.
With no browser additions, the user has to search for something with Google, go to a page, then open find and search for the exact same terms to find where the relevant information is on the page. With this patented idea implemented, one only has to search for pages, go to one, then click a single button to go to the information on the page.
The summary is, as usual, misleading. To my knowledge, Windows itself has no such feature, nor any other program I've seen for that matter.
What about the people living near the North Korean border under constant threat of attack? What about defending the citizens of Iraq targeted by Operation Anfal? Where's the line between initiating a war and defending others?
Maybe the ones who initiated Operation Anfal were the Kurds, who settled down to live in Iraq where they might someday have not been wanted. Maybe it's the fault of the immigrants' parents, for having children who might settle there. Maybe it's the fault of the first people over a thousand years ago who separated into modern-day Kurds.
Or maybe, just maybe, war isn't something that can be so easily avoided.
Conflicts happen in any society, and the violence increases as they escalate. I doubt there's any leader in recent times who has started a war for his own enjoyment. Everyone feels their cause is justified, whether it's bloody murder or not. The best anyone can do is try to reduce the number of conflicts (by choosing skilled diplomats as leaders) or reduce the amount of pain (by improving the accuracy of weapons, control of troops, and improving the medical care).
So when was the last time you volunteered to be shot in the chest, to help train field medics? Sure, dummies are limited, but every advancement means better knowledge beforehand. That means fewer mistakes when the real thing comes along.
Slashdot Mirror
Regardless of whether the behavior could have been done before, the patent would still be valid unless the average professional in the field would have done it as a matter of course.
Given that I've never seen a system with exactly this combination of write permissions, deployments, and automatic configuration, I certainly think it's novel enough for a patent.
That might be related to the large (even by patent standards) list of patent references dating back to 1988. Prior art just means something similar has been done before. If it isn't done in the exact same way, the idea's still novel, and the patent's valid.
Conceivably Tech is one of the most detrimental "journalism" outfits I've yet encountered. I'm fairly certain their writing method is as follows:
We've all seen this kind of system before, used by psychics to predict various catastrophes. "There will be a water disaster in 2011!" covers everything from drought to blizzard, and they will take credit for predicting it. I suspect that's what these folks are going for, too. If their predictions don't pan out, they can always claim something's "done well amidst fears of..."
The last thing we need is more patent FUD. The patent is quite clear on what it's intended for:
2. Description of the Related Art
Most organizations currently employ local area networks (LANs) of thick clients, e.g., personal computers. While this represents an improvement over the disconnected computing environments of a decade earlier, many limitations still exist. In current LAN environments, each client computer has its own local copy of operating system software, application programs, and user customizations to the desktop environment. Typically there is no centralized mechanism for maintaining a consistent system configuration in such a computing environment. Consequently, individual user workstations often get out-of-sync with each other as one or more users upgrade to newer versions of the operating system, upgrade their application programs, or install application programs that were not part of the original system configuration. Additionally, in this type of uncontrolled, decentralized environment, the operating system of a client computer can easily become corrupted. This is especially true with the Microsoft.RTM. Windows.RTM. 95, 98 and NT operating systems where user modification of a single system file can have undesirable consequences and require significant downtime. For example, editing the Windows Registry file could render a client computer unusable thereby requiring reinstallation of the computer's operating system software and all the application programs.
In view of the foregoing, it should be apparent that administration and maintenance of current computing environments is complex and time consuming. Therefore, what is needed is a reliable computing environment that can be maintained more easily and at a lower cost.
This has nothing to do with cloud computing. This has everything to do with managing a large net-booted environment, like a large corporation with a few thousand workstations. From reading the patent's claims, it's a design for a net-boot server that maintains separate boot volumes for each client class. Those volumes can be modified on the fly, without the need for carefully creating images.
TFA implies that this may be a technology for Apple to have more control over iPods and other devices, by keeping the OS internal and possibly charging a subscription fee to keep the device booting. With today's systems, that's ridiculous. Downloading a whole working OS is impractical over current residential networks, and it kills one of the best features of handheld devices: they're ready at a moment's notice. It simply doesn't make sense for Apple to expect users to wait for a half an hour every time they turn on an iPod.
The more reasonable in TFA speculation is that this is a push to have a bigger corporate Apple presence, but that's glossed over in favor of more outlandish claims.
And how did the biologist count the frogs? I've never seen a frog fill out a census form.
Yes, if you're very specific about the details of what your program does, and what's novel about it. There's the rub: How much novel material would you be able to gather in one place? How much time and money would it take to compile the material into a marketable system? That investment is what the patent aims to recoup.
This is not a patent covering all forms of IP management. It covers one specific system. Change any part significantly, and it's no longer covered. One of the details is that objects are referenced by a keyword. I'm no lawyer, but you could have a system use a set of keywords, and consider that a novel addition.
If you were to patent a particular system for managing advertisements, any other system that does things differently would be fair game. Maybe you pick an advertisement at random for every display, using weighted probabilities. A different system that draws from a deck wouldn't infringe.
Patents do not cover ideas. Only copyright does that. Patents cover specific novel solutions to problems. Solve a problem differently, and you don't infringe the patent. There's nothing "broken" about rewarding inventors for solving problems. What's "broken" in my opinion is the notion that any interesting solution is fair game for copying by anyone, regardless of how little they contributed to solving the problem.
After reading TFA and finding effectively nothing about the patent itself, other than typical "oh-no-patents-are-bad" scaremongering, I finally found one single link to the patent in question. The title (conveniently not mentioned in TFA) is "Intellectual Property Component Business Model for Client Services". From that alone, it appears the patent covers only a particular method for managing IP. It doesn't directly relate to actually filing patents at all.
Looking at the abstract and claims, it describes a "computer system" (probably implemented as an application like any other) with a large number of modular parts that manages each step of IP creation, organization, administration, and enforcement.
It includes a module to keep track of what is or is not a current patent, and where.
It includes a module to keep track of who's licensing what, and with what conditions.
It includes a module to take a business plan and figure out what IP will be necessary to enact that plan.
Skimming through the other claims, it appears to be pretty benign: It's an application to sort out the mess of IP every big company has. Heck, as a final product, it might even cut down the number of patent trolls, because companies can more easily show all the IP that a particular product uses, and know that what the troll is claiming is not in the product.
The worst part of this I see is that Go now gets a storyline:
The game starts with the player receiving a letter from a Go master explaining that your twin is missing. When you visit the master, he tasks you with the Path of Go quest, through which you must find your twin. Through the experience, you learn and play the game. In the course of your journey you interact with a number of characters and challenge them in games of Go.
As much as I like good stories, there are situations where you just don't need a story. A computer adaptation of a casual game is one of those times.
Coming next year from Microsoft: The Great Solitaire Battle! As the evil sorcerer throws his magic cards at you, you must make order of them to build up your own magical reserves!
Personally, I'm glad that my 25-volt, 5-amp supply doesn't physically connect to my 15-volt laptop, and that I don't have to have a big supply everywhere I take my tiniest netbook. By "standard power connectors", I don't mean "the same power connector across all laptops". Rather, I mean "power connectors that are standard, thus already widely used and available elsewhere".
Almost all laptops I've had in the past 15 years have used some form of barrel jack. Of course every company likes to use a different particular jack, but they're mostly available through electronics suppliers like Digi-key. The connector does not pose a significant barrier to any company that wants to make an after-market part.
Remember the good old days when computers sat on desks? All those connectors on the back (D-sub, mini-TRS, 6-pin mini-DIN, etc.) were already widely used for other electronics, and still are today. Most laptop connectors I've seen are similar examples of reusing existing jacks, and as such there's a fairly competitive market for off-brand replacement power supplies.
In contrast, the Mac connector is (in typical Apple fashion) completely non-standard. Not only was it designed by Apple for Apple's own use, but the design is patented and not licensed to anyone. The only company that can make power cords for Apple laptops is Apple, and I do indeed see that as a bad thing.
Within the cell phone market, most major manufacturers are using custom connectors. Those that do use physical "USB" connectors do not necessarily conform to USB wiring, to the point where one phone I used fried when connected to a real USB port, despite using a mini-USB connector on the charger. That anti-consumer behavior is what I'd like to see outlawed, and in my opinion it's a worthwhile use of bureaucrat time. Better they debate this than read the latest speculative medical research looking for things to ban.
Cell phones are replacing everything else, so the device itself matters more at the moment. Phone connectors matter more than any of your specific examples to the current politicians, who are responding to fears of monopolies and corporate control. Note that laptops already use mostly standard (and cheaply available) power connectors.
Cell phones are also far more portable than TVs, so the plug becomes far more important and a bigger investment as people buy more chargers to keep in more locations. When was the last time you had to plug in your TV anywhere outside your home?
They won't redesign anything important, but I'd bet a few will still throw on their proprietary connector, which coincidentally has four meaningful pins and a size that fits a particular hole in the case.
I can personally attest to Edubuntu's usefulness. I used it to help teach a few dozen rural African kids letter recognition. Not quite reading, but an important step nonetheless.
...convenient.
Conspiracy theories have convenience. Reality often has coincidence.
...happier when they have more rights.
That's getting closer to my point. What give any particular person/group the right to say what others' rights are? Why should you have the right to speak your thoughts, but I don't get the right to control all the natural resources in the world? Why do Americans get the right to practice some religions (that bury their dead), but not others (that, hypothetically, fling their dead at relatives' houses)?
As soon as any restriction is placed on anything, somebody's going to be unhappy with the situation. For kids on a playground, it's the limit of having only one toy. For nations, it's often having a finite amount of land. For the dead-flinging religion, it's having dead things contained.
I believe the best route to having less death through war is to try and understand the reasoning behind conflicts and change them through diplomacy, rather than telling nations to simply stop their wars, accept all offenses, and never return attacks because some arbitrary group finds their opinions "senseless".
Intelligence at the time indicated Iraq was a threat to its neighbors, and had offered allegiance to preexisting enemies. So, rumors and conspiracies aside, there's still no concrete examples of a corruption-led conflict.
On a purely hypothetical basis, let's assume the current Iraq war were simply to ensure a continuing supply of oil for the next few years. The American economy runs on oil. Is it sensible to leave America's economic security in the hands of a dictator who won't follow international treaties?
Also, let's not forget that "rights" are merely certain activities that people think certain groups of people should be able to do. They are as arbitrary as any other human decision, and having a uniform set of "inalienable rights" is damned near impossible. Any given leader can feel their particular group has a "right" to exterminate another group, and you quickly get genocide for the sake of rights.
War is hell. Go watch some children on a playground, and see how they start fights. One kid will do something without realizing it offends another, and it starts an argument leading to a fight. Countries are a lot like children. What one sees as an advance in research is seen by another as aggressive posturing.
I didn't say development. I said complex.
I want to see some unusual personality traits, a few quirks, and some out-of-place habits. Real people have those. I don't want a character telling me every twenty minutes how he lost his <body part> to the <current enemy>, implying that nothing happened before or after the current situation.
Heck, it's even a good move for the various copyright lovers out there: By leaving a complex character unrevealed, you can push more sales of books/sequels/prequels that fill in more details of the world!
An example off the top of my head is Jack Sparrow's "piece of eight" in Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End. Through two full movies, Jack's various personal decorations were simply decorations. In the end, there's a reason for some of them, which can be assumed (via suspension of disbelief) to have been the reason all along. It builds the character without distraction.
Yep. Assuming it is indeed Minecraft's Notch, it makes me happy.
And who exactly might that be? Perhaps a mercenary or two starting a conflict between a few villages, but I can't think of any major conflict in the past few decades started by corruption.
If you're just defending yourself (or others), then I have no problem with it.
I'm sure every leader who's gone to war would agree with you. They all had reasons they felt to be very good. Maybe it was defending their honor, their land, their resources, or their security. Maybe they just felt their precious bodily fluids were being corrupted by the terrible enemy at the gates. It all makes perfect sense to them, and everybody else's reasons are senseless.
It makes perfect sense. Patents grant a monopoly on a particular technology for a length of time ideally long enough for a competent inventor-turned-businessman to recoup their investment and be rewarded for their idea.
It does take a significant amount of thought to take an existing idea and adapt it to another use. A forum is composed mainly of flat threads and very clearly-defined and well-regulated content. Webpages are far more complex, with some elements hidden, and no clean determination of what's meaningful and what isn't. There's an investment in the adaptation, and the patent reflects that by granting the monopoly, but only among browsers. If the forum idea were patented, it'd need to be included by reference.
Even if the new patent did cover a pre-existing idea, it needs to be patented to be clear-cut prior art. Without a well-defined patent, slight variations can and should be patented as novel non-obvious improvements.
Patents do not imply "I thought of this first", they imply "I'm did it exactly like this first."
Forum software before 1999, perhaps... but not browsers. Patents are very specific. "Like X, but on a browser!" is a valid claim, if X only claims the feature for forum software.
Now filmmakers will focus on compelling stories, complex characters, and complete worlds, right? Right? Please?
North Korea claims they were attacked by South Korean terrorists. Are they justified to attack South Korea now?
My personal religious views aside, I see no reason to count religion as any more insane than an historical land feud between rival groups. How is it any worse to believe that your god is mad at somebody rather than your great-great-great-great-grandfather?
What qualifies anyone, or any particular group, to decide what's an insane reason?
Claim 1:
...provide a tool bar within a web browser application window, the tool bar including a button, for activating a highlighting operation...
Yep, they're patenting a browser feature. Three slight variations (claims 1, 7, 12), but all browser features.
It appears they're patenting a browser button that will highlight the things you searched for, in any page. I don't use Google Toolbar, but it appears to be already implemented.
With no browser additions, the user has to search for something with Google, go to a page, then open find and search for the exact same terms to find where the relevant information is on the page. With this patented idea implemented, one only has to search for pages, go to one, then click a single button to go to the information on the page.
The summary is, as usual, misleading. To my knowledge, Windows itself has no such feature, nor any other program I've seen for that matter.
What about the people living near the North Korean border under constant threat of attack? What about defending the citizens of Iraq targeted by Operation Anfal? Where's the line between initiating a war and defending others?
Maybe the ones who initiated Operation Anfal were the Kurds, who settled down to live in Iraq where they might someday have not been wanted. Maybe it's the fault of the immigrants' parents, for having children who might settle there. Maybe it's the fault of the first people over a thousand years ago who separated into modern-day Kurds.
Or maybe, just maybe, war isn't something that can be so easily avoided.
Conflicts happen in any society, and the violence increases as they escalate. I doubt there's any leader in recent times who has started a war for his own enjoyment. Everyone feels their cause is justified, whether it's bloody murder or not. The best anyone can do is try to reduce the number of conflicts (by choosing skilled diplomats as leaders) or reduce the amount of pain (by improving the accuracy of weapons, control of troops, and improving the medical care).
So when was the last time you volunteered to be shot in the chest, to help train field medics? Sure, dummies are limited, but every advancement means better knowledge beforehand. That means fewer mistakes when the real thing comes along.