"they restrict you doing something no matter how you do it "
Actually that is entirely untrue. If you find a way to determine the delivery address for a gift, and Amazon's patent doesn't describe that way of determining the delivery address, then you are free to do it, patent it yourself, etc. If you "find a better way", the law explicitly recognizes that as a new invention.
You cannot patent "doing something". You can patent "a device that does something", and apparently "a method of doing something". Granted when/. discusses a patent they always act like it's a patent on "doing <whatever>", but that is not the case.
Copyright does not come down to "basically [doing] the equivalent of a diff". Literal copying is only one form of potential copyright infringement; there are many ways to modify a work and still infringe on the original; and determining whether your work was the source of material in my work is really only the first step (and the easiest step) in determining infringement.
Trademark is far from "easy to evaluate"; I'm not sure I can think of any law with definitions as murky and subjective as trademark.
I don't know that individuals moving from job to job has anything to do with the original purpose of patents. If a company chooses to protect knowledge instead of patent/publish it, they make a trade secret of it. They can do this today with patent law, they could do it without patent law, and an employee taking the idea to his next employer could be sued off the map.
I'd say that sometimes patents do serve their intended purpose, but that even when they do people are more inclined to see them as unfair restrictions because "I could've thought of that".
There is a little sleight of hand in that wording.
Some of the patent claims actually involve contacting the recipient in various ways to get delivery info. A nice feature in some situations, though I wouldn't be entirely surprised if there were prior art (though as I've mentioned elsewhere I'm not specifically aware of any).
Others, however, do involve going to 4th-party sources - online databases of contact info, I think it even mentions DNS records as a place to check, etc. This is the part I think least likely anyone else had thought of; but then again, it's the part I'm not sure I would want to rely on when trying to send someone a gift...
Maybe it is, maybe it isn't; I'm holding off to hear more arguments.
The submitter and at least one other poster are convinced that it's not at some obvious level, and I guess I'm missing the basis for that. So here are my questions:
1) Did you read the patent claims? 2) Do you know of anyone in the history of online shopping that has done the thigns the patent claims cover?
My answers: Yes I did; and No, I honestly haven't.
Lack of prior art alone doesn't prove something to be patentable, but if (as submitter applies) there is nothing novel about this patent, then I would be surprised to see we'd gone this far with online shopping and never seen it. Remember that just because something is novel, doesn't mean it doesn't "seem obvious" after someone has pointed it out...
Ah. You're unwilling to be convinced that mirrors will behave like mirrors in front of this particular laser, unless I can provide you the detailed specs of this particular laser. Suit yourself.
Yes, it would be reckless to jump straight to conclusions from these messages. However, this does point to questions that nobody would otherwise know to ask. I guess the question is, should this organization be expected to explain unpublished comments from internal emails/
The thing about climate science is, it's really hard to get an independent dataset from which to test for reproducability of results. To me this makes it reasonable to expect more scrutiny into what the people who are in custody of that data do - not just into what they judge to be suitable for publication.
So you don't care what the answer is, but you want to know, but when someone tells you and you don't like their answer (though supposedly you didn't care), they're "hand-waving"? Weirdo.
1) "Makes me upset?" What makes you think you know my emotional state?
2) I'm not making "conjectures". I'm applying basic physics to a simple problem, and you're disliking the answer. The problem isn't that I haven't connected all the dots; the problem is that you don't understand the principles well enough to see that I have.
3) What makes you think I "expect" you to accept that I am right? How many times do I have to say this: If you want to hold out hope for some fantasy mirror-shield to be used against laser weapons, go ahead. If it's practical, someone is working on it, and now that laser weapons are seeing the light of day we'd see the shield soon enough. We won't, because as much as you want to think I might be wrong I'm not; but if you don't want to believe that, I don't care.
4) "shouldn't be hard to substantiate (other than giving numbers on mirror reflectivity)"? The hell you say? If 2 plus 2 is obviously 4, then you should be able to prove it easily without using integers.
5) "Where did you get the idea that I believe a reflective surface will defeat this weapon?" Uh... because the only statement I've made is that it won't, and you're arguing with me.
If there is a settlement, two things will probably happen:
1) The settlement will stipulate any changes to MS's behavior. It may be that MS admits no fault, and doesn't change their behavior. It may be that MS agrees to some change in their terms, but likely not one that will make much real difference. (When Columbia House lost a class action, they had to change the name of one of their fees.) Once MS complies with the changes in the settlement, it will be harder - not easier - to sue them going forward.
(Oh, and meanwhile it becomes impossible for anyone who doesn't specifically opt out of the suit to file their own action relating to MS's past behavior, even if the reason that they didn't opt out is that they never hear about the suit.)
2) MS will pay $X, but will run a court-sponsored marketing campaign that draws in >$X. What do I mean? I mean what you're gonig to get paid with if you're a class member will be store credit, and it will only be enough to discount something - so you will end up paying MS, not the other way around.
"Could be" != "legally must be". If a feature is part of the service, and the TOS say you can be banned from the service if you do X, and you do X, then they don't have to provide that feature to you anymore.
You paid a lot of money for a service and its add-ons without knowing the terms under which that service could be terminated? Why would you put yourself in that position?
Don't get me wrong, it's not just you. We've become a society of fools just waiting to be parted from our money. We're so addicted to convenience that we agree to pages of legalese without making the first effort to understand what we're agreeing to, just hoping that if it turns out to have a term we don't like the courts will take pity on us and overturn the agreement.
Of course, we get the full benefit of every agreement that doesn't come to that, which makes us no better than an insurance company that happily takes your premiums until you file a claim and then finds an excuse to retroactively terminate your policy.
Hell, when I bought my house the lender didn't put a copy of the mortgage agreement in my hands until signing day, and then acted surprised when I actually read it. For a freaking mortgage - an agreement that will be with me for potentially 30 years and will involve more money than any other agreement I've ever signed.
Yeah, the outcome for some people who modified their consoles sucks for them, I think everyone gets that. That alone doesn't make it necessarily wrong.
Yeah, because the years of lawsuits up till now have done a lot to make EULA less obnoxious.
Oh, wait, quite the opposite is true. Inconceivably, industry has built so much around the idea of EULA that now courts have been siding with them apparently out of fear of the disruption that would be caused by forcing a change, even in cases where the EULA is being blatantly used to abuse the customer.
If you want to reform EULA, take it to the legislature. Trying to change the law through the judicial system is folly.
So, tell me - when you signed up for the subscription, did the terms you agreed to include language to the effect that if you modify your console you will be banned from the network without refund? If so, then you're going to have to modify your analogy a little.
Oh, and "I don't know, I didn't read the terms" is not a valid answer to the question. If you don't know, find out. If you don't know and the answer is "yes, it did", then you're failure to know is your own fault.
Only if the terms of the agreement didn't allow them to terminate the subscription without refund is it theft.
"does not change substantive rights to any sort of compensation"
In theory, that's true. In practice, it's completely false.
First of all, if the court figures you fit the definition of the class and you do nothing (say, because the notice of the suit gets misplaced and you never hear about it), then you lose your right to sue over the matter - after all, you were supposedly already represented - and yet you get zero compensation. But let's ignore that and assume we're talking about people who knowingly participate in the class...
Assuming there is a settlement paid (and by the way, in this instance I agree with those who think there shouldn't be, but I've seen a lot of bogus "consumer protection" class actions get paid off so I'm guessing this one will be too), we could debate whether the lawyers' share of such settlement will be fair. I believe the typical split is excessive, just as you'd expect when the class members aren't at the negotiating table.
But more interesting than that, the plaintifs' cut will not be allocated to guarantee that everyone gets paid. Instead a fund will be set up, and paid on a first come first served basis until it runs out. If you're part of the class and the fund runs out before you get paid, then your right to compensation damned well does get changed.
Plus, if you do get paid, you're unlikely to get paid in cash. When Apple lost a class action, the court let them get by with giving out coupons, driving business to them from customers that otherwise might have been pissed enough to walk away. Same deal when Columbia House lost. It's pretty much the typical structure of the payout. That's not a settlement; it's a marketing promotion. Yeah, that deters bad behavior. You bet.
Uh, right. Make it harder for the poor to operate their heat and AC by inflating electricity costs across the board, in the hope that the middle-class-and-up group will connect their rising energy bills to TV usage and cut back rather than just complaining about the new tax and moving on unchanged.
Or, make the Energy Star guidelines that target the specific issue mandatory (roughly what CA did), leaving energy costs unchanged. Without trying to change consumers' habits you save energy (and lower their energy bills). If the standards were as devastating as the submitter wants you to believe, you'd be doing a lot of economic damage along the way. Given a well-written piece saying they're not, and a screaming rant saying they are, I know who I'm inclined to believe, but I guess time will tell.
I'm skeptical of the idea that you could make the entire plane literally transparent to the laser. Can't really even discuss the potential effectiveness until there's a plausible design to evaluate.
I suppose you could look into bending light around the craft. The science around that idea is far less established than the science of mirrors, so again it's hard to say what could be accomplished with that approach. If you could pull it off, there might also be stealth benefits; but you do have to let some light in for the pilot.
"Well, we are talking about the properties of mirrors being exposed to high energy lasers."
Oh my gosh, it hadn't occured to me that maybe a mirror that reflects 95% of the light hitting it, when exposed to a high-energy laser, might magically absorb less than 5% of the energy! I'll go study high-energy lasers so I can find out of maybe that's true!
Or not. Perhaps I'll just rely on the fact that I can comprehend "reflects 95% of the light hitting it" and apply it even in situations where I don't hold graduate-level knowledge of every element.
"What research are you referring to by the way? Any links?"
I suppose you must be deliberately misinterpreting the phrase "do a little research". As I've mentioned before, you can find the same facts I'm using with simple internet searches.
"Do you expect people to take your word for it "
I expect people to do their own digging if they want a deeper understanding. They'll find the same things I have every time this idea has been discussed. In fact, if you're capable of understanding the principles involved, you could've proved the point to yourself for far less effort than you've spent trying to convince me that I don't know.
But you're too busy wanting this mirror idea to somehow have a chance of being workable. So go on holding out hope, and again if I'm wrong we'll no doubt start hearing of reflective laser defenses soon enough.
Oh, I'm sorry, is this a court of law? WTF makes you think you have the authority to demand I provide you with "proof" you find acceptable before I'm allowed to state a position?
If anything, the claim needing (and lacking) proof is that it's possible to make a mirror that could reflect a laser weapon. I again refer you to the OP in this thread. Note that what I (and many others) posted was a reply. Show me a citation for a mirror that could plausibly do it, and I'll admit you have a point; but you can't, because there is none. So far we've looked at typical mirrors (~85%), lab mirrors (~95%), frequency-specific mirrors (~99% if you know what frequency light the enemy will use), a patent for mirrors for use with lasers (unspecified%, and requires maintenance of a polish on the order of a few molecules maximum roughness to attain whatever that might be)... yet nothing remotely suitable to the task.
I've provided links and resources you can use to verify that no mirror is reflective enough under combat conditions to do what is being suggested. I'm not sufficiently interested in your education to do more than that, so if you want to go on believing such an idea is going to be the undoing of laser weapon use in practice - and that nobody doing the actual weapons research has thought of it for some reason - then go on thinking that.
I'm honestly not sure what exactly MS is patenting.
This doesn't look like an attemptt to patent sparkilnes, much as the headline wants to paint it that way (and many commenters seem to be playing along). If it were, the claims would describe how to visualize data as a sparkline; instead, right from the very beginning of claim 1, they take the concept of a sparkline as a given.
So it's not sparklines; its the association of a sparline to data and presentation parametesr in an Excel document that they msut be trying to protect. Is it a bad patent? Maybe; the associations to Excel elements could be obvious. But to assert that every sparkline out there (but not used in an Excel document and integrated with it in the ways the patent describes) is prior art would be incorrect. Since nobody but MS could add this feature to Excel, I doubt there's any prior art. It could be that similar use of sparklines in another spreadsheet package would qualify, unless there's something unique about the way it's done in the Excel format.
There is nothing inherantly wrong with a patent on an invention that depends on / incorporates an element that itself would not be patentable.
Slashdot Mirror
"they restrict you doing something no matter how you do it "
Actually that is entirely untrue. If you find a way to determine the delivery address for a gift, and Amazon's patent doesn't describe that way of determining the delivery address, then you are free to do it, patent it yourself, etc. If you "find a better way", the law explicitly recognizes that as a new invention.
You cannot patent "doing something". You can patent "a device that does something", and apparently "a method of doing something". Granted when /. discusses a patent they always act like it's a patent on "doing <whatever>", but that is not the case.
Copyright does not come down to "basically [doing] the equivalent of a diff". Literal copying is only one form of potential copyright infringement; there are many ways to modify a work and still infringe on the original; and determining whether your work was the source of material in my work is really only the first step (and the easiest step) in determining infringement.
Trademark is far from "easy to evaluate"; I'm not sure I can think of any law with definitions as murky and subjective as trademark.
I don't know that individuals moving from job to job has anything to do with the original purpose of patents. If a company chooses to protect knowledge instead of patent/publish it, they make a trade secret of it. They can do this today with patent law, they could do it without patent law, and an employee taking the idea to his next employer could be sued off the map.
I'd say that sometimes patents do serve their intended purpose, but that even when they do people are more inclined to see them as unfair restrictions because "I could've thought of that".
There is a little sleight of hand in that wording.
Some of the patent claims actually involve contacting the recipient in various ways to get delivery info. A nice feature in some situations, though I wouldn't be entirely surprised if there were prior art (though as I've mentioned elsewhere I'm not specifically aware of any).
Others, however, do involve going to 4th-party sources - online databases of contact info, I think it even mentions DNS records as a place to check, etc. This is the part I think least likely anyone else had thought of; but then again, it's the part I'm not sure I would want to rely on when trying to send someone a gift...
Maybe it is, maybe it isn't; I'm holding off to hear more arguments.
The submitter and at least one other poster are convinced that it's not at some obvious level, and I guess I'm missing the basis for that. So here are my questions:
1) Did you read the patent claims?
2) Do you know of anyone in the history of online shopping that has done the thigns the patent claims cover?
My answers: Yes I did; and No, I honestly haven't.
Lack of prior art alone doesn't prove something to be patentable, but if (as submitter applies) there is nothing novel about this patent, then I would be surprised to see we'd gone this far with online shopping and never seen it. Remember that just because something is novel, doesn't mean it doesn't "seem obvious" after someone has pointed it out...
Ah. You're unwilling to be convinced that mirrors will behave like mirrors in front of this particular laser, unless I can provide you the detailed specs of this particular laser. Suit yourself.
Yes, it would be reckless to jump straight to conclusions from these messages. However, this does point to questions that nobody would otherwise know to ask. I guess the question is, should this organization be expected to explain unpublished comments from internal emails/
The thing about climate science is, it's really hard to get an independent dataset from which to test for reproducability of results. To me this makes it reasonable to expect more scrutiny into what the people who are in custody of that data do - not just into what they judge to be suitable for publication.
So you don't care what the answer is, but you want to know, but when someone tells you and you don't like their answer (though supposedly you didn't care), they're "hand-waving"? Weirdo.
Can you provide a citation for that law? I don't think such a law exists, since cell phone providers still differ on that poilcy.
Doesn't really matter. Your subscription wasn't canceled. Your account is still active unless the original term is up.
Nice try, though.
You're not making any sense, chief.
1) "Makes me upset?" What makes you think you know my emotional state?
2) I'm not making "conjectures". I'm applying basic physics to a simple problem, and you're disliking the answer. The problem isn't that I haven't connected all the dots; the problem is that you don't understand the principles well enough to see that I have.
3) What makes you think I "expect" you to accept that I am right? How many times do I have to say this: If you want to hold out hope for some fantasy mirror-shield to be used against laser weapons, go ahead. If it's practical, someone is working on it, and now that laser weapons are seeing the light of day we'd see the shield soon enough. We won't, because as much as you want to think I might be wrong I'm not; but if you don't want to believe that, I don't care.
4) "shouldn't be hard to substantiate (other than giving numbers on mirror reflectivity)"? The hell you say? If 2 plus 2 is obviously 4, then you should be able to prove it easily without using integers.
5) "Where did you get the idea that I believe a reflective surface will defeat this weapon?" Uh... because the only statement I've made is that it won't, and you're arguing with me.
"So your argument boils down to: "The mirror will absorb 5%. QED.""
Wrong, but I'm not getting drawn in to repeating all that I've said just because you're going to pretend you didn't see it.
"I couldn't care less whether this weapon works against reflective aircraft"
Then why are you commenting in a thread discussing whether this weapon could be defeated by making reflective aircraft?
If there is a settlement, two things will probably happen:
1) The settlement will stipulate any changes to MS's behavior. It may be that MS admits no fault, and doesn't change their behavior. It may be that MS agrees to some change in their terms, but likely not one that will make much real difference. (When Columbia House lost a class action, they had to change the name of one of their fees.) Once MS complies with the changes in the settlement, it will be harder - not easier - to sue them going forward.
(Oh, and meanwhile it becomes impossible for anyone who doesn't specifically opt out of the suit to file their own action relating to MS's past behavior, even if the reason that they didn't opt out is that they never hear about the suit.)
2) MS will pay $X, but will run a court-sponsored marketing campaign that draws in >$X. What do I mean? I mean what you're gonig to get paid with if you're a class member will be store credit, and it will only be enough to discount something - so you will end up paying MS, not the other way around.
Yeah, class actions sure are great.
"Could be" != "legally must be". If a feature is part of the service, and the TOS say you can be banned from the service if you do X, and you do X, then they don't have to provide that feature to you anymore.
You paid a lot of money for a service and its add-ons without knowing the terms under which that service could be terminated? Why would you put yourself in that position?
Don't get me wrong, it's not just you. We've become a society of fools just waiting to be parted from our money. We're so addicted to convenience that we agree to pages of legalese without making the first effort to understand what we're agreeing to, just hoping that if it turns out to have a term we don't like the courts will take pity on us and overturn the agreement.
Of course, we get the full benefit of every agreement that doesn't come to that, which makes us no better than an insurance company that happily takes your premiums until you file a claim and then finds an excuse to retroactively terminate your policy.
Hell, when I bought my house the lender didn't put a copy of the mortgage agreement in my hands until signing day, and then acted surprised when I actually read it. For a freaking mortgage - an agreement that will be with me for potentially 30 years and will involve more money than any other agreement I've ever signed.
Yeah, the outcome for some people who modified their consoles sucks for them, I think everyone gets that. That alone doesn't make it necessarily wrong.
Yeah, because the years of lawsuits up till now have done a lot to make EULA less obnoxious.
Oh, wait, quite the opposite is true. Inconceivably, industry has built so much around the idea of EULA that now courts have been siding with them apparently out of fear of the disruption that would be caused by forcing a change, even in cases where the EULA is being blatantly used to abuse the customer.
If you want to reform EULA, take it to the legislature. Trying to change the law through the judicial system is folly.
There have been EULA terms deemed unenforcable, therefore you assume that any EULA term you don't like can be ignored?
Good luck with that.
So, tell me - when you signed up for the subscription, did the terms you agreed to include language to the effect that if you modify your console you will be banned from the network without refund? If so, then you're going to have to modify your analogy a little.
Oh, and "I don't know, I didn't read the terms" is not a valid answer to the question. If you don't know, find out. If you don't know and the answer is "yes, it did", then you're failure to know is your own fault.
Only if the terms of the agreement didn't allow them to terminate the subscription without refund is it theft.
"does not change substantive rights to any sort of compensation"
In theory, that's true. In practice, it's completely false.
First of all, if the court figures you fit the definition of the class and you do nothing (say, because the notice of the suit gets misplaced and you never hear about it), then you lose your right to sue over the matter - after all, you were supposedly already represented - and yet you get zero compensation. But let's ignore that and assume we're talking about people who knowingly participate in the class ...
Assuming there is a settlement paid (and by the way, in this instance I agree with those who think there shouldn't be, but I've seen a lot of bogus "consumer protection" class actions get paid off so I'm guessing this one will be too), we could debate whether the lawyers' share of such settlement will be fair. I believe the typical split is excessive, just as you'd expect when the class members aren't at the negotiating table.
But more interesting than that, the plaintifs' cut will not be allocated to guarantee that everyone gets paid. Instead a fund will be set up, and paid on a first come first served basis until it runs out. If you're part of the class and the fund runs out before you get paid, then your right to compensation damned well does get changed.
Plus, if you do get paid, you're unlikely to get paid in cash. When Apple lost a class action, the court let them get by with giving out coupons, driving business to them from customers that otherwise might have been pissed enough to walk away. Same deal when Columbia House lost. It's pretty much the typical structure of the payout. That's not a settlement; it's a marketing promotion. Yeah, that deters bad behavior. You bet.
'Why not have a zero tax bracket for low electricity users?'
You want a progressive energy tax? Wow, that sounds like a terrible idea. Any idea how you'll implement it?
'How is prohibiting the sale of certain items not "trying to change consumer's habits"?'
What habit of the consumers' is it trying to change? Are you under the impression that purchasing a particular model of TV is a "habit"?
'And how is it going to lower energy costs when people are just going to buy the cheaper, less efficient monitors out of state?'
You're falling for a lot of assumptions that the submitter wants to pass off as fact.
Uh, right. Make it harder for the poor to operate their heat and AC by inflating electricity costs across the board, in the hope that the middle-class-and-up group will connect their rising energy bills to TV usage and cut back rather than just complaining about the new tax and moving on unchanged.
Or, make the Energy Star guidelines that target the specific issue mandatory (roughly what CA did), leaving energy costs unchanged. Without trying to change consumers' habits you save energy (and lower their energy bills). If the standards were as devastating as the submitter wants you to believe, you'd be doing a lot of economic damage along the way. Given a well-written piece saying they're not, and a screaming rant saying they are, I know who I'm inclined to believe, but I guess time will tell.
I'm skeptical of the idea that you could make the entire plane literally transparent to the laser. Can't really even discuss the potential effectiveness until there's a plausible design to evaluate.
I suppose you could look into bending light around the craft. The science around that idea is far less established than the science of mirrors, so again it's hard to say what could be accomplished with that approach. If you could pull it off, there might also be stealth benefits; but you do have to let some light in for the pilot.
"Well, we are talking about the properties of mirrors being exposed to high energy lasers."
Oh my gosh, it hadn't occured to me that maybe a mirror that reflects 95% of the light hitting it, when exposed to a high-energy laser, might magically absorb less than 5% of the energy! I'll go study high-energy lasers so I can find out of maybe that's true!
Or not. Perhaps I'll just rely on the fact that I can comprehend "reflects 95% of the light hitting it" and apply it even in situations where I don't hold graduate-level knowledge of every element.
"What research are you referring to by the way? Any links?"
I suppose you must be deliberately misinterpreting the phrase "do a little research". As I've mentioned before, you can find the same facts I'm using with simple internet searches.
"Do you expect people to take your word for it "
I expect people to do their own digging if they want a deeper understanding. They'll find the same things I have every time this idea has been discussed. In fact, if you're capable of understanding the principles involved, you could've proved the point to yourself for far less effort than you've spent trying to convince me that I don't know.
But you're too busy wanting this mirror idea to somehow have a chance of being workable. So go on holding out hope, and again if I'm wrong we'll no doubt start hearing of reflective laser defenses soon enough.
Oh, I'm sorry, is this a court of law? WTF makes you think you have the authority to demand I provide you with "proof" you find acceptable before I'm allowed to state a position?
If anything, the claim needing (and lacking) proof is that it's possible to make a mirror that could reflect a laser weapon. I again refer you to the OP in this thread. Note that what I (and many others) posted was a reply. Show me a citation for a mirror that could plausibly do it, and I'll admit you have a point; but you can't, because there is none. So far we've looked at typical mirrors (~85%), lab mirrors (~95%), frequency-specific mirrors (~99% if you know what frequency light the enemy will use), a patent for mirrors for use with lasers (unspecified%, and requires maintenance of a polish on the order of a few molecules maximum roughness to attain whatever that might be)... yet nothing remotely suitable to the task.
I've provided links and resources you can use to verify that no mirror is reflective enough under combat conditions to do what is being suggested. I'm not sufficiently interested in your education to do more than that, so if you want to go on believing such an idea is going to be the undoing of laser weapon use in practice - and that nobody doing the actual weapons research has thought of it for some reason - then go on thinking that.
I'm honestly not sure what exactly MS is patenting.
This doesn't look like an attemptt to patent sparkilnes, much as the headline wants to paint it that way (and many commenters seem to be playing along). If it were, the claims would describe how to visualize data as a sparkline; instead, right from the very beginning of claim 1, they take the concept of a sparkline as a given.
So it's not sparklines; its the association of a sparline to data and presentation parametesr in an Excel document that they msut be trying to protect. Is it a bad patent? Maybe; the associations to Excel elements could be obvious. But to assert that every sparkline out there (but not used in an Excel document and integrated with it in the ways the patent describes) is prior art would be incorrect. Since nobody but MS could add this feature to Excel, I doubt there's any prior art. It could be that similar use of sparklines in another spreadsheet package would qualify, unless there's something unique about the way it's done in the Excel format.
There is nothing inherantly wrong with a patent on an invention that depends on / incorporates an element that itself would not be patentable.
I could tell it was fake from some of the words, and having seen a lot of slashdot submissions in my day.
Not sure I've seen it phrased quite that way, but yes, there is. And it is completely inapplicable to this situation.