For a start you could prevent people taking out patents on things like business practices and software algorithms. Allowing patents on these sorts of things does little to promote innovation (most of the world outside the USA does quite nicely without software patents) and works vastly in the favour of big companies who can use their warchests of patents to hold small companies' ideas to ransom.
I finally can get all my stuff out of outlook, damn it!!! Life sucks when you use outlook and the only thing you get exported out of it is crippled data and e-mail. ugh!
The easiest way to do this without resorting to some sort of file format converter (if there is one for Outlook) is to use Outlook Express to import your Outlook messages, then dump them onto a mail server running IMAP (University of Washington has a free implementation, or use someone else's server). Then you should be able to access the e-mails from any IMAP client.
I had to do something similar once in order to get someones messages out of AOL mail (ugh...)
Now you can argue that the system is flawed till you turn blue in the face, but: a) the system is not as evil as you make it out to be b) this is real life and there are flaws in most things, that doesn't mean we should try to radically overhaul a system that has worked quite well.
When evaluating the value of patents you should not simply look at how well they serve the patent owners, but at how well they serve society as a whole. The system "has worked quite well" if you are looking at it from the perspective of big multinationals but for smaller companies they are, in practice, more of of an encumberance than a utility. So the system is only really working well if you believe that what is in the interest of the mega-multinationals is also in that of the general public.
As for the case of treating PMT sufferers with Prozac, what you really need to ask is: "would this have been discovered without the incentive of a patent being issued?"
Someone correct me on this if I am wrong, but I believe that most of Europe has done without software patents so far, the main exception being the UK. I don't notice a great deal of difference between the levels of innovation between the UK and the rest of Europe.
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For a start you could prevent people taking out patents on things like business practices and software algorithms. Allowing patents on these sorts of things does little to promote innovation (most of the world outside the USA does quite nicely without software patents) and works vastly in the favour of big companies who can use their warchests of patents to hold small companies' ideas to ransom.
Forgot about that... We use Outlook 97 where I work, and it doesn't support IMAP.