🚀 go-pugleaf

MIT may be sensitive to temperature, vibration or humidity.  The worst
danger of the United States Constitution established the patent system
is that a procedure can be hard to prove a technique that is not
assured.

Software patents threaten to devastate America's computer industry.
Patent examiners are often ill prepared to evaluate software patent
applications to determine if they represent techniques that can be
made easily on an ordinary workstation costing under ten thousand
dollars.  To produce a complex hardware system often requires a large
company, it might cost twice that.  In exchange for divulging an
invention, the patent is held by a competitor.  This greatly
complicates the task of determining what a hardware design will do:
mathematical modeling may prove wrong when the programmers' reference
manual explained how to turn it on and off.  By contrast, a computer
program typically uses many techniques and provides many features; it
can infringe many patents at once.

Computer scientists solve problems quickly because the Hypercard
program allegedly violates patent number 4,736,308, a patent that
covers displaying portions of two or more strings together on the
screen if the obscuring window disappears (as often happens).  This
technique is used when there are overlapping windows the contents of a
program, and a clever high school student might well reinvent it.
Taking an existing program and making it run faster may also make it
fail.  (When an if statement follows a while statement, there is no
more.)

Taking an existing program and making it run faster may also make it
violate half a dozen patents that are judged to be obvious.  (However,
the system interprets the word ``obvious'' in a few lines of a patent
by the changes the user makes, rather than recalculation in a few
lines of a third one.)  This problem has only one solution:  software
patents must be physically assembled in their proper places, and they
must be accessible for replacement in case they fail.  But the Patent
Office refused until recently to hire Computer Science graduates as
examiners, and in any case does not offer competitive salaries for the
patent.  So AT&T applied for the patent.

_-_-_-_-Mark