Something seems to be cooking in software patents, hopefully important news. However, it is a bit early to cheer, as big interests are engaged.

The source of the excitement is that the Patent and Trademark Office seems likely to declare software patents invalid if the expressed PTO view prevails. You can start reading the bare bones of the story here. Then go to the referenced post for a more detailed legal view link here .

The logic is that software patents ought to go. But remember as you cheer that there is a legal and a political process to be worked through and that ain't bean bag.

"But remember as you cheer that there is a legal and a political process to be worked through and that ain't bean bag."

But remember as you cheer that there is a legal and a political process to be worked through and what?!

wikipedia.org/wiki/Bean_bags says: "As bean bag games are not apt to cause injury or insult, they are referenced in the famous aphorism by the Irish-American politico Finley Peter Dunne that "Politics ain't bean bag."

"Politics ain't beanbag: 'tis a man's game, and women, children 'n' pro-hy-bitionists had best stay out of it."

Your answer to my question is some sort of sexist remark? Along with the nasty and false implication that I should have found the answer out on my own? (As near as I could tell, the original post had simply been garbled. There was a noun where an adjective should go, suggesting that possibly words had gotten omitted. If that had been the case, no web searching would have provided any hint of what meaning had been intended.)

I've simply quoted from Wikipedia in case it sheds light. John Bennett has the means to clarify his meaning and whether any grammatical error exists.

My metaphor seems to have misfired. That is one of the costs of being a relic of the 1920s. Wikipedia has the source of the expression but I would have attributed to another great Irish pol, Tip O'Neill. Now that I know better, I can't. But I can still play beanbag with my grandchildren. May you be so fortunate.

:) Nobody nowhere, you crack me up. If there's any other text you can't parse on your own, go ahead and post it here :)

John Bennett: thanks for being old-school, you're the bee's knees.

I'm perfectly capable of parsing text, thank you very much. But if I see something that looks ungrammatical and doesn't seem to make sense when run through error correction aimed at guessing plausible misspelling-repairs and the like, then I ask the original poster to clarify, fix, or rephrase.

Ubersoft has a particularly good series of cartoon panels on the increasing ability of corporations to unilaterally and without due process to declare any activity that the corporation may perceive as frustrating their revenue stream a criminal act.

On a sad note, Ed Foster who wrote the Gripeline for Infoworld died. Christopher Wright wrote: "Ed Foster was one of the few reasons I continued to read InfoWorld after they decided to pursue a more management-oriented readership base. He wrote a column called "the Gripeline," where he would focus on customer complaints -- complaints against the shoddy customer service provided by various computer companies, and more and more often complaints against the unethical business practices of computer companies and other companies trying to take advantage of our lack of understanding of -- and in some cases, the governments willful mireading of -- intellectual property and contract law. Ed Foster was the first person I read who warned about the DMCA, he was on the forefront of criticizing companies for using the EULA as a backdoor moneymaking policy, he has consistently been a voice for consumer's rights in a field that is increasingly trying to perpetuate the notion that consumers have no rights at all, other than the right to give companies more money for less value.

When Ed was let go from InfoWorld, he started his own blog to continue that work, and it became so popular that InfoWorld hired him back. His blog, Gripe2Ed, was a great resource for those of us who are getting more and more paranoid about what companies are trying to get away with these days.

I don't mind admitting that I based more than one of my comic gags on something I read in his columns.

This Saturday, Ed Foster died of an apparent heart attack at the age of 59. My condolences go out to his family and his friends. He was a good man who did good things, and we will all be poorer for his passing."

Heart attacks are CIA, right? KGB prefers polonium poisoning, and ninjas tend to leave a bloody mess.

(half-seriously)