Regarding patents
It’s really pissing me off seeing companies having to pay gruesome sums of money for ruled US patent infringments. Microsoft had to pay over $5.5 billion so far and this situation will become worse as times goes by.
However, as I have written in the past, I am not against patents. Patents do serve a purpose and bolster research. But I am fully against the US patent system, which is one of the things that USA does really badly. Want to see a good patent system? Go check Japan’s. An international company that has been awarded 50 US patents, it only managed to get 2 in Japan. All the trivialities are trimmed out, because it seems that japanese actually read the bloody application before they stamp it as “approved”.
Either the US patent clerks never read the filed applications, or they don’t understand what they are reading. Both cases are sad.