"suggesting an additional good or service... based on certain information obtained about the customer and the initial purchase" is not a 101 "process" as defined by the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court has defined "process" as "technological process". Therefor it falls outside the statute and 103 does not apply. Even non obvious improvements that are actually novel would not apply. Your patent has to target something in the list of things in 101.

The supreme court has over the last century defined what the words in that statement mean.
The word "abstract" is just shorthand for "not a process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter or new and usefull improvement thereof"
The supreme court has a very narrow and limited definition of "process" for this statute.

Patents don't disclose source code. So they don't teach a programmer how to "put the bits of plastic together". There is not enough utility in the patents. When creating a finanical application I am better off reading a textbook about finance than looking at patents. The textbook teaches the same thing but uses langauge a programmer can understand. If the patents disclosed souce code then there would be more fans. Patents could become an alternative to open source. The goverment could be using patents to build a library of code that future generations can build applications off of. Instead we get lawyers poorly paraphrasing existing knowledge.

I think you mean the world wide web, web pages, and personal computers. The fundamental internet parts were invented much earlier when mainframes were connnected. For example email has its roots in the 70s. Many internet standards were first published in the 80s.

Depends on what you do. I have heard of a person the delivered sql that had no where clause. It quickly choked up all the databases. Slowed all applications enterprise wide. It caused a complete outage in a corporate application the workforce used. Took a few hours to fix during the work day. Of course they were fired. They were lucky they were not sued.

How do you revert 10,000 employees not being able to do thier job for 8 hours becasue someone pushed untested sql to production? Fear of changing code is countered by testing. If you know your changes are going to be tested there is nothing to fear. If your not testing then your going to fear changes to code.

I think it is about having a small testing budget. You have budget to test the new feature but not the budget to test the whole application. Testing the feature involves the developer and client doing a day or two of work. Testing the applications involves a team of people running several days worth of formal tests. It is purely rational to push such testing off untill you have a larger release. One problem with Agile is you never get such a release. As everything is done in smaller chuncks.

Ohh I didn't mean my statement as a bash on Microsoft. Personally I think Mojang was too small to take the game where I want it to go. Mojang was just doing incremental improvements like adding bunnies and new types of dirt. I think Microsoft could put 200 people on it and makes something on the scale of grand theft auto.

Mario and Zelda did not have stories when they came out. They had a vague goal to rescue a princess and a paragraph or two in manual that kids didn't read. The Pokemon universe only exists becuase of the card game, anime, and manga.

Why would Notch leave 1.5B in cash in Mojang. He has like 40 employees and pays the rent on 1 building. Minecraft is the 1.5B tangible asset. Mojang could sell Minecraft to another developer for 1.5B. After selling Minecraft away there isn't a way for Microsoft to make another billion off Mojang.

Unless the market has already decided that Minecraft is on the way down and the price has finally become something reasonable. Could be Notch was shopping this around for 10 billion before. I think a Minecraft game still has plenty left in it. I would purchase a version that had smaller blocks. I would purchase a version with an actual story. I would even try an Minecraft mmo.

The mobile price is under $10. A $60 price would sell less copies than a $10 version. Also $10 makes the math easy. :)

54 million sold already. Lets assume they can sell the same amount for Minecraft 2. If they priced it at $10 they would make half a billion. They can probably make more money off DLC on the existing game. And make money off DLC for Minecraft 2. Then there is stuffed creapers and toys. They are still loosing money at 2.5 billion. Was good deal for Notch.

Software is not only mathematics. Example:
print Hello World
The above statement is speech. Now math may be used to transform that statement into 1 ands 0's. More math can transform it into a commands that cause Hello World to be printed. But the code itself exists separate from that implementation. In math there is no "hello" there is no "world". Placing hello next to world has no meaning in mathematics. This is speech.

Congress can modify or repeal treaties by subsequent legislative action, even if this amounts to a violation of the treaty under international law.