Wait until fundamentalist religious groups realize how much culture they could remove simply by buying the copyrights to those works. Once a fundamentalist Christian, Jewish, or Muslim group realizes that by investing billions of dollars they could completely control all large media, the culture war will truly begin.

But then who would examine all of the applications from lawyers who are not fluent in English?

Perhaps more interestingly, the USPTO uses Microsoft Word itself.

The problem with your suggestion is that it forces the inventor to disclose his idea to other potential competitors in the field without any guarantee of obtaining a patent. While many patent applications are published today, a significant fraction are not.

Most "patent clerks" are engineers with at least BS degrees in the field. They also have typically been spending the past few years looking at patent applications that are very similar to the one under examination. They are probably more familiar with the art than a randomly chosen "expert" who has a MS degree in the field.

While it may cost $10 grand to prepare and file a patent application, the USPTO only receives $1090 for an application. The rest goes to the patent attorney who writes it. Increasing the fee would probably allow for better examinations though.

I agree with the parent. The grandparent's suggestion completely matches the system in place today. The one difference I have with the parent is that the more senior examiner is really more equivalent to the BPAI (Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences) than the supervising examiner.

It's not linear size that shrinks, but rather area. This gives us about 8 more generations before we hit 4nm wires. The more common period is 24 months between generations. That gives us roughly 15 years before we hit that limit.

Actually, Wikipedia is possibly the worst place to publish it. You are better off just posting it on your own site and letting Google index it. The USPTO frowns on using Wikipedia as prior art.

The US Patent Office is always looking for Computer Science people to examine patent applications. No coding or fixing other people's computers involved. Plus, there is no more direct way to keep out bad software patents.