They may have been talking about plants as the invasive species.

They forgot this gem:

You don't get it. Dogs pooing north south creates the magnetic field. Your experiment would cause the magnetic poles to shift.

Did that test with a Gros Michel? Gros Michel was the primary banana in the US prior to the 1950s when a desease killed off most of the Gros Michel trees. It is larger than Chiquita Banana.

Woosh ?

A detailed description of a process in a textbook is also enough for any skilled programmer. For Alice and Bilski you can find the steps to perform the process in any finance book. Pseudocode and flow charts don't teach anything when the process is well known. Chances are finance books have charts in them as well. If your talking about a brand new process then your not talking about a software patent. Your patenting a new business method.

I think they would of been better off ruling that performing a known process on a computer is not a new use of use of a known machine. It would of been much clearer ruling that would have had the same effect. Changing the process does not result in a new computer if the computer is a general use(turing complete) computer. They could do this without overturning prior precedent by explaining that the facts changed as software development matured. They could explain that programmers after some given date can be expected to be able turn any detailed description of a process into code without inventing anything. That their conventional steps is not novel and is obvious according to industry testimony.

I won't argue with that. The Supreme Court clearly is defining it more narrowly than the statute. I agree with SCOTUS as policy. Not sure if they are protecting the law though.

You dont' get it. I can get pseudo-code from the finance text book. Any detailed description of the process is pseudo-code. "put the bits of plastic together" is the transformation of that detailed description into actual code. A patent is just a poorly reworded description of that process. It is a description that I need some legalese to understand.

"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.