Please complete this sentence:
I think they already [are/are not] in the wrong hands.

puh-leez

We really hope you'll contribute a lot more in the distant future.

anecdotal or otherwise, because maybe you feel this is so obvious that none is needed?

A strong immune system keeps cancer at bay - this is a duh.
But our lifestyles are increasingly focused on pathogen and stressor avoidance instead of encountering and overcoming them. Most people look at me as if I'm crazy when I say I like going out in the cold because it's good for me, and as many think I'm a kook when I ask them if they have ever drank water from a stream. Activities in the outside world boost our immunity, and we perform them less and less, and de-germ our environments more and more. I, for one, think there is a correlation.

let's let math drive the specification process! Because human opinion and behavior is so predictable there must be a wave function for our target market segment. Wait, I have it! BeN+d = oVEr

you aren't doing much on your computer. Try doing special effects graphics, or stock market analysis. Or even just start up an Android emulator - it's excruciatingly slow.

Because you can never have too many cores that you aren't using most of the time.

How about more speed? Or is that too hard?

still believed Slashdot was worth reading...
past tense intended.

and some that doesn't.

I didn't understand the obviousness test and now I do, thanks.

And therefore it is the name of test itself that is one of the horrific failures in this debacle.

What you described is not at all an obviousness test, it's a prior-patent test. It simply asks, has this been patented before in other ways? So it has nothing to do with whether it is obvious to someone skilled in the art. It's a red herring to think that this is testing obviosity. (ahem, new word.)

And hence when you say " maybe it's not obvious, even if in hindsight it looks simple. Maybe the solution is brilliant in its elegance and simplicity."
Right, and the answer to your Big Maybe is - unmeasurable, unreproducible, and based utterly on opinion. And therefore is a farce and incites argument from the get-go, no matter what the USPTO calls it, to try to test for it that way.

But thanks for helping me to understand why the software obviousness test has failed so badly - because it doesn't test obviousness and therefore hasn't failed. It only tests to see if it is already patented in a different form. But that makes me wonder if the test itself can be challenged, because it doesn't test at all what it implies that it tests. And if the intent is truly that obvious things should not be patentable, then the definition of the test can be proved faulty - it's obvious to me that it can ;)

" Copyright is next to useless for smaller programmers, because it's protecting the wrong thing. Basically, copyright protects the exact work,

In my never-to-be-humble-opinion, it's the exact work that should be protected, not the idea that lead to it. Because there's only two things in my job - the idea I'm trying to implement, and the code that implements it. If I'm not protecting the code, then I'm protecting the idea. So software patents are idea patents, because they are all ideas with "on a computer" appended to them.

Event-driven programming is HELL, except for interfaces. Every once in a while a DB trigger is justified, but event-driven languages have failed time and time again because... it's impossible to predict what will happen when and avalanche of eventual complexity causes the system to implode under its own weight.

For a programming language to make the cut, it must be utterly predictable down to the last side-effect.
 

I would love to agree with you, because to me they are all obvious. But the problem lies in the test itself - it is not at all measurable. It is based entirely on opinion, and thus it varies based on the particular "expert" testimony. And what is obvious this year may not have been obvious last year, and that makes it un-pin-downable to me. To me it is a losing battle to try to strike down patent by patent on obviousness. They can go either way, and so it is a never-ending battle, and the lawyers get richer. The only realistic way to approach obviousness is to argue its fallibility, bias-proneness, and slippery-slopedness in general, and strike it down as an untennable test, which must be either replaced with an unbiased, independently-reproducible test, or the system must be revoked as a whole as unfair.

And since you are obliviously experience and open-minded about this, what do you think of that approach?