Searching & reading may be all free at www.uspto.gov but no self-respecting patent searcher uses it for anything more than a cursory inquiry. The pto site is slow and clunky and can only display one page of a patent (or patent publication) at a time. Google patents is way better, but incomplete, so if the one reference that really makes a difference to you is one Google don't have in their archive, you're SOL. The pto does offer an extraordinarily great searching tool called EAST. It's also free, and it's a purpose-built app for patent searching. One you learn how to use it you'll be able to bang through hundreds of relevant patents an hour (depending on the type of art you're searching for). You can also search international patents. It's the ne plus ultra of patent searching tools. Oh, the catch. You have to travel to the patent office's public search room in Alexandria, VA to use it.

Section 1201 also says this:

(c) OTHER RIGHTS, ETC., NOT AFFECTED- (1) Nothing in this section shall affect rights, remedies, limitations, or defenses to copyright infringement, including fair use, under this title.

This should suggest the ban on anti-circumvention does not apply to fair use, e.g., making a backup copy on your own hard drive for your own personal use.

That's hilarious. Not because the poster looked for a report prior art button, which is not an unreasonable expectation, but because the USPTO website has been a disorganized, idiotic mess for years. Compared to the EPO patent site, and to even basic usability standards, the USPTO site is an embarrassment.

> OpenOffice.org 3.1's new features: eye candy

First on the list is EYE CANDY? Say it ain't so.

How about something useful, like default "paste unformatted"? The lack of a default paste unformatted option in Word and now OO is the single greatest source of needless clicks in my word processing day. Many users never need to paste the source formatting along with the text. Yet, with every paste the user is forced navigate to a paste special list to do the job a single click or keypress should be doing. It's a great inefficiency that could easily be remedied with a simple option setting. So please, spare me the eye candy, or at least, make the damn thing better than Word - not almost as good as Word.

I also recommend Avast. It's saved my butt many times.