Nice answer but you've forgetting that an "idea" has nothing to do with research, has nothing to do with how well you can mass produce it or any of the other distractions to my argument. You can't plan an idea, you can only influence peoples minds with facts, experience etc in the hope that something original will come out of it. Whether you came up with the idea or not, building a factory and/or pumping out products has nothing to do with the act of inventing. Inventors (which I include myself as) come up with good ideas because they have a deep interest in the subject. I have spent no money coming up with great ideas. It is a fallacy that the idea costs time/money.... it's the education/knowledge/experience necessary to come up with great ideas that does. Software should be considered in the same spirit as business processes, art, music and mathematics.

I think the inventor should go out of business if they can't make their idea work properly as a product. They shouldn't hold the rest of the industry to ransom. Software ideas are cheap, quick and serendipitous, its the implementation that cost time and money.

The problem as I see it is that the inventor of an idea may not have created the best implementation of that idea. Someone else may come along and want to create a better product that uses the (unchanged) original patent, but they can't because the inventor sees this as competition. Who should suffer? The individual inventor, or society at large by putting up with an inadequate product? Software patents are a monopoly on ideas in an industry where ideas are the building blocks of progress.

Software patents are clearly a huge mistake. The US should never have allowed them. They are costing business in the US a fortune and do nothing to protect the little guy inventor with the next idea that will change the world. They are simply a tax on innovation and must be stopped immediately.

I agree, this is a demographically skewed answer by the looks of things. I'm sure if Slashdot geoIP'd their users they would find that most of them in North America and Europe. In Brazil they make pizza with more toppings and less base (whereas in the UK, where I'm from, it's more base and less topping). Some pizzas I've had in Brazil have about an inch of topping.

They appear to be harvesting ever more information about us. Where do we draw the line??... "Google CCTV Home Security", "Google Banking Services", "Google Medical Records". But perhaps they don't need to go this far so long as we all adopt their new Chrome OS!!!

You are so right. I'm a Brit living in Sao Paulo Brazil, and my I can tell you that South America can be a very dangerous place. Being western tourist with a laptop and NOT being robbed/kidnapped after flashing it around at every wifi hotspot means that you've been a lucky SOB. Only last week a coffee shop near here was held up at gunpoint and all the customers robbed of all their laptops.

Talk about flogging a dead horse. Email is dead, long live the Wave!!!