As I May Think...

It appears that the well-known Amazon "One-Click" patent has been successfully challenged in a re-examination by the USPTO. This patent has always intrigued me for two reasons:

• I've never been able to see anything in it that warranted a patent
• The One-Click patent references two of my patents (5204897,5260999)and I've never been able to figure out why there was any connection between my patents and the "One-Click" patent...

Now, I think we'll all be better off without this patent on the books -- but, I'll miss the links. Hopefully, when people see that it was possible for someone to challenge this patent and have it modified, they'll be encouraged to challenge more of them.

bob wyman

Today, I'm going to do something that becomes harder and harder every day. I'm going to add to the network some lines that apparently aren't already there. I'm going to write something original...

I can do this because the network is still only a few decades old. While billions of lines have already been indexed into the monstrous memories of Google, Ask, and Yahoo!, there still remains an ever-shrinking collection of billions of lines that have yet to be written for the first time. But, time is running out.

Someone first wrote: "Good Morning" and someone else first wrote: "A rose by any other name..." But, when they wrote those words onto the network for the first time, what they wrote could never again be considered "original" or "fresh." They permanently erased a tiny portion of the space of original lines. They made it harder for the rest of us to be original.

Given the above as context, I'll now get to it. My contribution to the original lines on the net is two of the four lines in the short poem below: (Written when I was in prep school -- exploring the similarities between "W", "Q" and "C"...)

Waiting...
Waiting quietly and without qualm
Never knowing why the end will come
Only wondering why

The first and last lines appear on the net today but the two middle lines appear here for the first time - -and the last time as "original" lines. Or, should I say "virgin texts": not yet copied, not yet plagiarized, not yet indexed.