Great idea, mk. I bet there are various feeds that can be mushed to get that info. Excellent idea. > What would be the effect of prohibiting software patents? I don't know. What would have been the effect of prohibiting electromagnetic patents? An algorithm is a logical mechanism. A software embodying an algorithm is virtual machine. imo, there is nothing inherently wrong with patenting algorithms. Take Skip-Lists. Invented in 1990 (!) though after the fact it seems self-evident. http://www.cs.umd.edu/~pugh/ So Dr. Pugh is a generous soul who is sharing his insights. Good for him and God bless him. But if he was a entrepreneur competing against other businesses and had stumbled upon his discovery in course of addressing a business requirements, why on earth should he be denied the right to exercise his natural right to his own ideas? Because it is 'insubstantial'? (That is pretty close to materialist superstition in my book.) We here in Hubski are attempting a "thoughtful web". Thoughts matter. Ideas matter. A society that respects and promotes creative and constructive thinking will be a successful society, imo. edit: This is new on his bio (or I missed it before): http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?u=%2Fnetahtml%2Fsr... * google. What a bunch of hypocrites. So that is a software patent that is clearly non-obvious and whatever Bill Pugh came up with, apparently was beyond the reach of S. Berin (a "practitioner in the field" who is listed under prior arts in section .sctn.1.2.3 of the above patent application) whom we all know had huge commercial interest in getting "detecting near duplicate files in large collections" right, but alas he couldn't thunk it ....