Yet another insane US patent from MS

[Roland Orre <orre@nada.kth.se>]

US patent office has once again showed to be a joke. Anything can be
patented, despite how old obvious ideas are being used.

Arent' they even trying to find "prior art"?  Every trivial, obvious
well published application can be patented. I don't even understand what
would be new with something like this. An instant message translator, by
Microsoft. If this is implemented in e.g GNU/Linux, could Microsoft
claim that this is a patented "invention" then?

http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PG01&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=%2220030125927%22.PGNR.&OS=DN/20030125927&RS=DN/20030125927

Maybe this completely insane patent inflation is good. It will break the
whole system down for sure, but this is a painful way of doing it.

        Roland

PS. This about instant translation has been around for many decades in
the fictional literatur, e.g. Babel's fish by Douglas Addams... I wrote
about this kind of (but spoken in ip-phone) translation in a student
paper 1986.
I guess that EU's old project about direkt translation between the
member countries languages contains all necessary prior art.
I saw a live demonstration of a system translating (spoken, but slow)
between swahili-english- swahili at Carnegie Mellon university 1988.