Patent for "Godly Powers"

[joeactor]

Click here for Patent details...

'nuff said,
JoeActor

[SteveS]

Haha - this was a great find.  This tickles my funny bone.  The patent office is always a great source of fun.

I think my personal favorite was discovered while researching data compression - the guys who wrote GZIP, the GNU compression algorithm, had to study data compression patents to make sure they didn't violate any of them.  During their study, they found at least two patents that were issued for mathematically impossible claims.  Here's the link if anyone is a geek like me and wants to read about it: http://gailly.net/05533051.html

[joeactor]

Hey SteveS - I'd actually heard about these algorithms!  Silly stuff... During the 80's I had enough encryption knowledge that I wasn't allowed to travel to the Soviet Union - go figure!

JoeActor

[SteveS]

Yeah, cold war.  Encrypted communism is even worse then the garden variety  :wink:  .

I really like crypto, but my knowledge is API level --- I just incorporate crypto into our software.  It's good stuff --- you can even get an entire set of crypto primitives free in the OpenSSL library, and they aren't hard to use.