M$ Patents sudo

[Darryl Moore]

Even without prior art. Things which contribute only an iota of
innovation and would be plainly obvious to one "trained in the art"
should not qualify for a patent. Sadly however it usually does. An iota
of innovation is all one needs for a patent and there really is not
practical test for obviousness at all.

Since the original purpose of patents was to make available that which
would otherwise be kept secret, I think a primary test for patentability
would have to be how well the invention lends itself to reverse
engineering. If the product can easily be reverse engineered, or is even
obvious in its presentation (such as this one) it should automatically
not qualify for a patent.

Brandon Sandrowicz wrote:
> I think that it's talking about prompting you to authenticate when the
> required action is above your permission level.  If I run 'rm -rf /'
> as a normal user I won't have permission to delete most things. 'sudo'
> doesn't prompt me with a "I see you're trying to delete files/folders
> you don't have permissions for. Do you want to enter the root
> password?"  In that case, I have to manually decide that my actions
> will require root privs and run 'sudo rm -rf /'.  In any case, MacOS
> was doing this thing before MS released Vista.  They're still
> patenting something that has prior art.
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