8,000,000 patents and nothing has changed

Nothing has changed? What do they mean? I can understand patent #1, and it's not even in my field. Good luck trying to do that with a modern software patent.

I'm guessing at this point a good Marckov chain could do a bang-up job of getting patents approved.

Next up: AI's patent everything, drive humanity out of business. Its a hard take-off singularity, except we get trolled.

http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Giant_cheesecake_fallacy

Maybe I'm missing something, but just what useful conclusion is the linked article attempting to draw by looking at the typesetting of patents over the years?

How does the typesetting of patents relate to anything meaningful other than how patents are typeset?

I guess the implication is that if they haven't even made updates in formatting, that shows how slow-moving they are, and therefore the root of all patent-related problems.

Very shaky logic, but that's the best assumption I can make about it. Either that or this piece is actually written for typesetters rather than people on HN.