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It's a joke. 2^20 = 1,048,576. And the patent sounds a lot like Knuth's scheme for getting corrections to his books...

And epoch time is a dead giveaway for the issue date.

Especially since New Year's Day is a US government holiday...

Good find?

[Edit: I just picked a computationally relevant number that approximates the patent counter circa the epoch.]

I was just flying by HN on a busy day. Syntax parsing: success. Semantic parsing: error. Looks like I failed the Turing test... I'm a bot. Damn. ;)

Way off. That patent is from 1912.

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sec...

Right order of magnitude; close enough. ;)

you're practically forced to seek patents to avoid getting trolled

How so? What if you released something in the public domain and made it unpatentable?

I can't speak of litigious trolls, but academics have to churn out papers and patents for their own stature and paychecks. Yes, big edu would troll even The Man himself.

Of course, Knuth is notorious for his "churning out" of books; though none are as rigorous as his early VB6 stuff.

http://www.ibiblio.org/Dave/Dr-Fun/df200002/df20000210.jpg