A beautiful story about the inner workings of a patent-pending species-specific insect repellent based on a small strip of magnetic strip. As one might guess, it involves encoding the words "FLEA" and "TICK" on the strip. Or maybe "AELF" and "KCIT" to properly actuate the quantum polarity? The story was written in 2010 while the patent was still pending. But surely it's been rejected by now. Nope. Also as one might guess, the patent was granted by the USPTO with the the main claim intact: https://www.google.gg/patents/US8382001

Have you ever thought to yourself "Sure, this advertisement says 'patent-pending', but that only means that someone was able to scrape together enough money to file a patent. It's not like someone has vetted the technology and actually granted them a patent." Well, now you see that you can safely shorten that to "Sure, this advertisement says 'patented', but that only means that someone was able to scrape together enough money to file a patent. It's not like someone has vetted the technology."

This is probably not surprising to anyone who understands the role of patents. They aren't designed to act as evidence that a technology is useful, or even possible. Instead, they are designed to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts", which seems to be interpreted as to "create a secondary market for dubious patents". I was surprised though to see that they had been granted a second patent, covering the ornamental design of the tag: http://www.google.com/patents/USD626704

I was aware that design patents existed to cover essential innovations such as the rounded corners of a "portable display device" (http://www.google.com/patents/USD670286), but I hadn't realized how broadly they could be applied. Is there a threshold that needs to be exceeded when determining how much the grant of a design patent will "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts"? Or can one expect to receive design patents for any design variation you can dream up?