The real war is whether these things should be patentable at all, and I'm afraid this news is a loss of a battle, not a win.

The Realist in me says this will not help one bit. Excuse me, but the already-overworked and incompetent Patent Office is offering to spend more time on each patent before granting it? Yeah right! I'll believe it when I see it working and not a second sooner.

Patent Office to change its tune: "The patent office plans to add more checks and require a broader search of past practices and inventions. The changes follow criticism that some patents may choke off innovation in electronic commerce by granting exclusive rights to practices that aren't unique or new."

It should be clear that I disapprove of Electronic Arts et al going after Yahoo. They should be going after those selling the stolen goods.

Now, if you want to whip out a metaphor at this point and claim that for the purposes of demonstration of the above argument that Yahoo is like a flea market, feel free. But the argument must come first, because the metaphor flows from and elaborates on the argument, not the other way around.

In the real world, the question is Who is selling the goods?, and the answer to that question determines who needs to worry about being prosecuted. That's the pattern, which is more importent then any metaphor (insert sound of disgusted spitting) you can come up with. Clearly, it is not Yahoo selling the goods. Yahoo takes a fee for hosting the transaction but the selling is being done by (drumroll please) the seller.

The Netscape problem previously mentioned here has been fixed.

Take a look at the results to see what I'm talking about.

Did you ever have a bug in a program that takes you weeks to track down because it's intermittent, and you finally find it, and you just say Holy cow, how did this ever work correctly? I just found one of those in the Linkback code. I actually have no clue why it worked at all earlier today or for the past couple of weeks. Wow!