A mixed day for individual liberties

So much of what the Supreme Court does passes with hardly a mention in the press these days... but, sometimes, you get something "big enough" to break through. Today was such a day, with SCOTUS stating clearly that, yes, the second amendment to the constitution applies not only to the federal government, but state and local governments as well (link). Of course, they didn't get into little matters like how broad that constitutional right is (at least, I haven't heard any ads for full-auto weaponry for sale yet)... but, in general, people who want to buy weapons for self-defense (and haven't had their rights revoked for felonies) should be able to get them now, even in major metropolitan areas.

Of course, nothing's perfect (including, many would argue, that last item)... but SCOTUS made another decision (or rather, punted on another decision), wasting a golden opportunity to fix something that's been broken for some time - the patent system. You see, at some point, patents got away from "here's this new thing I made, and intend to profit from", creeping into the territory of "here's this nifty idea I had, which I might or might not make use of in something I'm making, but I don't want anybody else using my idea". In this particular case (link), somebody was trying to patent a way of deciding whether a risk was worth taking for a business... and SCOTUS, thankfully, threw it out. However, they didn't go all the way back to limiting patents to "machines or transformations", apparently thinking there's some more nebulous case where there's no physical change, but patent protection is still applicable. The pisser on that is, a lot of that grey area covers business method and software patents... meaning, in theory, I could come up with some nifty new way of doing things for my company, and end up putting us in legal jeopardy, just because somebody else had the same idea some years back. I mean, it's one thing to scour the Internet or the patent office's files to see if somebody came up with, for example, a peculiar fishing lure... it's quite another to find, again for example, an odd search algorithm.

Oh well, one can only hope that, in time, those answers will be worked out, and, possibly, code will be protected the way I think it should be, by copyright. In the meantime, if I ever get an itch to get into guns, it's likely to be a bit easier, in time.