Monday, February 07, 2005

5000 years of prior art

If you can wade through all of the legalese, it appears that this patent application submitted by Microsoft last week boils down to representing latitude and longitude in different numerical bases... such as base 60, which yields the degrees:minutes:seconds representation that has been used since the Sumerians came up with it around 3000 BC. Microsoft seeks to patent the usage of these numbers in URLS due to the prevalence of GPS devices popping up in phones, PDAs, and toasters.