David O Toole

David O Toole was contacted by the US Government regarding his lisp hacking.

He posted a vague warning about it on the lispgames mailing list and mentioned on the IRC that "it was all over".

All his blogs, twitter and any traces of his code have disappeared from the internet.

I've been unable to contact him in the last few months.

>>19

As far as patents go, it looks like all the interesting stuff in Blocky (even the stuff that looks innovative) is actually borrowed from pretty old systems (Smalltalk, Self) and university and/or public-funded tech.

(Actually that's a great approach if you think about it, because mining Citeseer and old public research projects for ideas is a great way to systematically establish bona fide prior art for every concept and technique employed in the program.)

Welcome to the patent hell that the US has become, where the more creative a programmer you are, the more time and effort you must spend making damn sure you don't actually innovate.

If we USians weren't also simultaneously fucked in every other department of nationhood, I'd really worry about the impact software patents are having on our IT competitiveness. But the transition to a service/tech economy is actually what ruined us. Software patents are just ruining the outcome of THAT.