You know why? Because the single dumbest patent I've ever seen, Amazon's one-click patent, has been struck down by the USPTO.
What does this mean? Well, it means two things. First, expect online shopping to get one hell of a lot easier. Set up an account, click the button, you've bought the gizmo and it's on its way.
Second, this is going to actually have a nice little political effect, as this trick can almost certainly be leveraged for political donations as well. If politicians from a party (let's say the Dems) agree on a combined donation collection system, people who are inclined towards donating towards a candidate can do it incredibly easily. They sign up once to verify that they're a citizen and what their credit card number is, and then bloggers who want their readers to send a ten-dollar "attaboy" to a politician can just throw up the button. Reader clicks, cash is sent (probably a quick little popup to verify might be a good idea, but it should only be one more click at most), reader never even leaves the blog.
(The same could be done for donations to the blog itself, mind. Paypal being able to take advantage of this will be very nice, though I've been a bit off Paypal as of late.)
That's how political donation will be done, guaranteed. That's how it should be done now, but the Amazon patent kind of got in the way. No longer.
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