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The Wall Street Journal, Michael Totty; September 11, 2006

http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB115755300770755096-R2Ct41cQ4ZIPMwk4_xh0xU_HnQI_20061011.html?mod=tff_main_tff_top

Sun’s DTrace software is named the Gold winner in The Wall Street Journal's 2006 Technology Innovation Awards. According to the piece, “Bryan Cantrill and a team of engineers at Sun have devised a way to diagnose misbehaving software quickly and while it's still doing its work. While traditional trouble-shooting programs can take several days of testing to locate a problem, the new technology, called DTrace, is able to track down problems quickly and relatively easily, even if the cause is buried deep in a complex computer system … Mr. Cantrill came up with the general idea for DTrace in 1996, while he was a computer-science student at Brown University, but didn't get to start work on it until late 2001. It took nearly three years for him and his team -- Michael Shapiro, a Sun distinguished engineer, and Adam Leventhal, a staff engineer -- to make it work; a final version shipped early last year as part of Sun's Solaris 10 OS.”

Do you know the patent office granted a patent on the peanut butter and
jelly sandwich? (Recently voided on appeal)

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7432980/

Or a patent on moving a playground swing by pulling sideways on the
chains? This one was granted to a five year old kid whose patent
attorney father was using it as an illustration of what daddy did for a
living, and never expected it would be granted.

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/4296923.html

Here's an article on bad patents

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/careers/careerstemplate.jsp?ArticleId=i080502

Here's the best reform proposal I've seen

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/careers/careerstemplate.jsp?ArticleId=i120204