A Guardian Angel In Your Cell Phone

theodp writes "Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie are listed as inventors of the Guardian Angel, which is described in a most unusual Microsoft patent application that should intrigue privacy advocates. In addition to protecting you from possibly diseased people, by detecting body temperatures, the Guardian Angel's 'monitoring component can take note of the number of conversations occurring in a room (and more specifically, a breakdown of the types of people in the room accompanied by a warning for dangerous persons, based on sex offender registration, FBI most wanted, etc.).' The versatile Guardian Angel, Microsoft notes, can also recommend restaurants, advise you on the appropriateness of your jokes, detect that your heartbeat has stopped, display targeted ads on billboards, and block spam."

Wow, talk about going for the gusto

[NewbieProgrammerMan]

In addition to protecting you from possibly diseased people, by detecting body temperatures, the Guardian Angel's 'monitoring component can take note of the number of conversations occurring in a room (and more specifically, a breakdown of the types of people in the room accompanied by a warning for dangerous persons, based on sex offender registration, FBI most wanted, etc.).' The versatile Guardian Angel, Microsoft notes, can also recommend restaurants, advise you on the appropriateness of your jokes, detect that your heartbeat has stopped, display targeted ads on billboards, and block spam.

ROFL....they want me to believe they have a working device that does all these diverse tasks, some of which are amazingly difficult? I suppose I'm also supposed to believe it's going to run on a Windows platform on some kind of portable computer. <voice="Bill Cosby">Riiiiiight</voice>.

Sorry, but as much as I'd like to think some pair of uber-geniuses managed to build one product (that runs on a portable Windows platorm, no less) that does all this, it just screams, "Vaporware inspired by Marketing!" to me. I thought you had to have some semblance of a working device before they'd give you a patent? Or is that something I remember from reading how it's supposed to work?

Re:Uhhhhh... Okay

[porkmusket]

I think the intent is to have the cellphone call someone/alert someone else when it detects the heart has stopped beating. It doesn't say 'alert user when his/her heart stops'.

Re:I call bullshit

[tricorn]

Seems sort of odd to be trying to patent something that clearly can't be made to work at the present time. I don't see why this would be patentable anyway, similar devices have certainly been described in various science fiction stories in sufficient detail to be "prior art".

Re:I call bullshit

[$random_var]

Maybe this is a preemptive patent, and they want to make sure this is un-patentable by anybody else 20 years down the road when we can actually build it. Sure, they could have just published a paper in a scientific journal, but patent examiners are lazy and prefer using patent filings as prior art.