Oh my god. WTF has the US Patent Office done to itself?
They must have been asleep at the wheel, and granted them this patent. They must have gotten starry eyed with all the wizardry of a web browser back in 2000, that they thought, this was a new and compelling technology.
The description of this patent, is just for a web site application, that will distribute assignments to students. The idea behind it is really not any more different than the GUI programs that were written on Windows 95 like the AOL program. They just splashed some fancy new words like "Uniform Resource Locator" and "World Wide Web".
This is another valid reason why software patents should be abolished. This is pure insanity. This is government and bureaucratic corruption of the highest order.
I think the patent office has absolved itself from all responsibility and shifted it to the courts. This mostly hurts small businesses that want to avoid court as much as possible.
You'd think more people in leadership positions would try getting end-users involved in acquisition decisions. There seems to be a significant bias against doing that sort of thing in large organizations.
In general, if an organization runs more efficiently, it reflects well on the leadership of the organization. Exactly how that benefits a given leader in an organization varies greatly, but if the leader's incentives aren't aligned with the organization's goals, that tends to lead to an unsuccessful organization.
An organization that gets its workers good tools that improve their productivity rather than wasting their time will get more done with the same resources. It will also have an easier time with hiring and retention. Even if there aren't direct pay bonuses or similar incentives, this will likely make life easier for the leadership.
And that's not even getting in to the basic human decency that you should care about other people.
