dariencrane

I. Hate. Period. Delimited. Sentences.

Can I use them to purchase bitcoins?

Here's a great idea, create a news forum for "innovative" people only. Force its members to upvote only the most "innovative" comments, and banish anybody caught upvoting well-thought-out opinions.

You could use creativity, or even mischievousness, as a metric indicating credibility. You could call it "Imagineif News." It would be awesome!

Realize that the amount of "art" you've created is altogether meaningless if you have a shallow experience of life. Let your self-esteem become unhinged from what you perceive as success, and just enjoy your time. If you have a single creative bone in your body you will create something amazing in due time. I recommend reading Siddhartha again and then getting back to work!

I didn't gather from the original post that the online service was biotech-related. But if it is, then you could be right about the public disclosure (unless the service could be demonstrated as "experimental").

But I think it's more likely that we're talking about a software invention, in which case any non-disclosed implementation details could be a way to avoid potential infringement.

If someone looking at the service can tell that it is nearly coincident with their own service...

Plenty of inventions produce similar results yet have vastly different (and therefore individually patentable) implementations. In the case of an online service, there's little chance of the actual implementation being disclosed or somehow transferred to the end-user. My guess is that the inventive part of the service is executed server-side, and thus isn't accessible to the general public.

I think it's hilarious how a story about leaked Iranian emails somehow led to bitcoins.

I doubt that by "running an online service" he's disclosed sufficient details to allow somebody to reproduce his invention. Can you tell how PageRank works just by using google?

Not unless you google "pagerank" ;)

Assuming the alleged troll's invention is even patentable (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine-or-transformation_test), if your implementation actually conflicts with the ideas covered by said troll's application, you might be in trouble.

If not, you can always file an application covering the implementation details of your technology that distinguish it from existing prior art.