The quoted material is not merely some anonymous Website owner’s opinion, but is in fact the official position of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. I guess you didn’t notice that my original cite has a link to its verbatim source on the official USPTO Web site. (Go to the bottom of the page.)
That site also has this and this, the texts of speeches by two current Patent Office officials refuting the myth. (The last two are PDFs.)
Phew. This fighting ignorance stuff is hard work!
OK…
Let me get this straight…
We’ve got a group of people on this board…
each with a pile of modern electronics, that cost them or their employer several hundred to several thousand dollars, on their desk…
connected to the most sophisticated communications network ever developed…
on which they are able to have a conversation with any other such connected person anywhere in the world for the first time in our history…
And their using it to bitch about technology?
Folks, it ain’t the machines that have gotten out of hand…
Nothing like a good website reference to cleanse the word of ignorance. Especially a website with PDFs and everything. If only they would add Flash to their website, surely we would all be enlightened by now.
Let me see, I think there might be a site out there where Bush claims Iraq is hiding an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. But alas, the site probably doesn’t contain PDFs, so its credibility would be shattered. 
And walked 3 miles one way to school through snow up to our shoulders, uphill and against the wind both ways.
I’ve heard this complaint from adults since I was 10 years old. It would seem that most high school graduates have never been able to make change.
And I know for a fact that most of them can’t handle common fractions and, what do you know? They couldn’t handle them in my day either.
“Technology” doesn’t decide how it is to be used. There is no non-technological way to support the present world population so worrying about whether or not it is “out of hand” is futile. We need to gear our training and education to learning how to make better use of it. I don’t think the optimum use of technology is making hoola-hoops by computer controlled robots.
scotandrsn, totally triumphant post, dude.
There have been complaints about the younger generations not knowing the old technologies anymore for as long as there have been newer, better technologies to win the technological evolution wars. Yet, despite such progressing ignorance, somehow humanity has survived and even prospered.
Change is good. Embrace change. Make it work for you.