Bizarre Patents
Mouthguard made at least partially from an edible candy
A mouthguard includes a U-shaped upper bite plate which removably fits over upper teeth of a person, with the entire upper bite plate being made from a soft, deformable and edible gummi candy.
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| Number | Title | Issue Date |
| 7260574 | Method and system for mapping strings for comparison A method and system for mapping a number of characters in a string, wherein the string comprises a combination of characters representing indexed expressions and a combination of characters representing non-indexed expressions. One embodiment produces a weight array... | 08/21/2007 |
| 7260583 | Web page connectivity server construction A process for constructing a server for collecting, arranging and storing data that defines the connectivity of pages on the World Wide Web (Web). The process input is a set of compressed ASCII links files, wherein each links file is a series of source URLs and corr... | 08/21/2007 |
| 7260579 | Method and apparatus for accessing data within an electronic system by an external system A method of and apparatus for accessing data within an electronic system by an external system to the electronic system. The method includes formatting a searchable database within the electronic system into a directory tree structure, the directory tree structure i... | 08/21/2007 |
| 7257598 | System and method for generating descriptive link names A system and method for descriptively naming links to facilitate subsequent identification of the links. Various naming sources are identified as candidates for inclusion in a link name for the link. Naming rules are applied to identify one or more of the naming sou... | 08/14/2007 |
| 7257586 | Data ranking with a Lorentzian fuzzy score The present invention relates to a method for searching a document database such as the Internet and ranking the results obtained from such a search. The invention also relates to ranking of a set of numerical data according to a set of user specified preferences, i... | 08/14/2007 |
| 7257577 | System, method and service for ranking search results using a modular scoring system A modular scoring system using rank aggregation merges search results into an ordered list of results using many different features of documents. The ranking functions of the present system can easily be customized to the needs of a particular corpus or collection o... | 08/14/2007 |
| 7257590 | Method and system for classifying binary strings The present invention relates to a method and network element for classification of bit strings such as data packets on a per-flow basis, wherein a plurality of classification fields are searched for in respective search trees based on a matching procedure in which ... | 08/14/2007 |
| 7257576 | Method and system for a pattern matching engine A system and method directed to a matching engine for finding the best match for an input string from among a group of predefined string patterns is disclosed. The predefined patterns may include one or more wildcard characters. A metric value is computed for every ... | 08/14/2007 |
| 7254572 | System and a method for selecting shops for the repair of railcars The present invention relates to a system and a method of optimizing the selection of shops to repair railcars. More specifically, the present invention relates to a system and a method whereby a customer needing to have a railcar repaired may enter information into... | 08/07/2007 |
| 7254576 | System and method for locating and presenting electronic documents to a user A system and a method for locating and presenting electronic documents most-likely of interest to the user. A plurality of search terms to be located in a set of electronic document is received. One of the search terms is selected as the anchor term, and occurrences... | 08/07/2007 |
| 7254699 | Aligning load/store data using rotate, mask, zero/sign-extend and or operation The present invention relates generally to microprocessor or microcontroller architecture, and particularly to an architecture structured to handle unaligned memory references. A method is disclosed for loading unaligned data stored in several memory locations, incl... | 08/07/2007 |
| 7251665 | Determining a known character string equivalent to a query string A system, method, and computer program product perform text equivalencing. The text equivalencing is performed by modifying a string of characters by applying a set of heuristics, comparing the modified strings of characters to known strings of characters. If a matc... | 07/31/2007 |
| 7251654 | System and method for ranking nodes in a network A dangling web page processing system ranks dangling web pages on the web. The system ranks dangling web pages of high quality that cannot be crawled by a crawler. In addition, the system adjusts ranks to penalize dangling web pages that return errors when links on ... | 07/31/2007 |
| 7251708 | System and method for maintaining and reporting a log of multi-threaded backups Systems and methods for performing multi-threaded backups and restores. In one embodiment, a log is maintained to record the source of write commands, and the order in which blocks of data are written to a sequential storage device. The source identification of the ... | 07/31/2007 |
| 7249128 | Performance prediction system with query mining Disclosed is a performance prediction system and service that uses acquired knowledge of queries that are received to make predictions concerning the future performance of certain entities, such as business entities. By analyzing query patterns and the actual or pre... | 07/24/2007 |
| 7246110 | Product feature and relation comparison system A method of presenting data regarding products. Feature categories are assigned to each product category based on available data. A weighted importance is assigned to each feature category of each product category based on the available data. The items in the produc... | 07/17/2007 |
| 7246121 | System and method for modifying new message retransmission within a system for harvesting community knowledge A system and method is disclosed for knowledge management. The method discloses the elements of: generating a client profile on a client computer connected to a network; storing the profile on the computer; receiving a new message; scoring the new message with respe... | 07/17/2007 |
| 7246267 | Logic analyzer having a disassembler employing symbol table information for identifying op-codes A logic analyzer according to the subject invention includes a disassembler for disassembling object code. The disassembler automates the process of locating op-code addresses by utilizing information derived from an object file corresponding to the code whose execu... | 07/17/2007 |
| 7246323 | Displaying information to indicate both the importance and the urgency of the information Data items contained in personal information are displayed in manner that is indicative of both the importance and the urgency of the data items. A first visual cue is assigned to the data item based on an importance of the data item. The first visual cue may cause ... | 07/17/2007 |
| 7246112 | Searching apparatus and searching method A searching apparatus and a searching method are disclosed whereby a storage medium containing a plurality of data items and management data for managing these data items is subjected to a sort based on a sort condition and a search based on a search condition. The ... | 07/17/2007 |
| 7246118 | Method and system for automated collaboration using electronic book highlights and notations The present invention provides a method, apparatus, and computer implemented instructions for sharing highlighted passages and notations in an electronic book. A user can highlight passages and/or notes, which are tagged and automatically sent to a designated set of... | 07/17/2007 |
| 7243101 | Program, image managing apparatus and image managing method An image managing apparatus for managing a plurality of image data units includes: an image data acquiring unit for acquiring the image data units; an attribute information acquiring unit for acquiring attribute information units respectively associated with the ima... | 07/10/2007 |
| 7243102 | Machine directed improvement of ranking algorithms Improving ranking algorithms for information retrieval. The ranking algorithms operate on search results obtained from a search engine. Input information including information describing a first ranking algorithm, a first score associated with the first ranking algo... | 07/10/2007 |
| 7243098 | Method, system, and program for optimizing aggregate processing Disclosed is a method, system, and program for processing an aggregate function. Rows that contain a reference to intermediate result structures are grouped to form groups. For each group, aggregate element structures are formed from the intermediate result structur... | 07/10/2007 |
| 7243100 | Methods and apparatus for mining attribute associations Attribute association discovery techniques that support relational-based data mining are disclosed. In one aspect of the invention, a technique for mining attribute associations in a relational data set comprises the following steps/operations. Multiple items are ob... | 07/10/2007 |
| 7243088 | Database management system with efficient version control A two copy versioning scheme is proposed. The scheme provides efficient implementation for a high read load database and eliminates read dependencies. The versioning scheme provides efficient implementation for transactions executing under ANSI READ COMMITTED isolat... | 07/10/2007 |
| 7239963 | Method and apparatus for displaying navigation information A vehicle navigation apparatus enabling a user to know whether a data item for display is the latest updated one or has old contents, thereby allowing him/her to confidently drive according to a guidance route provided by navigation. The vehicle navigation apparatus... | 07/03/2007 |
| 7240056 | Compressed document surrogates Disclosed is a method and device for storing information about Web documents such as pages or sites in a manner which may be used in conjunction with inverted term lists to facilitate the retrieval of documents of interest from the Web. The method involves construct... | 07/03/2007 |
| 7240059 | System and method for configuring a parallel-processing database system A system and method for configuring a plurality of processing nodes into a parallel-processing database system are described herein. Each of a plurality of processing nodes connected by a network receive software and one or more configuration files related to the in... | 07/03/2007 |
| 7240064 | Search engine with hierarchically stored indices A search engine comprising a crawler which crawls the WWW and stores pages found on the WWW in a database. An indexer indexes the pages in the database to produce a primary index. A document mapping section maps pages in the database into a plurality of tiers based ... | 07/03/2007 |
| 7237009 | Methods, systems and data structures for assigning categories to electronic mail Methods, systems, and data structures are provided for assigning categories to electronic mail (email). An email includes a category identification field, a sender category identification field, and a receiver category identification field. When the email is transmi... | 06/26/2007 |
| 7237187 | Interactively comparing records in a database The present invention can allow an electronic catalog or other set of items to be searched and compared interactively. In one embodiment, the invention includes displaying a list of items in an electronic catalog, each item corresponding to a row of the display, eac... | 06/26/2007 |
| 7234168 | Hierarchy-based method and apparatus for detecting attacks on a computer system A method of provisioning a computer against computer attacks includes constructing a hierarchy characterizing different computer attacks and counter measures, and traversing this hierarchy to identify computer attacks and countermeasures relevant to a target platfor... | 06/19/2007 |
| 7231395 | Method and apparatus for categorizing and presenting documents of a distributed database Described herein are methods for creating categorized documents, categorizing documents in a distributed database and categorizing Resulting Pages. Also described herein is an apparatus for searching a distributed database. The method for creating categorized docume... | 06/12/2007 |
| 7231596 | Collaborative, fault-tolerant, scaleable, flexible, interactive real-time display and processing method and apparatus The invention relates to a method and system for providing information in an easily customizable, interactive and collaborative format. Various manipulations of the data and its presentation, in many cases within one user action, including, for example, flexibly sor... | 06/12/2007 |
| 7231405 | Method and apparatus of indexing web pages of a web site for geographical searchine based on user location A local search engine geographically indexes information for searching by identifying a geocoded web page of a web site and identifying at least one geocodable web page of the web site. The system identifies a geocode contained within content of the geocoded web pag... | 06/12/2007 |
| 7228309 | Facilitating maintenance of indexes during a reorganization of data in a database An index can be maintained during a reorganization of data in a database by retaining each root segment, or the prefix component of each root segment, in its storage location during the reorganization. Correction of an index after a reorganization of data in a datab... | 06/05/2007 |
| 7225209 | Computer-implemented method for allocating new additional area for the dataset in storage based on the size of the new additional area wherein if the new area number does not exceed clipping threshold, the size of a new additional area being greater than the size of each previously allocated additional area of the dataset A method and article of manufacture, implementing the method, allocates space for a dataset. The dataset has an initial area and zero or more additional allocated areas to provide space for storing the dataset. The size of a new additional area is determined. The ne... | 05/29/2007 |
| 7225198 | Data compiling method A data compiling method for conversion into the form of an information block containing a value list in which table format data expressed as an array of records including items and item values contained in the items are so arranged that the item values are arranged ... | 05/29/2007 |
| 7225175 | System and method of facilitating and evaluating user thinking about an arbitrary problem using visual feedback Preferred embodiments of the invention provide systems and methods of facilitating and evaluating user thinking about an arbitrary problem. The system includes first logic to facilitate user specification of the problem to populate a problem statement structure; sec... | 05/29/2007 |
